Chord

Chord (2015) is the third collection of poetry from the award-winning poet Rick Barot. Focusing on memory, history, and Barot’s reactions to vividly described sights and sounds, the poems in this collection commemorate everything from Barot’s ancestors in the Philippines to his own experiences living in the San Francisco area to the evocative powers of visual art. Barot received praise for what the International Examiner describes as “associative leaps―bringing together the personal and historical, the banal and sublime―with a precision” and in the words of Scout: Poetry in Review, for the way his poems “complicate and expand each other.” The collection won several prestigious awards: the PEN Open Book Award, the UNT Rilke Prize, and the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry.

The book is divided into three sections—the tripartite chord of the book’s title—which gather poems that resonate with a specific theme, set of images, or feeling. A description of each of the poems is outside the scope of this summary but highlights of the critically acclaimed standouts follow.

“On Gardens” juxtaposes the conquests of Spanish colonialism in Barot’s Filipino family history with the supposed beauty of a cultivated garden maintained by the Spanish. With rage, Barot writes about no longer being able to perceive the garden as designed. Instead, he sees “qualities of injustice in the aesthetics / of a garden” because this is also the place where a colonist raped one of Barot’s female ancestors. The poem tries to bridge this perceptive and reactive gap but acknowledges that this is impossible.



“Chord,” the poem that shares its name with the collection as a whole, is a triptych that elegizes Barot’s grandmother, whom he describes in an essay as “my grandmother Consorcia, who died in 2005, at 92 years old. She was a schoolteacher for 47 years in the Philippines before retiring and coming to the United States.” The poem’s first part, “Annunciation,” covers the initial stages of grief in language that plays with metaphor and echoing diction. In the second part, “Grasshopper,” syntax breaks down as Barot explores the destructive power of grief. Here, words are broken apart by whitespace, stanzas shift on the page awkwardly, and there is no punctuation to anchor the words. The final section, “Threnody” consists of fragmented sentences that all begin with the words, “Chord that is.” Here, grief has been transformed into memory and evocative imagery.

In “Inventory,” a list of highly descriptive objects from the speaker’s memory investigates how the associations of one person’s memory, in this case, the speaker, are perceived by another—the reader. The poem’s unrhymed tercets combine nouns with the often ambiguously related images they connect to for the poem’s speaker. They begin with the everyday: “Bridges and streets. The neon like candy.” Then, they veer into the domestic, before becoming deeply personal invocations of the qualities of a missed lover: “The ginger of you. The cream of you. / The eyes and bones. The scratch-and-sniff / of you. The back. The back of the hand.”

This vulnerable display shifts into dreamlike strangeness, ending the poem on an unresolved note: “The wish, biding inside like a hive of bees. / The crow, a knuckle of the landscape. / The stone, which is tired of the discursive.”



This experimental strain also appears in “Syntax,” a poem that explicitly plays with the conventions of grammar and form. Composed as one long sentence despite the syntactical convolutions required to achieve this task, the poem emerges as “One of the most challenging poems in the book for [Barot] to write.”

Several of the poems reference war and violent conflict, connecting with the state of the world during the poems’ composition. “Exegesis in Wartime” is an amalgam of several perspectives on war. One stanza analyzes a quotation from author Ernest Hemingway, another responds to the return of the poet al-Mutanabi to his native Baghdad in the 10th century, and yet another imagines an American soldier’s recollections of a bomb exploding on Mutanabi Street in Baghdad during the Iraq War of the early 2000s.

In a different poem, “The Man with the Crew Cut,” the speaker observes a one-armed veteran eating noodles. The speaker notes that this outward mark of violence shows that “There is always a war on, somewhere,” because the modern world is defined by its military engagements.



The attacks of 9/11 make their way into “Some Roses & Their Phantoms,” in which the speaker recalls witnessing the collapsing towers in New York. The poem tries to make metaphors out of the visual memory of the smoke and dust, but these poetic flourishes are ultimately rejected as making light of something that cannot be poeticized: “my translation stops working,” he adds, explaining that it is impossible to process what he has seen through the usual channel of creative description.