The blurb on the back says it all: “This is David Barnes’ first and last book.” That David ever came to be a poet is a kind of miracle in itself. He’s an unlikely candidate. A ward of the state, placed in institutions and physically and sexually abused - there was little likelihood that he would become a functioning adult, let alone a loving one who could have a happy relationship, a much-loved son a self-deprecating sense of humour – or a writing career.
Reviewed by Rob Walker
Prayers waiting for God by David Barnes Mulla Mulla Press 2011, ISBN 9780987077110, https://www.mullamullapress.com/node/6
I first ‘met’ David in the early days of the internet when he ran an early e-lit journal called Poetry DownUnder from 1997. David published a lot of my early work which encouraged me to write more and send it to other places as well.
Born in 1943 (and with a whole litany of medical conditions including a debilitating spinal injury which makes movement and long periods of writing difficult) David Barnes doesn’t expect to write much more. He came to poetry by a long route. Leaving school at 13, he worked for 11 years as a carpenter in Melbourne before traveling throughout the outback as a driller, trench-digger, stockman, petrol-pumper, cook and playing self-taught guitar at folk festivals. This morphed into writing, poetry and editing the DownUnder and Numbat websites. He met his wife Libby in Alice Springs but they settled in Perth in ’72 where David sold real-estate and they had a son. When Libby died in ’96, David had to raise Daniel alone on a disability pension. Amazing that with all this, David also continued to write his own poetry, founded Poetry DownUnder and edited and encouraged other poets like me. Small wonder that he hasn’t had time to be a prolific poet or that only now (with the help of fellow WA poet Janet Jackson) has he been able to produce a collection. The result is an intense collection of the impressions of one man’s life.
The opening poem ‘entreaties’ is both a bleak prayer and an acceptance of grief devoid of maudlin self-pity:
i do not sleep much anymore unremittingly it is naps and snacks pen in hand, inscribing words at 5am i have prayed for relief there is no answer conversing with God
if thought exceeds the velocity of light would he hear a single muted plea it seems life is a continually moving flash an inside-outside ache this leaves no thought on how to spend the days
it’s Easter holidays and the only man with the solution died carrying his fated cross i surmise i will have to continue carrying my own
somewhere between toast and coffee the aftertaste lingers, like prayers waiting for God
The harshness of institutional routine in a day at St John’s Boys Home is recalled in language that is basic and poignant:
We are neat rows of hard steel-framed beds, weight of bodies in the dark,
heads turned sideways, installed for the night.
Retinas burn torchlight; body counts, darkness hangs, numbers,
pain, solitude.
We close off shape sanctuary walls so nothing can touch us.
(‘Storms in Childhood.’)
And Barnes the imagist renders a scene even more chilling for it lack of humanity and emotion:
Outside the thick bluestone, exposed branches sway like whips, lash the air,
and the shriek of the wind penetrates,
echoes a voice: the pious priest administering the thick lash, rhythmic, bruising, the whack and howl suppressed, drowned by the noise of the storm.
(‘Storms in Childhood’)
It is the strength of his images that make David Barnes a gifted poet – to reduce these painful experiences to a series of flashes, like the photo that arrived in 1999 of a mother he never knew:
corners curled, brown with age. In the photo a young woman held a child – smiling, rosy cheeks, blonde hair, brown eyes gazing, two hands holding teddy – in her arms.
(‘If only I had known her’)
The master of the burning image which persists – killing a kangaroo when he was 22:
I hit the roo in the chest. He went down to a half-sit. As I walked up, he raised his proud red head, looked me straight in the eyes. I felt ashamed.
I had simply shot him, not for food or skin, just for the sport of it. Something passed between us.
One more shot between his eyes finished him. Three hundred miles from Alice Springs there is a twenty-two rusted, buried in sand.
(‘In the eyes’)
Other poems are written as narratives with the emotion even more potent because it is understated. He relates how he and a mate stumble upon a rolled, smashed-up Holden containing two dead parents and a young, living, scalp-sliced boy. They clean the ants from his exposed skull:
My mate drove fifty miles to Alice Springs. I stayed, with the living and dead, inside the wreck.
No one really remembers.
I do.
(‘A dirt road, Alice Springs’)
David Barnes’ portrait in ‘the carpenter retires’ has a particular resonance for me as my own memories of my carpenter-father have much in common. (In fact David once sent me an email to apologise for inadvertently ‘stealing’ some of the phrases and themes in my poem "Shed tears". It’s nonsense of course. We all absorb ideas and images from others’ work and incorporate them into our own.) Are the ‘ hands which once/ planed the rich surface/ of a life cut down,/ made into/ an intricate corner cabinet/ hanging somewhere’ his own hands? I believe so. His own memories of carpentry as his past life are all the more touching when written in the third person:
Hand tools worn smooth from years of use lie across the scarred workbench:
blades capable of cutting pencil lines in half hang from hooks, teeth sharp, oiled for packing.
The tang of timber lingers in aged nostrils as he packs his tool box.
He also observes others with a warm empathy – a homeless man, an old woman, lovers walking… Painful moments. Grief in an image:
your white split-mesh see-through dress which drove other men, burning, to seek you out hangs inert in our wardrobe…
… all I have left.
(‘memories mingle’)</bockquote>
Even the deepest questions are framed in the simplest of words:
I saw a green sprout today, curled, pushing it way through the earth, unfurling, knowing the answer;
while I seek that answer but will not know it until I am placed in the ground
(‘The Question’)
Despite a decaying body, humour toughs it out:
I wake not wishing to rise, longing for lively yesterdays when I wasn’t this trapped back-broken being.
The only parts that can dance anymore are my eyelashes.
(‘Things happen’)
He writes of profound moments with an honest simplicity – not unlike Peter Bakowski’s…
when i awakened i was tired of the dream
the mirror told me a sad-eyed man
stayed with me all night waiting for dawn
(‘Symmetry’)
… an acceptance of the fate of us all. Perhaps even a longing…
At the quiet church gardens weeds and wild grasses wave to me in welcome wait for my ashes to be joined with those from the past in moist soil; I will rest in the shade of the trees. I will watch goldfish swim in the lily pond. I will walk the earth I have known. I will feel the Freemantle Doctor’s gentle touch through withered leaves. Since birth, this land has given me my breath, my life, its love. Finally, my earthly residue returns to where I belong
(‘In the silence of the morning’)
… and penultimately, images of passing:
With flickering light a candle burns shedding wax; with passing time its glow dims
the wick dwindling until there is no more.
(‘The Wick’)
But David completes this beautiful book with optimism from the poem ‘In the morning’:
Outside light cascades in rainbows through my garden
reminding me of how much I am alive.
Prayers waiting for God is a summary of one poet’s life. But it is also for all the rest of us; testimony that, despite pain, humiliation and suffering, there is joy too, and the human spirit can and will survive.
About the reviewer: Rob Walker is a poet and short-story writer from Adelaide, currently living in Japan. www.robwalkerpoet.com
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