Book Review: MY FRIEND KEN HARVEY by Barrett Warner
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My Friend Ken Harvey Poems by Barrett Warner |
| Publishing Genius Press, 2014 $7.00 |
Nostalgia and sentiment were dirty words in poetry until Barret Warner’s My Friend Ken Harvey came on the scene. Here we have a chapbook that shows us the many forms of love, how relationships can be measured as “not enough war or too much war in someone’s life,” and how the simplest moments can be transcendent, all while dipping in and out of the sepia tint of memory.
Warner’s epigraph for the chapbook is borrowed from Jack Spicer’s “A Poem without a Single Bird in it”—there are no birds here, either, but we are surrounded by all the recognizable accoutrements of life. Bluebonnets and plumbers, cabins and raked leaves, these are the objects that populate a world where “bodies fall asleep against anything that doesn’t move— / floors, speakers, boxes, furniture.” These poems are much like the stories Warner’s friend Timmy Reed tells, where “instead of ogres and orphans there are shovels and lawnmowers, / and everyday people just trying to sort it out.”
And after a life spent among countless people, there’s a lot to sort out. What is a friend, for instance? A man like Bomba, who appears again and again in Warner’s reflective lines, or childhood acquaintances like Zenaida and Barbara Carmody who flash before our eyes only once? One small ode starts “My friend Tracy Dimond probably doesn’t call me a friend. / More like, someone she knows.” Yet each person illustrated here is drawn with the tenderest touch and the deepest respect. Though some poems linger almost long enough to be cloying, Warner always returns to the tangible to show us how deeply a moment can affect us.
“My Friend Julia Wendell” transports us to a brief interlude in a hospital bed, just long enough to sip briefly from a bowl of bullion before heading back to sleep. But when the speaker awakens from his rest, he finds himself immeasurably cared for—“When I wake up she’s gone and my hair is beautiful.” The things we do for the ones we love, these are the actions that add up to a life.
Warner spends much of the chapbook remarking on his own shortcomings—he doesn’t visit often enough, he isn’t as admirable as all his many friends. He laments about
The things [he’s] bashed. The cars. The lives. The dogs.
The sweat that flew off [his] brow. The wasted muscle.
…
The things [he] learned… The things [he] never learned.
But I’d argue he’s learned a little more than he gives himself credit for. Surely this is the best way to honor people, immortalizing their genuine graciousness to remind us of the goodness this world can hold. Even after years spent apart, he reminds us, our old friends and lovers can be just as immediate as ever through memory. Whether we keep up with each other doesn’t take away all that they’ve meant to us, their omnipresence in our minds—as Warner says, “I like not knowing / I like looking in every direction and wondering where [they] could be.”