2016
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
PHOTOGRAPH BY JEFREY STEVENS
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A “SENSE” OF SELF: CRAFTING IDENTITY a review by Elizabeth F. Oxler Tina Barr. Kaleidoscope. Oak Ridge, TN: Iris Press, 2015. Grace C. Ocasio. The Speed of Our Lives. Buffalo, NY: BlazeVox Books, 2014.
ELIZABETH F. OXLER is a second year PhD student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her concentration and areas of research include folklore and Southern studies. She is currently the Curatorial Assistant at the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum, where she works on exhibitions and oversees the educational programming. ABOVE Tina Barr reading at Malaprop’s Bookstore, Asheville, NC, 15 Sept. 2013
On the cover of Tina Barr’s Kaleidoscope is an open slide of a kaleidoscope featuring butterflies, within which appear two quotations about butterflies: “We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever” (Carl Sagan) and “The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough” (Rabindranath Tagore). The juxtaposition of these elements – the open slide and the language of time and its fluttering nature – not only invoke obvious thoughts about nature, but also reflect what the poet does in her collection of poems. The butterfly in these examples distorts the view of time, while the kaleidoscope by virtue of its function serves as a distorted object. Through these two ideas, Barr takes the reader on a journey of distortion and creates a milieu of inversion, surrealism, and inclusion. The poems scat as jazz pieces do, moving through consciousness, time, and written form. Like a kaleidoscope needs a mirror to reflect the pieces inside of it, Barr uses the form of the poem to inspire the senses, crafting within
these moments poems that not only reflect her own biography, but are as easily absorbed into the being of the reader. Barr reinforces the concept of kaleidoscope and that feeling of juxtaposition immediately within her first poem, “In the Kaleidoscope’s Chamber,” a seemingly patterned sonnet that reads as an ode to the namesake object of the collection. However, the turn at the couplet suggests otherwise: “My husband’s hands / tab the keys, dicing white and black. My ears / arrange it as music; outside are birds, ushering us in.” Barr immediately “turns” the reader, instead of the sonnet, and from then on, her poems continue to juxtapose one idea with another that reads at first as not connected, yet by the end of the poem, seems the most likely fit. “Blue Rose” and “Blue Fawn,” poems for and about jazz musicians Sheila Jordan and Herb Robertson, introduce the literal idea of juxtaposition, as both artists are known for their musical versions of this idea. Barr writes
TINA BARR has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, among others. She is the former director of the Creative Writing Program and the Charles R. Glover Chair of English Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. She now teaches in the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNC Asheville.