"Grief has its own architecture,
sorrow its own physics,
the pain of loss, a set of principles
unlike any other."
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Sounding by Barry Marks Negative Capability Press
book review by Mihir Shah
The author embeds a heartbreaking narrative within his poetry. The tragic loss of his teenage daughter stirs myriad emotions ranging from grief and guilt to denial and anger. Readers can feel the underlying, unfathomable pain through the use of prose and sentence structure. Marks employs the use of parallelism in many of his poems to enhance the visual image and overall impact of the stanza. For instance, in "Gravitas," Marks describes the emptiness and heaviness of his predicament by stating, "Until no radiance/no music/no joy can escape."
Many poems, including "Lay Lake," "And It Is Like This," and "She," similarly repeat particular words for emphasis. Grief is undoubtedly a strong theme throughout the compilation, but the tone of the grief tends to shift from helplessness and despondence in poems like "Phantom Limb," and "What Was Lost" to outright accusatory and aggressive in "The Child" and "How Did You Feel When Your Prayers Were Not Answered?" These variances in tone ultimately give the poetry a natural feel that will resonate, especially among those who have lost loved ones.
In "She," the author magnificently captures his daughter’s life, from making an ice-cold cheese omelet for her father at seven to the last words she spoke to him: "I love you." This particular poem does an exceptional job of repeating "who," at the beginning of every stanza to demonstrate that the person who had such a profound impact is no longer there. Poetry is known to be an outlet for expressing one's inner inferno; Marks executes this notion to perfection. With such an immense personal touch and seamless use of stylistic devices, Sounding will tug at the heartstrings of even the most hardened hearts, of this there is no doubt.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review