Barbarian Seasons by David Blair
“It is almost unfair how much pleasure David Blair takes in walking around and thinking. Unfashionably free of self-seriousness, his work calls the world it sees poetry mainly because he loves to talk about it. What nerve! How dare he experience such delight in having a body, such joy in being alive, such exuberance in thought, such solace in friendship, such stupid happiness in social life, in a world as cruel and miserable as this one? But underneath the humor and liveliness of these soliloquies lies a deep understanding of our actual Barbarian Seasons—the fact that we live both with and against each other. Blair can do this because he doesn’t think he’s exempt from the rapacious part of himself. He is a mystic contemplator whose hermitage is anywhere, a poet of private insight alive in our shared world.”
—Katie Peterson
“The poems of David Blair’s Barbarian Seasons stroll, snap, gossip, and dance, a street party thrown by one of contemporary poetry’s finest freewheeling hosts. But the collection’s joyful, irrepressible Whitmanian vision also makes it a special standout in this era. I dare you to join the basketball players, the Cuban nun, the chumps, the sea snot, the hairy-legged, and the socialist-realist oompah-loompahs in this smart and rousing celebration of an America not lost, but found.”
—Maria Hummel
“David Blair’s poetry unfolds via his exuberantly free and associative imagination, through up and down precipitous, switchback trails of thought, feeling, and perception, and rueful recognitions of what he discerns in himself and others: our hopes and fears, griefs and grievances, myopias and mistakes. Nothing human is alien for this poet, and no poem is a still life. “How to be a person / making mistakes,” the poet wonders at a central point in Barbarian Seasons, his panoramic, collective portrait of our strange and estranged lives in late-capitalist America.”
—Fred Marchant, author of Said Not Said (Graywolf Press)
—Katie Peterson
“The poems of David Blair’s Barbarian Seasons stroll, snap, gossip, and dance, a street party thrown by one of contemporary poetry’s finest freewheeling hosts. But the collection’s joyful, irrepressible Whitmanian vision also makes it a special standout in this era. I dare you to join the basketball players, the Cuban nun, the chumps, the sea snot, the hairy-legged, and the socialist-realist oompah-loompahs in this smart and rousing celebration of an America not lost, but found.”
—Maria Hummel
“David Blair’s poetry unfolds via his exuberantly free and associative imagination, through up and down precipitous, switchback trails of thought, feeling, and perception, and rueful recognitions of what he discerns in himself and others: our hopes and fears, griefs and grievances, myopias and mistakes. Nothing human is alien for this poet, and no poem is a still life. “How to be a person / making mistakes,” the poet wonders at a central point in Barbarian Seasons, his panoramic, collective portrait of our strange and estranged lives in late-capitalist America.”
—Fred Marchant, author of Said Not Said (Graywolf Press)
Barbarian Seasons
by David Blair
$19.95, paperback, 104 pp
ISBN-13: 978-1-941196-96-0
