Book Reviews: Gary Barwin • by Robert Colman • 1

Hamilton Arts & Letters       Gary Barwin is a player — a serious one. In his creation of both visual and text-based poetry, he toys with the mutability of language, potentializing fragmentation, reinventing how we view text as tool. Sometimes the play coheres in wholes, giving the reader a refreshed perception of text and meaning. Occasionally, his book-length projects fail to find that something by which experiment solidifies into a strongly set idea, however elliptical. Barwin’s four most recent books of poetry, all released in the past 24 months, offer examples of these two results. The Fabulous Op, co-written with Gregory Betts, benefits in having a solid premise from which the authors jump into experimentation. The germ of this collaborative poem came in asking the authors’ social media contacts to post lines of poetry that they keep memorized. This, as Barwin and Betts state, gave the project a grounding “in the soil of the brain, the canon of the individual as sieved through their experience.”   [  >>>>>   FORWARD ]   + [Distillate © HA&L + Robert Colman {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]