Home Delivery: New and Selected Poems

By Lou Barrett

In her latest collection of poetry, entitled Home Delivery, Lou Barrett returns to familiar themeslove, loss, the beauty and the terror of the world, the search for lost time. Her resilient spirit demands that, at age ninety-one, she continue to write a script of amazement and indignation lest the unfinished selflive in exile.
Time is a major concern in this volume. The poet writes of how reverently one should consume all of Times hoard. The poems provide a kind of portal into cherished memories, into lost time. Her language, luminous and unique, awakens our senses. We see through the poets eyes, as she walks the beach, lovers in blankets like strewn sarcophagi. We see a young Israeli guard shift a gun to her left hand with the certainty of a mother easing an infant. Ms. Barretts view of the world is original. Her words enable us to see with fresh eyes. We are strengthened by her perceptions of how to live in a world marked by change, characterized by rapture and wounds.
For Lou Barrett, the cardinal sin is despair; the antidote to despair is writing. The poet offers beauty and wisdom to her readers like letters/promissory notes/ for home delivery/in your mailbox.

Lisbeth Comm, Muse magazine
Director of Secondary Education,
Westport Connecticut Public Schools

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jun 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781480808058

Lou Barrett

Lou Barrett has enjoyed a rewarding career as teacher of literature and writing. In 2005, she was named Poetica magazine’s Poet of the Year. She has been honored at Wesleyan Uiversity by the Connecticut Council of English Teachers as Poet of the Year and is the recipient of the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Winchell Award. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Midtream, Connecticut River Review, Poetica magazine, Voices Israel and the National English Journal. Ms. Barrett’s publications include Clotheslines (1994), Homefronts (2002) and Connecting Flights (2006). Currently, her teaching series on Shakespeare is studied in high school classrooms. She and her husband raised their five children in Westport, Connecticut and are currently residents of Jenkintown, Pennsylvania.

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 Lou Barrett.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Cover credits: Colleen Anderson Mother Whit

Review: Lis Comm Muse magazine

Director of Secondary Education, Westport CT.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-0804-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-0805-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014909419

Archway Publishing rev. date: 6/03/2014

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A number of poems in this collection first appeared in other venues: Closing Wells in Midstream magazine, Not Quite Ready to Madden in Canopies (Xlibris) and Barter (North Castle Books).

Table of Contents

Home Delivery

At The Beginning

Salt Dreams

Reunion In Vienna

Drawing in Wash

Cardinal Sin

Fall of a Sparrow

Bread and Wine

Barter

Home Comer

My Ararat

Blizzard in Connecticut

Demeter’s Daughter

Laundry on Mulberry Street

Only a Fool

The Single Act

Fanny

Fragments