Hypothesis / John Barton.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Barton, John, 1957-

Language:

English

Genre:

Poetry.

Physical Description:

118 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Toronto : House of Anansi Press ; Niagara Falls, NY : Distributed in the U.S. by General Distribution Services, 2001.

Summary:

John Barton's Hypothesis brilliantly maps the incidental acts of love and separation that mark our carnal and itinerant search for place. What is most striking about these poems is the candor, vulnerability, and tenderness with which they confront the realities of loss. Travelling through landscapes of the body, the metropolis, and the open road, Hypothesis explores the narratives of science, the experiments of medicine, and the desolation of environmental collapse to find what endures. One poem builds upon another until they create of themselves a timeless collection capped by a powerful homoerotic elegy for Canada's moment and place. The immediacy, passion, and intelligence of the collection are given force by technical genius: Barton's deft use of the line, skewed for momentum, generates a rolling cadence that does not give us false crescendos but is processional. John Barton's language redeems what otherwise seems a fractious, evasive world.

Contents:

Watershed 3

Hypothesis 6

Palm Springs 9

Phone Lines 11

At Lindow 14

Oxygen 17

Transient 19

Chrysaora 21

Shroud

The Living Room 22

Pret-a-Porter 24

Plasma, Triangles of Silk 27

Body Bag 29

Case History 32

Escher 35

Hybrid 37

Luna 39

In a Station of the Tongue 43

Light Paralysis 52

Eye Country 60

Book of the Southwest

Sunrise, Grand Canyon 69

Against the Current of the Virgin 73

Disappearance of the Anasazi 77

A Restaurant Guide to Santa Fe and Region 81

Plateaus of the Eternal 85

Eschatology of Skin 89

Anthropomorphism 94

Sky News 98

Trudeau's Children 105

Somewhere Marked Farther Down the Lines of Destiny 108

All That Enters Must Pass Through 110.

Notes:

Poems.

ISBN:

0887846599 :

OCLC:

47296285