Blue Planet Memoirs

by Joseph Barrett

"Imagine that all of life is something like a hangover: the mental haze, the regret, but still the memory of the vanished beatific high. Imagine the longing for health and comfort and love in the midst of knowing they are fleeting, perhaps illusory. Imagine that up and through languor and pain, momentarily, the clearest and brightest images suddenly arise like small fresh breezes through the smoke of mills and fires; imagine beat laments of loss and limping love, and moments of smoldering beauty alternating with haiku that tape their clear moments to the very front windows of the eyes. These poems: a soul before us, working its way with words and feelings through this blue planet we inhabit—its mountains, its cities, its hard times, its cherished ecstasies: alive again, here on the pages before us."—Richard Hague

127 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2018

About the author

Born in Montgomery and raised in Richwood, Mr. Barrett attended Bethany College where he studied abroad as an exchange student at Oxford and went on to study in the Middle East, in Israel and Turkey. At nineteen, he published his first poetry collection, Roots Deep in Sand. In the midst of a growing Appalachian literary renaissance, in 1975 he arrived on the scene at Antioch College/Appalachia in Beckley, West Virginia and quickly became associated with the Soupbean Collective under the tutelage of mentors Bob Snyder, P.J. Laska and Don West. His work appeared in the Soupbean Anthology and the seminal publication Mucked (edited by Jim Webb and Bob Henry Baber). He published his second poetry collection, Periods of Lucidity in 1978. (Biography from Blue Planet Memoirs, Facebook)

Reviews

[David B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joseph Barrett's first collection of poetry was published when he was nineteen. I didn't even know living breathing poetry until I was well into my twenties, and I can only hope that my work reflects the type of vitality that Barrett's work expresses, even in his most pessimistic and hopeless moments.

[Cheryl Denise · Rating 5 out of 5]

"How many delusions compose the soul," asks Joseph Barrett in his poetry collection "Blue Planet Memoirs." He wonders what amount of poetry is needed to be "cleansed of sanity and madness." Come sink into his words, take a pickup truck ride, rattle down a dusty road to places you've been but haven't seen. Watch the woman at the juke box, hear a man "blissfully arguing in his drunken underwear." After hearing a reading by Kirk Judd of Joseph's work, my husband said he never heard any haiku he liked before Joseph's. Joseph embraces other cultures, religions and ways of being. This book is worth buying for the title poem alone, in which he says, "we are children of the immaculate illusion and we must return to our bewildered selves in exile." Come, read this.
reviewed by Cheryl Denise, poet and author of "I Saw God Dancing" and "What's in the Blood."