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Ros Barber
How Things Are on Thursday
Published by Anvil Press £7.95
ISBN 0-85646-374-4
(A condensed version of this review appeared in the 04 Winter /    
 05 Spring Edition of Connections )

The cover of Ros Barber’s first collection shows a house lying at an angle of 45 degrees after a landslide. Together with the title of the collection, the symbolism of the image is clear, affording a helpful ‘way in’ to the darker underlying reality of the sometimes complex, more intricate poems she creates. In ‘Liberation’, the opening poem, she sets out her stall: a woman refuses to ‘Accept(ed) like a pelt her husband’s coat’, for, ‘That was old-fashioned dying.’

   The first sequence, ‘Lafayette – Super Eight’ is aptly divided into eight poems which take us from 1971 to the present time using a Super Eight cine-film to flashback to a childhood in California when the family, like the film transferred to video, were ‘slightly out of tempo’. The children leave their Christmas lunch to play ‘in the buff’ and run under sprinklers to keep cool. Water, particularly swimming and diving metaphors serve to exemplify family relationships in this sequence, when ‘We were still immortal….’, ironically reiterating the 'immortality' of being captured on film. All that is seen of the father who is taking the film, is his shadow; appropriate, since we learn that he had ‘one foot already out of the door’. In a later evocative poem, ‘Waiting for Scott’, Barber again uses the metaphor of film together with snow to share with us the anguish of the fading memory of her father, 'his name is melting' whilst inviting us to draw the parallel with the man of the poem’s title who waved cheerio on film, never to be seen again.

   There is also a strikingly honed sonnet sequence, written for the Arts Council’s Archi-TEXTs project, which traces the history of one of the most derided sights on Brighton’s seafront: Embassy Court, a decaying white concrete building designed by Wells Coates was considered an outrage when erected in 1935 alongside Brighton’s more sedate architecture, or as Barber has it, ‘the grey/of Londoners in their tweed, and felt, and shame,’. The sequence works on two levels, using woman as a metaphor for the building, having us travel through time with ‘Little Miss Bauhaus’, ‘The Babe’, and more obviously, ‘What Happens to Woman’, witnessing the building’s inception, its first uses, its neglect then decay. We see inside it, together with refugee squatters, ‘the piss-poor dispossessed (who) see past/her windows’, unlike the majority who, as with women, ‘only see the face’. In ‘Sunk’ we witness ‘the truth of the third age’ when ‘A current of urine snakes between the floors’, but then in ‘Goddess’, we’re told the building will no longer be ‘the passive victim of your slurs,' when she is restored, for then, 'Once again, she will take your breath away/she will be fought for, idolised, adored./And you’ll be lucky if she lets you in.’

   The title sequence ‘How things are on Thursday’ moves from a poem about a drunken father seen from a small child's perspective, to a poem about a couple who cannot love – 'love' a word they can’t even articulate, the telling metaphors for the centre of their bed being first ‘a current of icy water’ then ‘a forest’, ‘a nest of snakes’, and finally a ‘wound’ that ‘just seeps and bleeds’. There are poems about cancer in this sequence, Barber’s unsentimental depiction of a teenage girl trying to come to terms with her mother having cancer being particularly admirable for its stark reality. At school, as one of a group, the girl shares the usual adolescent preoccupations: lipsticks, kissing, smoking, hair-styles, the only mention of the illness, ‘Your mum’s got cancer’ repeated unrelentingly at the end of every stanza – reiterating another pressure the teenager has to deal with, but unlike the rest, not one that she will eventually shrug off.

   With amazing dexterity, Barber slips into the skin of people from widely different backgrounds and ages. In ‘Helping the Police With Their Enquiries’, she is a clairvoyant weighed down by the responsibility of her ‘gift’, ‘For years I fought my senses,/ tried not to see the monsters in the cup’. And in, ‘I Filled the Bath with Coty L’Aimant’, we commiserate with the fragmented cries of a nanny whose charge dies in a scalding bath she prepared for herself on her night off, ‘I wanted to smell sweet./Sweet William.' She is equally convincing depicting the awkward ‘Old School Friends’ of a women dying of cancer, who ‘left their flowers to die before her eyes’, and more humorously, as a young mum mopping 'ice-cream and wafer from clumsy mouths,' whilst lusting after ‘Surfers at Sennen’, whom she longs to ‘unzip from their seal-skins, peel.....like bananas. Pull the rubber from their buttocks.’ But it is in ‘Airtight’ that Barber excels, taking us deep into the mind of a stalker who is capable of listing every item his subject has for breakfast. He even raids her bins, sifting for evidence of any ‘lout’s inept attempts at love: the flabby Fetherlite’. The last stanza is suitably chilling:

‘She slept in her clothes last night. She’s becoming a slut.
I’ve seen her weeping for hours into the phone
as though all that contrition could make her good
again. She’s scared. She nailed her windows shut.
When the light goes off I’ll call to let her know
I’m taking care of her. Well someone should.’

   Feelings of ambivalence and love, especially for her immediate family, are often rationalised through nature. There is the wonderful ‘Fish’ with its biblical opening, ‘On the third day..' in which she gives us the strikingly original image of fish leaping out of the water until they are ‘finally breathing the whole sky.’ Then there is ‘Fecundity’, oozing with rising sap in a celebration of the natural, but where women 'gather together like nettle beds,/tall, proud, and fertile.... concealing/the stinging barbs of their fine hairs.’ In contrast, her description of the birth of a child in ‘BN1’, achieves a beauty by its very simplicity, and an added poignancy by its juxtaposition with a candid description of Brighton’s urban landscape, where
                                    ‘..................people
                                    once as new as you
                                    are ticking like grenades
                                    with their pins pulled,
                                    none of them aware
you are sharing
the same thin air;’

   Ros Barber’s poems are pregnant with suggestiveness and ambiguity; she produces a lexis which allows for multiplicity of meanings. As each poem proceeds, the tension builds through unusual imagery, revealing a true poetic sensibility. Barber’s first volume is far more than promising. After the poems in ‘How Things Are on Thursday’, it will be interesting to see in which direction her future work will go.