The Singers I Prefer

Foreword by Sydney Lea

Academy of American Poets The Lenore Marshall Prize Finalist 2006

Trained as a musician and composer, Barter’s poems are driven by the rhythm and lyricism, punctuated with occasional dissonances that startle the reader with profound perceptions hidden within deceptively straightforward “melodies.” Whether exploring the misadventures of youth or the petty defeats of encroaching middle age, Barter evokes the bittersweet feeling of being “sad in the deep-sweet way/that gods are sad for all that will/never be.”

Christian Barter is the author of three books of poetry –The Singers I Prefer in 2005, In Someone Else’s House (2013), and most recently Bye-bye Land, winner of the 2017 Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions.  His poetry has appeared in journals including Ploughshares, Tin House, New Letters, Georgia Review and The American Scholar and featured on poets.org, Poetry Daily, and The PBS Newshour.  He has received a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the 2014 Maine Literary Award for Poetry, and was the Centennial Poet Laureate of Acadia National Park.  For thirty years he has worked for the trail crew there as a stone worker, rigger, arborist and supervisor.

Another Burning

I lit a fire for the first time since last winter
and it smelled like being in love with you.

I half expected—no, that word is a lie—
I imagined, in the old way, the way

I had of imagining you when you drove up
my driveway with your books on tape

blasting away calmly about Lincoln’s assassination,
that you would come charging up my driveway

in the old way, last winter’s way, your tears still lingering
for Abe, you’d somehow forgotten had been shot,

and let me comfort you for some long-gone thing.
It smelled like you would, and kept right on smelling
that way.

I’ve been listening to Christian Barter’s strong and subtle voice for some years now, and to read his first full volume is to recall, among other things, that this poet is also a first-rate musician. His are the capacities of the best jazz improvisers: an awareness of and respect for his predecessors; an instinct for just the right “change”; and that indefinable gift to howl in pain at the moon even as the virtuosity and beauty of the howling indicate the player’s love of life. One of the most impressive debuts I know.
— Sydney Lea

The ability to draw an honest bead on one’s personal history and on history in general is uncommon. Christian Barter is an uncommon poet, one who in poem after poem goes beyond the anecdotal and into the domain of the searched soul. His talent is at the service of an inquisitive urge that won’t quit but that recognizes how limitation assails us at each turn. In his best poems he makes a reader feel both the awe and the pity of time.
— Baron Wormser

June 2005
88 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.5
$14
978-0-9723045-4-2