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Double Helix Here are comments by other poets and editors: Barri has channeled her personal
tragedy into what Stephen Corey calls "some of the finest
elegiac writing of recent years" as well as into "love poems
that can achieve marvelous effects."
He says, "The poems in Barri Armitage's poetry emerge from
inner bedrock and wellsprings that nearly all readers and writers would
profess to yearn for, to live from...To an uncanny degree, we join with
the poet's experience and emotional wisdom, spiraling in tandem to
emulate those fundamental bonds her title evokes."
Walter
McDonald writes, "I love the courage of these poems, the
surprising risks, the energy and skills of a poet who makes a stranger
feel that the lovely, painful world of these poems is home.
Spun from unbearable loss, the book weaves a story of human
abundance--a family blessed with so much, deeply in love, with so much
to lose...These poems give me more than I expect from any book.
How else can I explain the splendor these lines from the title
poem give me? In mid-life,
in spite of all risks, she writes, 'tonight I'll make you / honeycake
that keeps a week.' Like
the widow who 'shared her food with Elijah...lately it seems, the more I
bake, / the more the oil rises in the jar.'" Katherine
Soniat calls the collection "a book of powerful
transfiguration, a record of loss slowly and finally digested so as to
become the substance of healing...From page to page, light and shadow
weave, dance, much as storm clouds blow across the sun.
Armitage's wise voice involves us at the deepest level with what
intimacy means to our daily routine." Susan
Ludvigson is "persuaded and moved, especially by the
wrenchingly beautiful sequence whose genesis is a daughter's accidental
death. Through quiet,
accurate language, the poet's pain is rendered with terrifying clarity.
These are poems of survival, even of celebration, in the face of
irredeemable loss." Jack
Zucker describes "Barri Armitage's poems [as] contemporary in
meaning, in diction, in professional skill, but they strike me as a
charmed echo of the 18th century, in clarity, fluidity, and
rationality." For
REVIEWS from The Bridge, Poet Lore, and Washington
Review, click here to read: Reviews. Double Helix can be ordered through bookstores, Amazon.com, or through WWPH, P.O. Box 15271, Washington, DC 20003. If you wish an autographed copy, contact Barri directly at, 13904 N. Gate Dr., Silver
Spring, MD 20906, USA Please click here to read some of the poems. Please click here to print out an order form.
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