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A review by benplatt
Best Barbarian: Poems by Roger Reeves
5.0
The word “barbarian” famously derives from the Greek word “barbaros,” an umbrella term used to reference the indistinguishable (to Greek ears) mass of foreigners outside their city states. Eventually, to not speak the language of the Greeks, to be a barbarian, evolved to encompass every trait that the Greeks, and eventually the Romans, projected onto their enemy. To be a barbarian is to be constructed as an unintelligible, alien, and inferior other; to be Grendel as opposed to Beowulf (to use one of Reeves’ many allusions, even if it’s neither Greek or Roman).
Best Barbarian is, among other things, a disruption of how white supremacy, colonialism, and imperialism have created a mythology and a history exclusionary and hostile to the people whose suffering enable the history of that mythology. This collection is full of complicated entanglements with texts and ideas belied by Reeves’ vivid lyricism. This is a collection that is constantly and inventively in conversation with other texts and artists, from classical literature such as Homer and Virgil to Black contemporary artists such as Drake, Alice Coltrane, and a trio of guides to the afterlife in the form of verses from Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lucille Clifton. The conversation between Reeves and these other artists often involves Reeves inserting their voices exactly into his own poetry as often as he’s responding to another’s work. This multi-voiced entanglement serves to clarify the reality of the poetic, historical, and musical lineage that Reeves is drawing on: that despite the canonical casting of the blood and darkness of history and the language, song, and art of communities of color into the camp of the barbarian, thus undermining it and labeling it unintelligible, Reeves’ lyrics exemplify that the voices of the barbarians are beautiful, intelligible, and inseparable from those of the hegemony. That the mythological freedom and prosperity of America is built on the blood and exploitation of Black slaves, that colonial settlement has never ended across the world by invoking the assassinated Palestinian author and activist Ghassan Kanafani, and the generational and familial history of his own family, which is complicated by histories of trauma and distance between those who love each other.
By synthesizing so many voices, some deemed canonical and some non-canonical, together along with his own, he is asserting a different, more complex history of music, society, and literature, one that exhumes from the past and the dead and that he creates in the present. Reeves’ history digs into the damage done to the so called “barbarians” of the world by the colonial and imperial core through dense, multifaceted verse that ranges in lyrical form as much as it ranges in time, scale, and intimacy. All that density, though, is miraculously contained within musical, clear language that doesn’t aim for perfect intelligibility (that’s not a goal worth aiming for imo), but that does come together as a miraculous, tangled chorus.
Best Barbarian is, among other things, a disruption of how white supremacy, colonialism, and imperialism have created a mythology and a history exclusionary and hostile to the people whose suffering enable the history of that mythology. This collection is full of complicated entanglements with texts and ideas belied by Reeves’ vivid lyricism. This is a collection that is constantly and inventively in conversation with other texts and artists, from classical literature such as Homer and Virgil to Black contemporary artists such as Drake, Alice Coltrane, and a trio of guides to the afterlife in the form of verses from Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lucille Clifton. The conversation between Reeves and these other artists often involves Reeves inserting their voices exactly into his own poetry as often as he’s responding to another’s work. This multi-voiced entanglement serves to clarify the reality of the poetic, historical, and musical lineage that Reeves is drawing on: that despite the canonical casting of the blood and darkness of history and the language, song, and art of communities of color into the camp of the barbarian, thus undermining it and labeling it unintelligible, Reeves’ lyrics exemplify that the voices of the barbarians are beautiful, intelligible, and inseparable from those of the hegemony. That the mythological freedom and prosperity of America is built on the blood and exploitation of Black slaves, that colonial settlement has never ended across the world by invoking the assassinated Palestinian author and activist Ghassan Kanafani, and the generational and familial history of his own family, which is complicated by histories of trauma and distance between those who love each other.
By synthesizing so many voices, some deemed canonical and some non-canonical, together along with his own, he is asserting a different, more complex history of music, society, and literature, one that exhumes from the past and the dead and that he creates in the present. Reeves’ history digs into the damage done to the so called “barbarians” of the world by the colonial and imperial core through dense, multifaceted verse that ranges in lyrical form as much as it ranges in time, scale, and intimacy. All that density, though, is miraculously contained within musical, clear language that doesn’t aim for perfect intelligibility (that’s not a goal worth aiming for imo), but that does come together as a miraculous, tangled chorus.