A Flame on the Spanish Stairs

Douglas Barbour

Douglas Barbour's new series consists of quasi-sonnets, word-line acrostics, based on fourteen word-phrases found in the letters of John Keats. In turns characteristic of Barbour's recent work — including Fragmenting Body, etc and Breath Takes — A Flame on the Spanish Stairs uses linguistic techniques, such as homolinguistic translation, as modes of experimentation to explore the limits of conventional lyric poetry.

Formally innovative, this short series of poems follows the last thoughts of a sickening Keats through the streets of Rome. Barbour's use of Keats' letters as pre-text calls the structure of narrative lyric into question. Once associated with an internalized speaker, the lyric poem is turned upside down. Far from being cold and formal explorations, these poems are affected by a great sense of learning, a longing or melancholy, and the final thoughts of Keats are rendered with a delicate human closeness.

Douglas Barbour is a professor in the Department of English, University of Alberta, where he teaches creative writing, modern poetry, Canadian Literature, and science fiction and fantasy. His critical books include studies of poets Daphne Marlatt, John Newlove, and bpNichol (all ECW Press 1992), and Michael Ondaatje (Twayne 1993). Volumes of poetry include Visible Visions: Selected Poems (NeWest Press 1984), Story for a Saskatchewan Night (rdcpress 1989), Fragmenting Body, etc (NeWest Press 2000) and, most recently, Lyric/Anti-lyric (NeWest Press 2001).

Read some of Doug's work in the archive...

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