Material [Paperback]

Ros Barber's collection is truly magical and her understanding of so many deep emotions is evident. My feelings of isolation have been somewhat alleviated by this collection; someone understands, someone has been there before me.
She uses everyday situations to reveal layers of feelings beneath them. I cannot commend Ros Barber enough.

My favourite poem is Losing It, which conveys everything that is wonderful about this collection:

She's not like the people who lose their dogs
by driving to Wales and opening the door.

She's like the people who lose their phones
in swimming pools, against hard floors,
or into the pockets of handbag thieves,
while the owner was ordering something to eat.

She's not like the people who lose their wives
with a rope, and a hammer, and a carving knife.

She's like the people who lose their way home
with a belly full of vodka on a dark night
two weeks after moving to Poet's Name Road
off something or other. Around here, though.

She's not like the people who lose their lovers
by forgetting dates, and screening calls.

She's like the people who lose a limb,
are haunted by dreams of what it's for
and feel its ache as though it's here,
thick with the usefulness of air.

She's not like the people who lose their shirt
on a worthless nag in the three-fifteen.

She's like the people who lose hope
through a hole in the lining of a favourite coat
though they'd put their name on the think okay,
and were sure they had it yesterday.

She's not like the people who go on a diet.
She's like the people who starve on the quiet.

I sat on my sofa one afternoon and devoured this collection. It soars with emotion. Delightful visions of family members and moments in time that resonate with the past and the present. These poems don't shy away from the difficulties of family life either - the complexities of adult and child relationships, moments of hurt and loss, the power of healing. I laughed and I choked back tears. These poems recognise something in us as fragile human beings. They place us in what we are born into and live with: families. I loved it.

One of the best things about Brighton's poetry scene is Ros Barber for whom the adjective feisty was invented. She's a professional poet of outstanding calibre and a teacher of rare insight. Her first collection published in 2004 was the intriguingly titled `How Things Are on Thursday' which included the beautiful sonnet series `Embassy Court' and the wonderful poem `Surfers at Sennen':
`I want to unzip them from their seal-skins, peel them/
like bananas. Pull the rubber from their buttocks.'

`Material', builds on the success of her first with what I felt were (generally) more serious and more mature poems arranged in a series of sets: Material, Driving without Lights, Flesh and Blood, Missing and Test Series. Few match Barber's dexterity and sensibility when it comes to commissioned pieces. Flesh and Blood was a commission for Pallant House Gallery in Chichester and some of the most immediately appealing poems here were part of a commission from Canterbury City Council for the Seaside Sonnets project for Herne Bay, including the sure-to-be-classic `How to Leave the World that Worships Should':
`Let faxes butter-curl on dusty shelves./
Let junk mail build its castles in the hush/
Of other people's halls. Let deadlines burst/
And flash like glorious fireworks somewhere else.'

The superb `Test Series' is a homage to some of the senior men in the poet's life and includes `Corridor of Uncertainty':
`only after years of this/
did I feel how similar we were,/
forged in the nights I sobbed to sleep/
when no-one came to tuck me in.'

The corridor of uncertainty is a cricketing term meaning a notional narrow area just outside a batsman's off stump. It supplies what T. S. Eliot would have called an `objective correlative', an appropriate vehicle for the poem's emotion. In fact it seems to me that Ros explores a corridor of uncertainty in almost all the poems here - uncertainty of parenting, of childhood love, of understanding, of wife or husband. This corridor can be a lonely and painful place. It's certainly full of grief and shadow. It's a tribute to Barber's skill that the poems never ever droop towards the mawkish or sentimental. As you'd expect of a trained biologist and programmer, there's a steady scientific nerve engaged in Barber's work, much like the father she recalls in `Corridor':
Why are you crying? My father said./
He wanted to know. He worked in specifics;/
a scientist, a man of quantum/
cause and effect, of splitting matter/
to its smallest particles to get at/
the essence of it.

This `Material' rates a highly commended - an ideal Christmas gift for poetry lovers and a collection of memorable poems to return to time and again.