THE DEAD CENTER OF DAY

Reviews

"...this chapbook has the finish of a careful, longtime practitioner.  At the Dead Center of Day is a carefully built arrangement of poems , a journey through some of the genuine abominations of the twentieth century-the agonies we withdraw from unless pressed to the task by someone like Bargen, who reminds us that we dare not forget.  Most of these poems are not just staged shockers, but responsible, vivid holdings of the imagery of horror.  They contain genuine feeling and each is a subtle, cautionary deliverance.”

 “Bargen concludes his chapbook with an extraordinary work, “The Elves of Katyn Forest,”  which in essence delivers his final statement on the power of endurance in the face of contemporary horrors.  The poem begins, “It started during the night after the burning of many cities.  It started when the soldiers in uniforms the color of miles / of muddy road began the forced march of the defeated. / The mud of the vanquished and the mud of the victors / indistinguishable.”   With frightening precision Bargen has “the long muddled lines drudged into a dark forest /to a strange mumbled cadence-the belch of boots being sucked in/and out of mired miles-fifty thousand struggling vowels/and rifle reports the only consonants spoken over the dead/guarding the ditches.”  The entire country stops breathing. The trees become bloated.  He concludes his poem:

A half century later, out of Katyn Forest miles of mud-caked

Uniforms march.  At dust-choked crossroads villagers look for

Passing cars.  The sucking sound, the faint moans, only wind twisting

Through the gargoyled and steepled churches.  Couples stroll along

Rivers, watching their children run ahead.  Cottonwoods sail

Their leaves on the reddening current.  The evening grows faint;

The sun’s pulse weal on the water.  The children shiver, listening

to stories of elves who return to retake the country they lost.

“Walter Bargen says more about the hate and cruelty of our time in a

 few lines than does all the exhibitionist stomping and bellowing of a 

dozen slam group.

-Paul Zimmer of The Georgia Review- 

Anyone desiring something more than the virtuoso dance of self-reflexity in American poetry should read this collection.  And heed it.

- John Miller of the Delmar 7-

At the Dead Center of Day is a carefully built arrangement of poems, a journey through some of the genuine abominations of the twentieth century--the agonies we withdraw from unless pressed to the task by someone like Bargen, who reminds us that we dare not forget... Bargen

concludes... with an extraordinary work, "The Elves of Katyn Forest," which delivers in essence his final statement on the power of endurance in the face of contemporary horror... Walter Bargen says more about the hate and cruelty of our time in a dozen lines that does all the exhibitionist stomping and bellowing of a dozen slam groups.

-Paul Zimmer of The Georgia Review-