The Galleons: Poems

By Rick Barot

Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry
Finalist for the Pacific Northwest Book Award
A New York Public Library Best Book of 2020

For almost twenty years, Rick Barot has been writing some of the most stunningly crafted lyric poems in America, paying careful, Rilkean attention to the layered world that surrounds us. In The Galleons, he widens his scope, contextualizing the immigrant journey of his Filipino-American family in the larger history and aftermath of colonialism.

These poems are engaged in the work of recovery, making visible what is often intentionally erased: the movement of domestic workers on a weekday morning in Brooklyn; a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, fondly sharing photos of his dog; the departure and destination points of dozens of galleons between 1564 and 1815, these ships evoking both the vast movements of history and the individual journeys of those borne along by their tides. “Her story is a part of something larger, it is a part / of history,” Barot writes of his grandmother. “No, her story is an illumination // of history, a matchstick lit in the black seam of time.”

With nods toward Barot’s poetic predecessors—from Frank O’Hara to John Donne—The Galleons represents an exciting extension and expansion of this virtuosic poet’s work, marrying “reckless” ambition and crafted “composure,” in which we repeatedly find the speaker standing and breathing before the world, “incredible and true.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Release date: Feb 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781571317278

Rick Barot

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has published three previous volumes of poetry: The Darker Fall; Want; which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 GrubStreet Book Prize; and Chord. Chord received the UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. It was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, the New Republic, Tin House, the Kenyon Review, and the New Yorker. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and Stanford University. He is the poetry editor for the New England Review. He lives in Tacoma, Washington, and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University.

Book preview

THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE CRICKET

The poetry of earth is a ninety-year-old woman

in front of a slot machine in a casino in California.

She is wearing a gray dress, her sharp red lipstick

in two lines across her mouth, put there

by her daughter. Like Gertrude Stein’s, her hair

is cut close. Nearby is her wheelchair, painted blue

like a boy’s bicycle. It is a weekday in March,

the casino is the size of a hangar that could house

a dozen planes, but it is thousands of machines

that fill the eye, an event of light and color.

The sentences she speaks now are like the sentences

of Gertrude Stein, without the ironies of art.

Her mind is like a compressed accordion, the far

points now near, more present than the present.

Waiting, I am at the food court, reading a magazine

article about the languages the world is losing.

The languages spoken only by a few remaining

people. Or by one remaining person. Or lost

totally, except for the grainy recordings in archives,

mysterious as the sounds made by extinct birds.

The reels on her machine spin, their symbols

never matching. She is playing the one-cent slots,

and her money will go far into the afternoon.

And because waiting is thinking, I am thinking

of the eternity Keats writes about in the sonnet

about the grasshopper and the cricket, ceasing never

in the hedges and meadows, in the evening stove:

the grasshopper of summer, the cricket of winter.

THE GALLEONS 1

Her story is a part of something larger, it is a part

of history. No, her story is an illumination

of history, a matchstick lit in the black seam of time.

Or, no, her story is separate

from the whole, as distinct as each person is distinct

from the stream of people that led

to the one and leads past the one. Or, her story

is surrounded by history, the ambient spaciousness

of which she is the momentary foreground.

Maybe history is a net through which

just about everything passes, and the pieces of her

story are particles caught in the interstices.

Or, her story is a contradiction, something ordinary

that has no part in history at all, if history is

about what is included, what is made important.

History is the galleon in the middle

of the Pacific Ocean, in the middle of the sixteenth

century, swaying like a drunk who will take

six months to finally reach his house.

She is on another ship, centuries later, on a journey

eastward that will take weeks across the same ocean.

The war is over, though her husband

is still in his officer’s uniform, small but confident

among the tall white officers. Her hair

is marcelled like a movie star’s waves,

though she has been too sick with the water’s motion

to know that anyone sees her. Her daughter is two,

the blur of need at