Grace Author:John Barr A song of the human spirit responding to beauty and adversity, Grace is an epic poem for America at the millennium.Grace is the master song, the last telling of Ibn Opcit, a Caribbean poet condemned to die by torture. In a series of jailhouse monologues, we hear him comment wryly on justice, on creation, on death, and on life after... more » death:One little theory or theorylette hold dat de long
oblong of de grave is not a place of cold and silence.
It be a place of popcorn and comfort.
De saved get to see first runs.
De lost must watch Ishtar for eternity."In Grace, not only does John Barr handle the demanding form of the long poem with skill and panache, but he delivers a one-of-a-kind linguistic tour de force. Spoken mostly in a Caribbean dialect and rollicking with word play, Grace achieves a riotous level of verbal inventiveness. I don't know any other work with which to compare it unless we think of it as a kind of funky Finnegan's Wake in verse with palm trees. You have never read anything quite like this wildly sustained imaginative drama. Set those one-page lyrics aside and dive into this momentous feat."-Billy Collins, author of Picnic, Lightning"John Barr's Grace is an incredibly risky poem about white American consciousness in the instant of attempting sympathy with black American (in this case Caribbean) consciousness. This cross-cultural ambition couldn't be any more vertiginous, but that doesn't mean that it's not crucial for the regional literature. Barr's courage and zeal for the project are astonishing, and his ambition should be the wonder of writers and readers north and south of the Panama Canal."-Rick Moody, author of The Ice StormJohn Barr has pursued parallel careers as poet and investment banker for the past 25 years. He has founded the country's largest natural gas marketing company and a prominent investment-banking boutique. He is President Emeritus of the Poetry Society of America, and Chairman of the Board of Bennington College. Story Line Press published the trade edition of his first book, The Hundred Fathom Curve, in 1997. He lives with his wife and three children in Westchester Co« less