‘Best Barbarian’ Review: A Voice That Must Be Returned To

Bold and ambitious, Roger Reeves’s second poetry collection “Best Barbarian” is a triumphant testament to the power of the Black voice. Reeves forges ahead and puts forth an intense body of work that examines issues of race, war, and even climate change without compromising its lyricism. Recipient of a Whiting Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, Reeves is gripping in his examination of the apocalyptic state of humanity, making it impossible for the reader to look away.

Ruminations on abstract concepts like death, loss, grief, and pain become achingly familiar as Reeves’s speakers trace the contours of their familial history. At the beginning of the collection, the speaker grapples with the complicated entanglements of lineage and trauma in poems such as “The Alphabet, For Naima,” “In Rehearsal For The Funeral,” and “After The Funeral.” The death of a father casts a shadow that is felt throughout the collection, but it never feels repetitive. The undercurrent of pain runs through the piece in an electric display of creativity, whether it's in contrast to his daughter’s “invisible breathing” in “After Death” or by taking the form of the German Feldgeister in “Cocaine and Gold” — his dead “father the corn-wolf”.

As much as it is personal, Reeves’s depiction of suffering is not strictly individualistic. His poetry engages with a range of global literature and contemporary issues as well. His examination of the assassination of the Palestinian writer in “The End of Ghassan Kanafani” broadens into a consideration of the painful consequences of war. Likewise, in “Children Listen,” the poem spans the “Roman sky” to “Gaza” to Kazimierz,” imbuing his rallying imperative “You must grow wildly over the graves” with a universal quality. He captures microscopic and macroscopic perspectives with ease.

Featuring frequent allusions to the Anglocentric literary canon, Reeves pushes his writing to its creative limits, constantly incorporating different voices with remarkable freshness. These span from Beowulf to the Bible and from Augustine to Walt Whitman. By engaging with these works, he places his own poetry in conversation with a canon that has been historically exclusionary. This ambitious undertaking leads to a fascinating exploration of the potential of Black poetry — able to simultaneously accommodate and interrogate the cornerstones of Western history and culture. Noticeably longer than the other poems in the collection, there are echoes of epic poetry in “Domestic Violence,” where named characters move alongside literary allusions and victims of police brutality, framed by epigraphs from Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and “The Kybalion.” Allegorical, dense, symbolic, and esoteric: It is this very complexity that insists the reader slows down and takes the time to consider the many connections Reeves creates between the past and the present.

What stands out is the way Reeves’s voice holds its own even as it draws upon giants in literary history. In “Fragment 107,” he gives Sappho’s disembodied voice a new life as he addresses her directly: “Do I long for my virginity, Sappho?” This strength of voice reaches its fever pitch in “Prayer Of The Jaguar,” where the speaker appropriates the symbol of the jaguar to embody his voice’s precise and calculated power: “the golden heaven rising / Above him, the hush of a slamming door.” It is in these depictions of nature that Reeves’ poeticism shines through. The world, through his eyes, is at once beautiful and traumatic, sometimes in inseparably complex ways. As such, natural imagery intermingles with contemporary injustice in “Rat Among The Pines.”

Moreover, the power of his voice also draws strength from the Black canon Reeves evokes. References to legendary artists like Aretha Franklin, Louis Armstrong, James Baldwin, Marion Brown, Beyoncé, and others position the collection amidst a celebration of Black artistic excellence. Specifically, in “Something About John Coltrane,” Reeves transfigures a pivotal moment in Black history — Mahalia Jackson’s wig flying off in the heat of performance — into a transcendent act of liberation. Here, the act of “Jackson’s wig flying” is “as if a star / Suddenly freed from the mouth of God / A Black tooth blessing.” His words strike at something beyond, mining the ordinary for moments of divinity.

To cover all the nuances of a book mired in historical, literary, and religious contexts is impossible in a review or even a singular thesis. This complexity does not mean that casual readers should be put off. The richness of his descriptive imagery, the vulnerability of his personal narratives, and his concerted engagement with contemporary issues are accessible and universal. This is a collection that warrants multiple re-readings, each time with new insights to be discovered within his lush words. As he says in the collection’s final poem, “You are in a beautiful language.” It is truly a marvel to behold.