Bargen, Walter: Too Late To Turn Back

Singing Bone Press, paperback

Publication Date: January 31, 2023

Publisher Marketing: Unrelenting in its dark vision of humanity and, yet, uncompromising in its intelligence and empathy expressed in gorgeous lines, Bargen's 72 poems in his twenty-sixth book expose our secrets and lies, our desires and torments. With each line, he reveals at once our bloody vapidity and our innocent hope, laying bare the clumsy paths we forge across the planet along with all its inhabitants.The poems in each section undulating around us while we gawk, like passersby to tragic accidents, seeing without believing it could be any of us. Bargen's poetry would not be out of place alongside the philosophical musings of the ancients, a companion perhaps to Lucretius's De rerum natura for the postmodern age.Bargen's exquisite language carries us along even when we reach out to steady our emotions, trying to prevent ourselves from flying unhinged into the ether.In the poems that form Too Late to Turn Back, Walter Bargen sets Nature and Man on the precipice together, conjuring a kind of detached tranquility, an Epicurean vision that directs our gaze inward.