Don Barkin in New Haven 11/20 7 p.m.

[slopoet]

Friday, November 20 2009
7:00pm

Don Barkin in New Haven

Poet Don Barkin (bio below) reading & book-signing from his first full-
length poetry collection, That Dark Lake.

Wine and light snacks will be available. The event is co-sponsored by
the Kehler Liddell Gallery and the Westville Village Renaissance
Alliance.

Kehler Liddell Gallery
873 Whalley Ave.
New Haven, CT
For more information: www.kehlerliddell.com

In Don Barkin’s first full-length poetry collection, That Dark Lake,
there is terror and despair but also underlying faith and hope, as in
the work of a poet often echoed here: Robert Frost. And like Frost’s,
Barkin’s verse has a fierce formality that connects it to the very
tradition with which its fresh and modern voice does battle. There is
enormous honesty and an unrelenting refusal to provide easy answers in
these poems. You will not emerge from them unscathed, but you will
emerge much enriched. The editors of many of the country’s finest
journals would agree, having often featured Don Barkin’s work on their
pages. The poet and critic Margaret Gibson has this to say: “Don
Barkin’s poems are memorable, unsettling, and welcome. They offer us
‘an ancient shadowed ache’ and a canny clarity; they offer
straightforward honesty and deft, surprising turns of insight and
image. That Dark Lake is a book that can touch the heart and evoke wry
recognition in the same moment.”

Don Barkin has published poems in Poetry, The Virginia Quarterly
Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, the North American Review,
Harvard Magazine, The Louisville Review, Verse, and other journals. He
is the author of two poetry chapbooks and has twice been awarded
grants by the State of Connecticut. He was educated at Harvard College
and Cambridge University. A former newspaper reporter, he is currently
a high school English teacher. He has also taught writing seminars at
Yale and Wesleyan Universities, and on-line for a consortium of
Oxford, Yale, and Stanford Universities.