Jim Barnes's familiarity with the European poetic traditions has been deepened through long periods spent in France, Germany, and Italy, and through his translations of European poetry. In Visiting Picasso he repays Europe for its gifts to him in a series of poems that evoke the lush poetic history that ties European culture together, sometimes darkly. A heightened sense of place and purpose infuses the poems of Visiting Picasso with meaning drawn from actual landscapes, events, and observations.
| Contents Homage to Nabokov Leaving Chillon L'Exposition Charlie and the Funicular Waiting for Recognition Remembering Cap Canaille Always Completely at Home In Cassis, Early March In Vauvenargues Gwawdodyns for the Fisher King Rue du Faubourg St.-Honor¿ Ballade Weather The Poetry Reading near La Californie after a Day on Golfe Juan The Judgment of Paris (Whereabouts Unknown) Watching TV at Dooley's, the Early 1950s Zen Winter's End, 1970 Sibyl F¿ria de P¿ques, Arles 1996 The American Heritage Potato Postcard to Andrew Grossbardt from the Confluence of the Fourche Maline and Holson Creek, Summerfield, Oklahoma, 1 September 1975 By the Ruins Postcard to David Ray from Poteau Mountain, Runestone State Park Corniche de l'Est¿rel The Artist as Beachcomber Picture of Creeley, after Hearing Him Read in Munich, February 1995 A Book of the Dead Winter's End Fin de Si¿cle at Schloss Solitude Birkenkopf 1998 These Flat-Topped Pines Crouch In St.-Maximin-Ste.-Baume with the Old Men at Boules, Looking for the Maestro Deputy Finds Dean's Tombstone on Highway Epitaph for J(ohn). B(erryman). Monsieur le Marquis de Vauvenargues The Marsh Bird The Cave on Cavanal Mountain Portrait in Seven Parts with Nightscape Heading East Out of Rock Springs Birkenkopf 2000 Giuseppe's Song for His Annelise in Her Absence . . . The Fox at Agay Visiting Picasso La Vieille Madame ¿ la Machine ¿ Sous Rubaiyat for a Pair of Heroes On the Hill Back of La Ciotat Ithaka 2001 Lay 4 The First F¿ria of the Third Millennium, Arles Easter Monday In Aix-en-Provence The Poet's Paradise Agamemnon The Snow Bird Twister Ikaros 1940 Owl Rondeau for a Shovelbill Catfish, at the Buffalo Hole, Fourche Maline River, ¿ la Research du Temps Perdu, January 2003 Magpie West of Cassis Taos as Purgatory Epithalamion: Villanelle for September 7, 2002 In Memory of Dora Maar Elegy for the Old Man beside the Road to Nans les Pins Villa Serbelloni Revisited, February 2003 | Poet Laureate of Oklahoma for 2009-2010. — Poet Laureate of Oklahoma for 2009-2010.
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Jim Barnes is an internationally recognized poet and translator. He is the author of many books of poetry, including The Sawdust War, Paris, and On a Wing of the Sun, as well as an autobiography, On Native Ground: Memoirs and Impressions, which won the American Book Award. He is the Poet Laureate of Oklahoma for 2009-2010.