*Originally Published in the November 2023 Newsletter* David Barber’s debut, *The Spirit Level*, was released in 1995, and Barber would wait more than a decade before his second poetry collection, the more tightly woven (if guarded) *Wonder Cabinet*, saw the light. During these intervening years, Barber’s mentor and boss at *The Atlantic*, Peter Davison, died, and Barber ascended the editorial throne. I studied with him at Emerson College just prior to this career development, and he also chaired my MFA thesis, a duty he performed for little compensation besides the bottle of wine I bought him when it was over. While other senior Emerson faculty impressed me—Gail Mazur, Bill Knott, Jonathan Aaron—it would be the adjunct David Barber whose imprimatur I sought the most. He didn’t shape my style as much as Mazur or Knott, but it is Barber’s ideas that I return to as I strive, nearly twenty years later, to answer Yeats’ classic problem of difficulty—why should anyone tussle with such a difficult art form? #@callout it would be David Barber whose imprimatur I sought the most If Barber himself harbored occasional doubts, he disguised them well, and never lost his temper with me when he probably should have. He suffered his share of bad luck—his *The Spirit Level* was published in the same year as *The Spirit Level*, the ninth poetry collection from Seamus Heaney. However ill-fated this coincidence, Barber took pride in his titles, once coming up with a zinger for a poem of mine that badly needed an entrypoint. In dubbing it “Council for a Cavalier,” he handed me the best line of the piece. Barber was persistent and skilled at salvage, as when he insisted, during my thesis drafting process, that we comb through my discarded manuscripts—and proceeded to learn me my flotsam from my jetsam. Barber has a keen eye for the poetry of others, but his editorial acumen cannot tell us why he is able to see that which others cannot. No, the best way to know that is to read his poetry. The Spirit Level contains many sturdy poems, such as “Lines on a Yankee Aphorism,” “The Dark Ages,” “Talking Cure,” “Ladies of the Necropolis”...more than enough to make his reputation. But “Prospectus,” with its pun on *The Tempest*’s Prospero, is the sleeper track. Many might mistakenly pass over its unfashionably syllable-laden lines and slow warm-up—the opening stanza ends with “None of us should have to countenance / A loss of words, a lack of common names / In the face of the world’s embarrassing wealth / Of sundry motions and stirrings.” As deliberately as it opens, it picks up speed, and many passages achieve lyric excellence in the face of prevailing winds. Barber expertly orchestrates those chewy, polysyllabic lines in the third stanza, invoking Prospero’s storm in a teacup with “languorous exaltation of curtains / Before an open kitchen window” and, in a nod to Marilyn Monroe, “summer dresses / Will swirl jubilantly above the thighs.” While Barber still leans on adjectives and anachronisms, the alliterative rhythm and swaying assonance take sail. His litanies lift in the next stanza, too, with “airsocks / and windbags. The rise and fall of dragon kites.” Momentum builds, and he summons his storm—It would be his “masterpiece,” but “yesterday’s newspaper snags in the forsythia.” What’s it all for? the poem seems to ask, as it speeds towards its final “sigh.” No one literally needs a field guide to wind, but the idea of being able to label the invisible is a seductive one that gives poetry a charter—practicality be damned.