Home Delivery

In her latest collection of poetry, entitled Home Delivery, Lou Barrett returns to familiar themes-love, loss, the beauty and the terror of the world, the search for lost time. Her resilient spirit demands that, at age ninety-one, she continue to write a "script of amazement and indignation" lest "the unfinished self...live in exile."
Time is a major concern in this volume. The poet writes of "how reverently one should consume all of Time's hoard." The poems provide a kind of portal into cherished memories, into lost time. Her language, luminous and unique, awakens our senses. We see through the poet's eyes, as she walks the beach, "lovers in blankets like strewn sarcophagi." We see a young Israeli guard shift a gun to her left hand "with the certainty of a mother easing an infant." Ms. Barrett's view of the world is original. Her words enable us to see with fresh eyes. We are strengthened by her perceptions of how to live in a world marked by change, characterized by "rapture and wounds."
For Lou Barrett, the "cardinal sin" is despair; the antidote to despair is writing. The poet offers beauty and wisdom to her readers "like letters/promissory notes/ for home delivery/in your mailbox."
Lisbeth Comm, Muse magazine
Director of Secondary Education,
Westport Connecticut Public Schools