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Gene Barry's Unfinished Business: A Book Review by Kristen D. Scott, Ed. by Penny Perry 

 

 

 

Gene Barry' in his new collection of poetry, Unfinished Business from Doghouse Press, points at last with children’s fingers to childhood pain and abuse. Barry’s searing and honest account of wounds, and denial, pulls the reader in. The reader sees with Barry’s eyes, even sometimes flinches with Barry’s skin. The reader roots for Barry and hopes those included in his works,  receive the ablution and understanding they deserve.

 

Barry suggests that healing from a difficult past is a lifetime journey and will always be Unfinished Business. The poems are riveting and complex and demand careful consideration. For readers who have suffered from similar abuses the poems, though disturbing, are comforting and cathartic.

 

Barry often uses an adult lens to examine his past. In his poem “Letter to Self” he looks at his denial, his need to forgive himself for his mountains of inabilities, and his desire for repair:

 

          Denial perched on my heart,

          I didn't know this, couldn't have.

          It arrived days when inside 

          my little frame and head

          my dictionary had only 

          white pages and when pain 

          had nudged me on to 

          a tangent of self sabotage.

          Those lumps of anguish encased

          in childhood blindness grew into 

          mountains of inabilities and rejection,

          steering my mother adult to dole out

          the oozing jealousies and torments

          to a clean new generation.

          (1-14)

 

 

Barry’s honest and illuminating poem about abuse “ Stuffing Hanks” reveals Barry’s grit and stunning lack of self pity.

 

          One day I will cry forever.

          Not like a terrace loser,

          or a baby-faced softy,

          you know, a terminal cry.

          I will stoke my engine with

          nights-without-sleep and invasions, 

          childhood floggings and hidden wounds,

          attacks and black-suited fiends. 

          I won’t forget to douse the unexpected 

          with rivers of anal blood and

          floods of small-boy tears.

          I will hold up all of those walls 

          I’ve fallen off and hidden behind

          with screaming wrongs

          and decorate my sky

          with pointing children’s fingers.

          A cortege of forbidden questions 

          will at last assemble

          and trod with notice 

          to a brand new place of old

          where every squeezed-open

          pair of perfect ears

          will finally embrace my slowest form of death.

          (1-24)

 

One of the most heart wrenching poems in Unfinished Business deals with our discomfort with disability.

From “Michael”

 

After polio had visited,

the boy it chose

was never the same.

It paralyzed his mother.

 

Young men lit their laughter,

Pubescent girls wondered

and dogs slowed near him;

the years after his father

could take no more.

 

He had paddled upstream

to a school and a room

for special people

…...

(1-12)

 

Unfinished Business is a collection of poems as powerful as Barry’s fellow countryman Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela's Ashes. Barry has the courage to find words to name and describe wounds. Barry’s poems harsh and honest, thoughtful and tender reveal a portrait of a man who has overcome difficult odds and carved his own switchback path to healing.