Books

  “Barber approaches the scrap heap of common discourse as a connoisseur ready to celebrate the vitality of lexicons and vocabularies so encased in custom and context that everyone else has mistaken them (and by implication the aspects of our lives that they evoke) for dead.”

Langdon Hammer

"The botanist, the beekeeper, the falconer, the grammarian, the master of the high wire, the student of dew: David Barber's Wonder Cabinet finds room for them all. And finds in them all the common ground of poetry: devout articulation of the given world. Barber's gift for form is most luminous at just that juncture where form becomes meaning. These poems are built on wonder, and beautifully produce it."

–Linda Gregerson

"The poems in David Barber's first book don't sound quite like anyone else's of his generation. . . The buoyant intensity of his poetry owes something to Crane and Stevens, but Barber's way of making language itself a shape of strong feeling is his own."

–W.S. Di Piero