Poet Island Press

Poet Island Press is devoted to publishing works by both new and accomplished writers whose poetical content demonstrates a thoughtful attention to the creative process, and a serious self and world awareness. The True Visitor Book series focuses especially on exceptional works of a personal, lyrical nature.

Collage of the Soul

Poems by Barry Tagrin - available now through Amazon.com

Presented here is a special edition collection spanning a decade in the life and times of Barry Tagrin. A poet of true intensity, whose work derives directly from a struggle to survive his own emotions. These poems explore and brilliantly illuminate a life lived at its very fullest.

As Jack Gilbert puts it so clearly: “Barry Tagrin is dangerous, his work muscular without straining, and always a surprise.”

Tagrin’s highly personal poems are made up of a natural complexity of insight and a dramatic interplay of emotions, and while not opaque, are not always easily absorbed on first reading. Wisdom and tenderness at one moment can shift next into wonderment and raw, troubled self reflection. Indeed, we very often come upon a world struggling, conversely, for imbalance, a wish when one is in the light for the dark, and immediately after the opposite. But perhaps no critical insight can adequately sum up the force of voice and creative impulse that marks this unique and original poet. One feels privileged to observe in these poems the drama of the human psyche as it ranges through the poet’s vision. In Walls Coming Down In The Rain, we read, “The ambling brut sets aside the wild run, the necessary escalation of the body’s tramp,” and so an astute instruction to the self, from the priestly other to the keeper of the body’s lust, sets up this poet’s sacred mission: “The passionate ordeal of poetry,” Tagrin says, “is the heart’s message to the mind that one’s moral integrity, in its complex wholeness, needs constant management.”

A painter as well as poet,
one of Tagrin’s recent
“action portraits”
is featured here.