Contributor’s Marginalia: Robert Cording responding to Jennifer Barber’s poem “In Bologna”

A deceptively straightforward poem, “In Bologna,” repays reading after reading. At first the poem seems like the description of a hot, but lovely day in Bologna, the speaker, observing a second person “you” who seeks shelter from the “pressure of the sun” by “strolling” inside a series of lovely porticoes. But three quarters of the way through the poem, the speaker draws an analogy between the porticoes’ columns that “stripe the light with shadows” and the shadows of trees “along the railroad track / between the Fossoli camp and Birkenau” in a photograph “on display with others” which the “you” (Barber herself?) happens on in the “noon square” as she emerges from the cooling shade of the porticoes.

And then the reader sees both the double nature of the speaker and of the poem, the way the dropped line, loosely syllabic, has prepared for this moment. The triple description of the porticoes’ color in the first couplet moves from “sandstone red” in line one to the second dropped line’s “terracotta” that ultimately becomes the color of “dried blood red.” Right from the start, the world is doubled, the porticoes “shelter[ing]” but also both “blood red” and a reminder of the “pressure” (what an unpredictable but perfect noun) of the sun. As the poem continues, the dropped line in each couplet is a reminder of the in-between the “you” finds herself in: though the airy porticoes arch beautifully over the sidewalk and “don’t trap you the way a building would,” they lead directly to the display of photographs of the Nazi death camps. Though the “you” has been afforded, for a time, the sheltered and shady porticoes, they lead directly to the sun, its “pressure” inescapable, as the “you” “emerges” into the unshadowed, noon square. Like emerging from Plato’s cave, the “you” must return to a world which is always, and in all ways, both beautiful and horrific. The pretty shadows that stripe the columns are now, in the full light, the shadow of the death camps that illustrates our capacity for evil.

The dropped lines of the last two couplets (both six syllables and with two iambic stresses) tighten the “trap.” If earlier the porticoes didn’t trap the “you” “the way a building would,” they are now like a one-directional tunnel from which “blinking you emerge.” Born into the always doubled world, the “you” isn’t blinded by the sun, but “blinking” (another perfect word choice), her eyes adjusting once again to the sun, to the “pressure” of what is always going on in the world we (aren’t we all part of that “you”) live in where “sandstone red” porticoes stripe the light like the black-and-white uniforms of the Birkenau prisoners.