From a woman’s affair with a preeminent artist and the challenges she faces in their marriage—including the birth of her second child, her love’s spurn of her first child from her previous marriage, and ultimately, the division that grows between them—the prose poems of Beautiful Raft cover a wide swath of ground. As a rarely encountered meld of historical fiction and verse, this second full-length poetry collection from Pushcart Prize nominee Tina Barry reaps the benefits of her lineage as both prose writer and poet. This new edition to Big Table Publishing’s catalogue is an artfully layered series of persona poems that provide a first-hand account of the romance and marriage of Virginia Haggard to revered modernist painter Marc Chagall. As successful in its storytelling and character portrayal as it is in syntax and diction, it is sure to please the avid reader of both fiction and verse. 

Barry’s prose poems embody two voices. She first paints the portrait of the woman herself, Virginia Haggard, as she details the initial rapture of love in powerfully evocative language: “He motions for me/ to come to him… we acknowledge... how alive we are to each other; that/ we want to become lovers. And so we do.” With equal skill, Barry also dons the childlike voice of Jean McNeil, Virginia’s young daughter from her first marriage. This second point of view is interspersed throughout the work and does much to move the world of Marc and Virginia fully into view, again demonstrating Barry’s skill in character development. Initially Jean tells us, “marc gives me clay and mum gives me blue beads and/ yellow buttons and string and other stuff   I make men/ and women and dresses for the women to wear then/ they talk to each other some kiss some are in love.” Yet there is much ahead of Marc and Virginia, as there is for Jean, including the birth of a child, the disruption of family, and the growing old of love in its quotidian nature. Readers are carefully guided through each phase in rich voice and emotional depth by Barry’s adroit narrative. Over Beautiful Raft’s pages, the characters come into full view as their relationships evolve.

Beyond telling the stories of individuals, Barry stretches herself and the reader further. Beautiful Raft leaves the personal and enters the political as it details the repeated invisibility of women in the first half of the 20th century through its portrayal of Virginia’s physical and mental space. Early in the work, Virginia tells the story of how her first husband, rapt by psychosis, is incapable of seeing her. Try as she might, Virginia is equally incapable of reaching him. “Am I big enough? Are you/ comfortable? How do I look against the blue water? Should I change color? Should I change the color of the water?” Then later, after a period of initial romance, the same dulled vision comes to Chagall. Lines like “How I fear that the only things/ that will ever keep me busy are him and the children. I’m invisibile, I say” and “I’m sick of the children. Sick of/ food, even the garnet-skinned tomatoes. Even the/ cherry pie” detail this half-seen existence, a position which while more common in Chagall’s era, many of us in longstanding relationships can attest, is not unique to it. Barry attempts to give this portraitless woman justice, giving her the space to expose her obscured half-life. 

Easily accessed and stunningly executed, Tina Barry’s Beautiful Raft brings to life a world of characters and another time. As much a love story as it is a social commentary, the end result is a triumph: an illustration of personhood that begins a larger conversation on gender roles and being—a conversation that is rarely understood so completely as through the view of the person that lived it.

October 2019