Winner of the 2003 Cherry Grove Poetry
Prize: Regarding Women by Barry Spacks
Barry Spacks, after many years of teaching at M.I.T., now earns his keep
as a writing and literature professor in the English Department and the
College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara He's published
poems widely in journals paper and pixel, plus stories, two novels, and
(as of late 2004) nine poetry collections, the most extensive of which
is Spacks Street: New And Selected Poems
from Johns Hopkins. He has a CD out, "A Private Reading," presenting 42
poems selected from 50 years of poetry-work. “Barry Spacks’ poems have always been exceptionally readable
because, even when the subjects are poignant or distressing, the
words are at play, rejoicing in their adequacy to life. Clear, energetic,
prodigal, ebullient, human, these poems are good company.”—Richard
Wilbur
“There is a recurrent humor, always rooted in affection...transfixing
us with strokes of sobre wit. The basic mood is hopeful, lighthearted; poems
end in easings of tension, outward motions of release...[they] partake
of the quality of a saving miracle; we see literal event modulate
effortlessly into myth.”—Marie Boroff
“Spacks is that rara avis: a poet you immediately feel you would
care to know personally: humane, intelligent, and compassionate, with
a wry humor that sometimes operates at his own expense. Spacks reminds us
that we have no grim duty to read poetry; it must entertain and illumine us,
or it does not exist.”—X.J. Kennedy
“Anybody who reads poems for pleasure is liable to be thought
old-fashioned, and so is anyone who takes the skill and care that Barry
Spacks does to make objects of real beauty out of his poems. I think
the time for such readers, and for masterly lyrics like Spacks’s, may
have come round again, as fashions will.”—William Meredith
IBSN 1932339299,
96 pages, $17.00 
Regarding Women
by Barry Spacks is an intimate meditation on its subject: women, relations
between women and men, and their interconnections with the larger world. The
quiet surface of these poems opens up teasing depths that the reader grasps
more fully on each reading.