Marsha Barber explores love, life, and grief through her third poetry book “Love You To Pieces”

A crowd of family, friends, and colleagues gathered on Sept 18 at Ryerson University, to celebrate  the launch of Marsha Barber’s third poetry book, “Love You To Pieces”. Her poems embody emotions of love, loss, and heartache by detailing of her personal experiences as a mother, daughter, wife, and a journalist.

Barber, an esteemed documentary producer and broadcast journalist, is a professor at the RSJ. She was a senior producer for the CBC’s flagship newscast: The National, and has specialized in investigative pieces that garnered several awards. Her résumé spans from freelance work across publications such as the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and many more.

But her love for writing allowed her to delve into more than just journalistic stories: it brought her to poetry. Barber has previously written two poetry books, “What is the Sound of Someone Unravelling,” published in 2011, and “All the Lovely Broken People,” released in 2015.

“I love words … Because of my journalistic work I think it's sharpened my awareness of the importance of words. My goal is to... communicate as clearly as possible. I think that comes from my background as a journalist,” she said.

“Love You To Pieces” is filled with poems that are deeply personal to Barber and that deal with social issues in the wider world. She said that some poems are based on headlines or places where she has spent time as a journalist.

Barber said she loves using poetry as a form of storytelling, and believes that poetry can search for truth in the same way journalism can.

For example, the poem, “Cambodian Host,” portrays her experience while in Cambodia training broadcast journalists. Her poem details the tension between her and a senior member of the Pol Pot regime at the time. She described how although she was having tea with him in his nice garden, she was well aware that he had possibly been responsible for some of the murderous and terrible atrocities which happened under the communist Pol Pot regime.

Barber also shared intimate feelings in the form of poems about her husband, whom she has watched experience a series of heart attacks. Others poems deal with parent and child relationships, including her own experience with parenthood.

Her nephew’s wife who attended the book launch, Jessica Pinto, said she’d connected to a poem about Barber’s father.

“Her poems about her father, and bidding him farewell, [reminds me of] my experience with my father as well. The experience of having a small hand in his big hand and watching him cry… that experience of seeing weakness in a parent is universal to us all,” said Pinto. “How you see and feel about each other in that relationship changes and I think that's a universal experience.”

Marsha Barber reads aloud the poem, “A Father Shouldn’t Cry”, at the book launch of her third poetry novel, “Love You To Pieces” on Sept. 18 at Ryerson University. (RSJ/Sophie Chong)

Barber says her goal is to connect with her audience, and writing about personal experiences lends her readers the authenticity that allows a communication of feelings people can relate to.

“I think poems have to be honest, and if that means they're personal, so be it. We all have shared experiences and if somebody reading one of my poems feels less alone as a result, that would make me very happy.”

The poem “My Husband Drowns the Rat” from her book was shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize, and on the winners list for the FreeFall Poetry Contest for 2017.

“I've written since I could first hold a pen, and I plan to write for the rest of my life,'' she said.

Here’s a poem from Marsha Barber’s book,  “Love You To Pieces”:

Your Defibrillator

It’s tidy and compact,
just below your collarbone
under your pink skin,
outlined like a box
of cigarettes
in a shirt pocket.

When you lie on me
I feel the metal imprint, hard
upon my flesh.

If your heart fibrillates,
palpitates like a lost bird,
the machine delivers
an electric shock.

You tell me the jolt feels as if a horse
kicked you in the chest.

And so that night
as you roll against me
I dream of Pegasus,
bringer of lightning from Olympus.

And when I tell you, as we stir at dawn, you say:
That bodes well for me,
don’t you think?
And I nod and trace the tiny coffin-shaped box
beneath your skin
with my thumb.