leaving new jersey
This collection of 56 prose poems recounts the story of leaving America, where I was born, and of arriving in Australia, where I didn’t plan to stay. It’s a tale of unsettling and resettling, of leaving as an ongoing process. The mode of telling is episodic. Each micro-scene is a snapshot of time and place—spanning decades and moments, continents and conversations, wars, dreams and kitchen tables—to capture the psychological and spatial tensions between ‘here’ and ‘there’. Leaving New Jersey is a lyrical re-experiencing of putting down roots and tearing them up, a poetic account of my quest for home.
Reviews
‘Barbara Kamler's Leaving New Jersey is a captivating collection of prose poems. These lyrical, deeply moving poems work like sepia-tone postcards where family scenes are honed back to overheard talk, glimpsed expressions, streets and living rooms. The poems invite us, quietly, into the wistfulness and uncertainty that shadows moving from one country to another. Most importantly, the poems reveal a hard-won emotional depth and focus that is at the heart of these indelible, minimalist narratives.’
Anthony Lawrence
‘This story is full of pain and beauty. Readers with experiences of loss, separation, and the awful dilemmas of parenting will treasure it for its precise honesty. These are the sorts of experiences it is difficult to write about, and it is even more difficult to bring to such stories the shaping sensibility of a poet. Barbara Kamler's book is a triumph of honesty and artfulness.’
Kevin Brophy
I inhaled your book in one big push and enjoyed it thoroughly. Particularly taken with the clipped, telegraphic style. Not poems so much as highly distilled chapters of a long novel reduced to a sequence of punches—and very punchy punches at that.
Paul Auster
From the Launch by Alex Skovron, Melbourne 2016
…Leaving New Jersey is a story of many moods: the poems are by turns reflective, restless, poignant, dreamlike, pensive, surreal, matter-of-fact, despondent, hilarious, ironic. The mood of the events in each poem is mirrored in the tone of the writing, so to travel through Barbara’s life with these vignettes as a vehicle can be something of a kaleidoscopic roller-coaster ride.
…Home is the leitmotif of the book: the need for a home, and sometimes the need to leave behind a home. The theme is counterpointed in the epigraphs that have been chosen throughout. The one by James Agee from A Death in the Family, introducing the section titled ‘Leaving,’ tells us: ‘How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves.’
With Barbara it is a case of having had to come away from herself before she could truly find herself again; and as a by-product of the process, rekindle and consolidate her Jewish identity. Her geographical journey transports her – and us, her readers – from her family home in New Jersey, to country New South Wales, and finally to Melbourne, with each stage also punctuated with return visits to the US. But of course, it’s the inner, psychic journey which is at the real heart of this adventure. The centre of gravity keeps shifting, and there is the constant tension between the centripetal and centrifugal – a tension which is disconcerting and frequently painful for the narrator; while for the reader, involved in Barbara’s unfolding story, navigating the frequent changes of scene, place and time, of mood and situation – the kaleidoscopic ride I’ve referred to – there is both an acceleration and a sharpening of the reading experience. So by the time we reach the end of the story, we are equipped to appreciate the author’s reminder in her Epilogue: ‘Leaving is never just now. Place is never just here.’
Leaving New Jersey is a book rich in its insights, generous in its honesty and trust, and (importantly) a most engaging read.