All the Roaring Tigers

About the Book

About the Author

Donald Barnes writes with the polish and urbanity of his years as a book publisher, yet with the sweetness of a remembered boyhood in a beloved Oklahoma town. The result is a mix of tenderness and hard, surprising ideas. In this volume Barnes’ poetry comes to public attention for the first time. An anonymous earlier work in prose, however, was distributed in 10 million copies by the Armed Services during Barnes’ mostly secret military career. Barnes makes a powerful case in his Preface for reason, thought and meaning in poetry - against the grain of postmodern critical tenets - and then his poems, by example, take the reader through a landscape of ideas, tensions, problems, joys and values in the life of every one of us. Donald Barnes has worked as a gifted lyric poet, under cover and in a double life, while occupied as Princeton graduate fellow, book publisher, bank president, Wall Street COO, director of numerous studies in educational policy, and finally managing director in a venture capital firm. Poetry first always, he says, and other activities just implicative. A resident of both New Hampshire and Florida, and a native and nostalgic Oklahoman, Barnes labels himself a part-time Existentialist, dubious meliorist, and certified Latitudinarian.