Barbed Wire

“Ode to Barbed Wire” sent me straight to Ron Rash’s collection, Raising the Dead.  A lovely, haunting collection.  Neruda is making more of a political commentary with his barbed wire than Rash, who seems to me to be writing about the pervasiveness and the bite of memory, the mark we make on the land.  The voice of the land speaks in both poems, though.