David Barnes
Poets are liars who tell the truth

US Trade, 128pp, €15, May 2023
ISBN 979-10-90394-64-3
The cover painting is by Iana Sophia.

David Barnes has been reading his poems aloud in Paris since 2003. This book contains the best of them, road–tested at the weekly open mic and writers’ community he fathered, Spoken Word Paris.

James Baldwin’s Paris comes to mind, the foreigner’s fascination and frustration. There’s an endearing vulnerability too, frank and unpretentious. Craig Martin Getz

With his blend of philosophy, imagery and acute observation, David Barnes conjures an eclectic series of worlds for his readers to inhabit. Sue Burge

What is most evident in David Barnes’s mode of writing is his carnival about everything that lives, breathes and dies, or never does, houses and cities, people… a fête in the company of all that is, whereby each poem discovers itself to better express its bold narrative. Rethabile Masilo