Jim Barnes's familiarity with the European poetic traditions has been
deepened through long periods spent in France, Germany, and Italy, and
through his translations of European poetry. In Visiting Picasso he
repays Europe for its gifts to him in a series of poems that evoke the
lush poetic history that ties European culture together, sometimes
darkly. A heightened sense of place and purpose infuses the poems of
Visiting Picasso with meaning drawn from actual landscapes, events,
and observations.