Howard Barker’s “Gary Upright” is a preacher, an unusual character in Barker’s oeuvre: the speaker is “the distillation of Barker’s characters who display a Faustian or Mephistophelean energy, from the limited conventional point of view, in affirming the possibilities of ‘a god unnamed’ in every being.” From David Ian Rabey’s Howard Barker: Politics and Desire, on Gary’s message and that of other poems written by Barker in the late 1980s:

Barker’s “Lullabies for the Impatient” continue the theme of the importance of not dividing and pitching the self against the self, but allowing the self to breathe and flourish to maximum effect, and thus swelling to resources forever striving to a state of unstoppability, where personal disease and rational argument are overwhelmed. In the final words of “To the Aberystwyth Students,” this collection of poems concludes on a uniquely but necessarily, defiantly positive note:

That must be the purpose of art
That must be art occurring
Its discomfort is considerable
And yet we return

Gary Upright, the most concentrated, direct, stirring and valuable of Barker’s dramatic poems to date [1988], stands as testimony to the persistent urge towards redefinition and regeneration in the individual self, identified as the kernel hope from which change might radiate. Barker’s writing is explicit evidence of compulsive self-overcoming and persistent imagination, and inevitably many theatrical and critical institutions are fearfully dismissive of the challenges it inherently poses.

But seekers for knowledge, love, or some form of personal truth might learn some things they need to know from Gary Upright’s ceaseless listening, speaking, self-redefinition and persistence in the essential hope and instinct and insistence that the world unlocks:

You have gone home
In a rattle of feet
Receding like a flock of starlings
A rising up of a black sheet
At the hand clap of five o’clock

I admit the probability that nothing entered in
But I refined

Imperceptible redefinitions occurred
Which at a later date may seem significant

The rehearsal was a good one I judge

And I will be here tomorrow assuredly
Oh, assuredly

I trust

But sometimes poets lie, as do literary critics … (Rabey 252-253)