He Held Radical Light

June 15, 2018

A sense of our own limitations and the struggle to accept them is at the heart of this beautiful, brief book, written in the face of former Poetry editor and honored poet/essayist Wiman's own struggles with a rare form of cancer. Weaving an informal memoir of poets and poems and the search for something more than limitations and acceptance, Wiman has wonderful stories to tell, having been at the center of the poetry world for the last quarter century. He gives us glimpses of A.R. Ammons, Mary Oliver, Seamus Heaney, Donald Hall, and a few less well-known poets. The chapters feel almost like prayerful contemplation, more than crafted essays. Each contains a poem by Wiman or one of the poets discussed. The author's thoughts on the poems are valuable, but even more fruitful are his memories of the poets. He shares these stories with grace and humility and leaves readers with a breathless sense of the revelatory. VERDICT A worthy companion to Wiman's wonderful My Bright Abyss, this belongs in libraries everywhere.--Herman Sutter, St. Agnes Acad., Houston

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June 15, 2018
The link between art and faith, as seen by a noted poet.When Wiman (Religion and Literature/Yale Univ.; Once in the West, 2014, etc.), a former editor of Poetry magazine, was 38, he had lunch with poet Donald Hall. During the meal, Hall "turned his Camel-blasted eighty-year-old Yeti decrepitude to me" and made a startling admission. "I was thirty-eight when I realized not a word I wrote was going to last," Hall said. That's a shocking thing for any young writer to hear, but Hall's statement would take on greater resonance when, a few years later, Wiman received a cancer diagnosis. In this memoir, the author considers the question, "What is it we want when we can't stop wanting?" For Wiman, one answer is faith, but as he puts it, spiritual hunger is like poetry in that it "thrives on longings that can never be fulfilled, and dies when the poet thinks they have been." Throughout this volume, the author explores the relationship between poetry and faith and the lessons each has taught him. He references many poems, most notably Philip Larkin's "Aubade," in which Larkin laments "Unresting death, a whole day nearer now" and "The good not done, the love not given, time / Torn off unused." Wiman also writes of the poets he has known, among them A.R. Ammons, who, during a reading when Wiman was an undergraduate, said to the crowd, "You can't possibly be enjoying this," and sat down; and Mary Oliver, who, after Wiman picked her up for Chicago's annual Poetry Day, examined with wonder a dead half-pigeon they found on the ground, stuffed it into her jacket, and gave her reading with the half-pigeon still in her pocket."It is hard learning to live 'one hour higher than the torments, ' " Wiman writes, quoting Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer. This moving book explores not only those torments, but also the understanding that art can provide.

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Starred review from July 9, 2018
Wiman (My Bright Abyss), a poet and professor of religion and literature at Yale, weaves together philosophy and lush prose in an elliptical memoir about his long flirtation with the belief that he could gain immortality by writing a perfect poem. He explains this drive for the ideal through delicately theological questions, including: is God the goal of all artistic hunger? And “what does one want when one cannot stop wanting?” By pulling together close readings of poems (including a striking dissection of Philip Larkin’s “Aubade”) and a vast reservoir of personal anecdotes, Wiman approaches (but never quite reaches) his answers. The stories largely come from his tenure as editor of Poetry magazine, where encountering poets in person deeply affected him. “It’s like being famous in your family,” Mark Strand told him about being considered a famous poet. He reconsiders Mary Oliver’s relationship to nature after she tells him that, out of respect, she carried a found dead bird in her pocket. Hearing Seamus Heaney read provided a singular experience of grace for Wiman: “I knew so much of his work not simply by heart, but by bone and nerve.” Readers who allow themselves to be swept along by Wiman’s beautiful style and oblique considerations will come away with fresh strategies for unpacking faith in the contemporary world.