Survival Is a Style

January 1, 2020

Wiman (The Long Home) is doubly famous in the little world of poetry, first as the editor of Poetry from 2003 to 2013 and then as a writer living in the thrall of an unpredictable and incurable form of cancer. Wiman is also an avowed although unconventional Christian, and his writing, in this, his first collection in six years, inevitably reflects all these characteristics and travails. "Another morning of mist./ How many do I have left?" he exclaims, and elsewhere he calls himself "one for whom God is not entirely gone." The world's spiritual deficits, and Wiman's own dire danger of early death, articulately addressed in the extended poem, "Parable of Perfect Silence," lend urgency to his natural skill and help to shape this collection as an immense step forward for Wiman and an important contribution to the current literary landscape. VERDICT Essential for Wiman's readers, this new collection will also speak to any poet or reader alienated by the hard cynicism of much contemporary verse.--Graham Christian, formerly with Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA

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Starred review from January 20, 2020
The fifth collection by Wiman (Once in the West) rings with hard-wrung truths. “Church or sermon, prayer or poem:/ The failure of religious feeling is a form,” he posits; “I need a space for unbelief to breathe,/ I need a form for failure, since it is what I have.” These poems, which vary widely in their forms, are held together by the poet’s sensibility, each word sparking joy in its sound and texture: “amid the sudden silica of the market stalls,/ the whirlwinded bones and the misted viscera: dates,” and “moon rover roving over// the moon of me.” Vivid portraits in verse (“You knew no hunger till you’d tasted his./ Every adamant, even the utmost bone/ of lean and gristled misery, split its richness”) appear alongside poems of theological inquiry: “There is an under, always,/ through which things still move, breathe,/ and have their being.” The brilliant long poem at the book’s center, “The Parable of Perfect Silence,” is part memoir, part ars poetica. Yet the poet steadfastly demurs: “I want to hum just a little with my own emptiness/ at 4 a.m. To have little bells above my door./ To have a door.” Wrestling with the self, skepticism, and faith, this collection is a radiant addition to Wiman’s oeuvre.