Once in the West
Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
One of The New York Times' 10 Favorite Poetry Books of 2014
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
A searing new collection from one of our country's most important poets
Memories mercies
mostly aren't
but there were
I swear
days
veined with grace
—from "Memory's Mercies"
Once in the West, Christian Wiman's fourth collection, is as intense and intimate as poetry gets—from the "suffering of primal silence" that it plumbs to the "rockshriek of joy" that it achieves and enables. Readers of Wiman's earlier books will recognize the sharp characterizations and humor—"From her I learned the earthworm's exemplary open-mindedness, / its engine of discriminate shit"—as well as his particular brand of reverent rage: "Lord if I implore you please just please leave me alone / is that a prayer that's every instant answered?" But there is something new here, too: moving love poems to his wife, tender glimpses of his children, and, amid the onslaughts of illness and fear and failures, "a trace / of peace."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The first half or so of this harsh and sometimes masterful fourth outing from poet, memoirist, and editor Wiman (Every Riven Thing) might represent the best verse he has yet penned. Wiman's short lines and sometimes dense rhymes look back at his West Texas youth, at "that back-// seat, sweat-/ soaked, skin-// habited Heaven," at the "cactus song" of a high-spirited grandma, at "my hard horizonless country/ whose one road releases me like heat as I walk on." A former editor of Poetry magazine, Wiman's wide reading there perhaps helped him develop his serious, careful, and widely admired technique. He now teaches at Yale Divinity School; as the volume progresses the poems' themes gravitate toward questions of Christian faith. "I tried to cry out in the old way/ of thanksgiving, ritual lamentation, rockshriek of joy./ There was no answer. Had there ever been?" His search for religious answers twines itself tautly with reflections on his own illness, homages to poets of the past, and exemplary self-scrutiny. If these poems of anger and devotion find few immediate admirers, they are nonetheless part of a serious poet's lifelong thought about life and death, about body and soul, about memory and family, about this world and what is beyond.
