English majors tell an urban legend about the doctoral
candidate who explicated the word “soil” in Moby Dick for his thesis, and killed himself when a new edition corrected the typo to “sail.” If the cover to Every Riven Thing turns out to have been designed without reference
to poet or his text, well, I hope that I never find out. Meanwhile, I love the
idea that the cover is a sort of Rosetta Stone for Wiman’s approach to both
poetry and faith.
Not that Wiman needs translating: the first ten poems in the
collection speak directly to the reader of Texas landscapes, neighbors, a dog,
a diner, the subway. They rhyme in
unexpected places, play on double-meanings, build on repetition without being
repetitive. Like hors d’oeuvres at a
banquet, each has flavor and texture worth savoring, and goes down easily.
Then come three poems in a row that were hard to
swallow. “This Mind of Dying” tripped me
up with a grammatically ambiguous word in its opening lines:
God let me give you now this mind
of dying
fevering me back
into consciousness of all I lack…(26)
How can “fever” be a transitive verb, and what subject “fevers”
the persona back: God, or the surrender of “this mind of dying?” A few lines later, the persona prays, “My God
my grief forgive my grief….” Is “God”
the subject being asked asked to forgive grief?
Is grief an appositive, telling us that My God= my grief? Or is “My God” an interjection? OMG:
All three meanings make sense!
Certainly the poet strikes home with the idea, rhymed, that “language”
can tame fear and transform “anguish.”
Next in the collection come poems paired under the title “One
Time” (27 ff), about two times: dusk at “Canyon
de Chelly, Arizona” and dawn at “2047 Grace Street.” At the canyon, the persona sees ambiguous
visions “under / dusk’s upflooding shadows” that may be footpaths or fissures, “ancient
homes” or “random erosions.” With
absence of light pictured as a flood, the poet makes a positive of a
negative.
To play with opposite meanings is a key to his work, I
think, reflected in two title pages and the cover: all three give us the title in calligraphy,
one white on black, one black on white, and one black on textured gray. “To believe,” he writes in “Canyon” is to
believe you have been torn/ from the abyss, yet stand waveringly on its rim.”
The next poem begins “But,” as if to refute the poem about the
canyon. He says the “world” is often “refuge”
from “sharp particulate instants” of God’s intrusion into our world. “I say God and mean more,” he writes, “than
the bright abyss that opens in that word,” and “world” is “less than the
abstract oblivion of atoms” we know from science. Lying in bed, listening to the breathing of
the woman he loves, he gives “praise to the light that is not / yet, the dawn
in which one bird believes…” (30).
Dusk v. dawn, “more” v. “less,” not the abyss but its edge, not dawn but a
song begun in darkness, and only so much “clarity” as allowed by “artifice of
words” and “distance as …eyes impose”: Ambiguity
of grammar and opposites in imagery also seem, with Wiman, to be an analogy
for how God is to be perceived. I’m
reminded of John Donne’s use of paradox to express his sense of God’s action in
his life.
I look forward to reading more.
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