Review by New York Times Review
WITH ALL THE STONINGS, smitings, beheadings and bear maulings in the Bible, it is easy to miss the rather staid death of Eutychus. As recounted in the Book of Acts, the young man nods off during a long sermon by St. Paul, and falls three stories from a window in Troas. In a reprieve for dozing parishioners everywhere, Paul resurrects him. Poor Eutychus comes and goes in only a few verses, but I thought of him while reading the poet Christian Wiman's curious new book, "He Held Radical Light" - not because it's in danger of putting anyone to sleep, but because, like Acts, it's an episodic account of equally strange encounters, in this case, with apostles of verse. A. R. Ammons shows up for a reading in Virginia but refuses to read, telling his audience, "You can't possibly be enjoying this"; Seamus Heaney winks before stepping into a cab in Chicago; Donald Hall orders a burger for lunch, then confides to Wiman, who was then 38: "I was 38 when I realized not a word I wrote was going to last"; Mary Oliver picks up a dead pigeon from the sidewalk, tucks the bloody carcass into her pocket and keeps it there through an event and after-party. Wiman had met a few poets by the time he finished college at Washington and Lee and completed a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, but he really started to collect them at Poetry magazine, where he was editor for 10 years. The most straightforward version of those years would be a literary tell-all, along the lines of the former New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb's "Avid Reader." But "He Held Radical Light" is something else: a collection of private memories, literary criticism and theology, plus an eccentric anthology of poems Wiman holds dear, all drawn into an argument about art and faith. When he finds Mary Oliver in her hotel lobby, she's reading "The Faerie Queene." "I want to spend what time I have left with masterpieces," she says, and the sentiment seems to have been contagious. The poems Wiman has chosen are almost all gorgeous, and he explicates them gorgeously. He doesn't bother with the obligatory details of biography; we learn about the poets evocatively, from whatever odd angle they crossed his path. Nor is his own life much on display. Readers who want to know about his teaching career, spiritual practices or his near death from cancer will need to look elsewhere, including in his tremendous memoir, "My Bright Abyss." In that book, as in his own poetry, Wiman is fixated on what he calls here "those moments of mysterious intrusion, that feeling of collusion with eternity." Such intrusions are real for Wiman and for many readers of poetry, though his attempt to marshal them in service of a grander theory about the inherent holiness of art will probably not persuade anyone who is not already devout or devoted to poetry. His strengths aren't as a theologian but as a critic, and he is expert at identifying the exact image or lines where a poet has wrestled eternity onto the page. It's hard to sustain a series of "moments" like that for very long, but Wiman's gratitude for them, and humility before them, makes this brief book strangely powerful. He marvels at the divine radiance pouring "into every / nook and cranny not overhung or hidden" in Ammons's "The City Limits," and lapses into the language of an excited teenager when pointing out that Philip Larkin's "Aubade" can give readers "serious ice in their spines." He admires how his friend Craig Arnold makes eating a grapefruit - "a little basketball / for breakfast" - a meditation on more existential appetites. He notices when Denise Levertov turns "the cure of souls" into "A Cure of Souls," an article substitution that transforms the priestly office into "one of those oddities of biological nomenclature like a shrewdness of apes or a crash of rhinos." These are achievements of attention, and by gathering so many of them here Wiman trains us to look for them elsewhere. If it were only those close readings, "He Held Radical Light" would be a textbook; instead, the real joy is how beautifully it melds intellectual labor with humane fellowship, refusing to forget the flesh that made the words. Even the most transcendent art arrives via the transient vessels known as artists, and Wiman knows how to bring both to life on the page. CASEY N. CEP'S first book, "Furious Hours: Harper Lee and an Unfinished Story of Race, Religion, and Murder in the Deep South," will be published next year.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
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 © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 Transtrmer. This moving book explores not only those torments, but also the understanding that art can provide. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
