Intense and Intimate: A Searing Collection from an Important American Poet
"Memories mercies
mostly aren't
but there were
I swear
days
veined with grace"
One of The New York Times' 10 Favorite Poetry Books of 2014 and a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, Once in the West is Christian Wiman's fourth collection, plumbing the depths of "suffering of primal silence" and achieving the "rockshriek of joy." Readers will recognize Wiman's sharp characterizations, humor, and reverent rage, 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."
Wiman's multifaceted poems are at once spiritual and secular, metaphysical and realistic, provocative and generous. With wry humor and intelligent grief, Once in the West proves why Wiman is considered one of our country's most important contemporary poets.
Intense and Intimate: A Searing Collection from an Important American Poet
"Memories mercies
mostly aren't
but there were
I swear
days
veined with grace"
One of The New York Times' 10 Favorite Poetry Books of 2014 and a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, Once in the West is Christian Wiman's fourth collection, plumbing the depths of "suffering of primal silence" and achieving the "rockshriek of joy." Readers will recognize Wiman's sharp characterizations, humor, and reverent rage, 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."
Wiman's multifaceted poems are at once spiritual and secular, metaphysical and realistic, provocative and generous. With wry humor and intelligent grief, Once in the West proves why Wiman is considered one of our country's most important contemporary poets.
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Overview
Intense and Intimate: A Searing Collection from an Important American Poet
"Memories mercies
mostly aren't
but there were
I swear
days
veined with grace"
One of The New York Times' 10 Favorite Poetry Books of 2014 and a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, Once in the West is Christian Wiman's fourth collection, plumbing the depths of "suffering of primal silence" and achieving the "rockshriek of joy." Readers will recognize Wiman's sharp characterizations, humor, and reverent rage, 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."
Wiman's multifaceted poems are at once spiritual and secular, metaphysical and realistic, provocative and generous. With wry humor and intelligent grief, Once in the West proves why Wiman is considered one of our country's most important contemporary poets.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374713546 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 09/09/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 191 KB |
About the Author
Christian Wiman is the author, editor, or translator of more than a dozen books of poetry and prose, including two memoirs, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer and He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art; Every Riven Thing, winner of the Ambassador Book Award; Once in the West, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; and Survival Is a Style—all published by FSG. He teaches religion and literature at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and at Yale Divinity School.
Read an Excerpt
Once in the West
By Christian Wiman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2014 Christian WimanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-71354-6
CHAPTER 1
SUNGONE NOON
Mad sand
and the sungone noon
stinging me
back to me
my mind fields
my hands shields ...
BACK
Goof the noon
no one knows
back of the house
back of the shed
back of God
with his everair
assurances
and iron
injunctions:
sing a little nonce
curse
for the curse
of consciousness
coming on you
like a rash:
little boy
lifting
little mountains
from the trash
to stare down
the angry
eons
in the oil eyes
of the horny toad.
Goof the noon
gone too soon
like the house
and shed,
like the boy
in whom you sit,
your back
to the back
of the old
commode,
where a few flowers
flower
out of all the years
of shit.
TELL ME
If the courts
are asphalt
and the nets
chain-link;
if it's a herculean
feat
to fuck unseen
at the Sonic;
if a slick
piglet
leaps
from a child's yelp
amid a roar
of beer
and such ugly
incorrigibles
as Clack and Skoot,
Messrs. Butt
and Derryberry
chalk their scores
and hawk
their spit
all afternoon
in the laughteryawn
of the bull-
smelling stalls;
if, as the sky
grains again
and the ground's
in every mouth,
someone homeward
turns
a pick-up
aboil
with birddogs
and someone skyward
syrups
Durn ...
tell me:
can it be
tragedy?
BIG COUNTRY
One answer's
cancer
on a slow boil
in the bones
of a woman
who sleeps
five feet
from the wide-screen
rape-screams
of a woman
her granddaughter,
motherless,
fourteen,
mainlines.
It's Christmas
in Abilene,
baked shanks
and blackeyes
cloying
the double-wide,
kerosene splashing
over an actor
acting terrified
of death.
Enter the pug.
It sniffs
the rinsed
vomit tub,
halfheartedly humps
Uncle Brunson's
un-broken-in
boot, spills in
and out of Ora's
happily distracted
hands, then
quicklicks
awake the raving
raging woman
he was bought
from the mall
to mollify.
Enter the woman
into the woman
raving
raging
at the pug
ogred
over her,
razormusic,
and the smell
of something
burning.
NATIVE
At sixteen,
sixteen miles
from Abilene
(Trent,
to be exact),
hellbent
on being not
this, not that,
I drove
a steamroller
smack-dab over
a fat black snake.
Up surged a cheer
from men
so cheerless
cheers
were grunts, squints,
whisker twitches
it would take
a lunatic acuity
to see.
I saw
the fat black snake
smashed flat
as the asphalt
flattening
under all ten tons
of me,
flat as the landscape
I could see
no end of,
flat as the affect
of distant killing
vigilance
it would take a native
to know was love.
CALCULUS
A soul
extrapolated
from the body's
need
needs a body
of loss:
is that, then,
what we were
given
in that back-
seat, sweat-
soaked, skin-
habited heaven
of days
when rapture
was pure
beginning
and sinning
praise?
ONE
One raised goats;
one raced around barrels
(bareback to teach me);
one liked it most
at midnight
on the pole-vaulting mat
(or did she feign that
to reach me?);
one, muddy-buttocked,
chigger-bit, bit me.
Tank-topped I rode
the rock-n-roll
of my T-topped Trans-Am
down the drag
of that drag town
in which, I'm told,
one raised four children
on her own; one fiended
wine; one roused
her roustabout boyfriend
from her best friend's
bed; and one,
who laughing slapping
leapt up nude as dawn,
her backside
fossiled in the lakeside,
died.
KEYNOTE
I had a dream of Elks,
antlerless but arousable all the same,
before whom I proclaimed the Void
and its paradoxical intoxicating joy,
infinities of fields our very natures
commanded us to cross,
the Sisyphean satisfaction of a landscape
adequate to loss —
and as I spoke inspired
farther and farther afield from my notes
I saw James Wesson whiten
to intact ash
big-boned Joe Sloane shrivelcrippled
tight as tumbleweed
I saw wren-souled Mary Flynn die again
in Buzz's eyes
I saw
I saw
like a huge claw
time tear
through the iron
armory and the baseball fields
the slush-puppy stand
the little pier at Towle Park Pond
until I stood strangered
before the living staring Godfearing men
who knew me when.
RUST
Mamie Thrailkill, 1894–1990
A hammer a father's forever behind
or a Dust Bowl woodpecker high in pines?
Blue purl and milkfeel of a child taking shape,
or child-sized tumor taking over?
She sits in the timestorm time's turned into,
shinedying in her easy chair.
Love is there:
handmade houseshoes and a cairn of yarn;
a Bible thumbed to nearly nothing;
the percolator's way of holding and withholding
every inmost stare and state.
And hate:
purple-kerchiefed, stupid-toothed, a Stuckey's Aunt Jemima
stalls her grin above a red cut of melon;
on the sideboard a lean late husband
hatchets through a half-dozen grainy days.
Shy birdbride, fourteen, all night you hide
under the bed divining sighs, each
iron
squeak.
Sweet Christ! how much itch and last sass
must a middle-aged man with one mean mule
and a patch of pissed-on dirt endure?
Not much, not much.
Is nothing pure?
Is it the soul's treason to think so?
Is it nature's to wink so
on the birdhouse hinges and the chain-links
until the brain breaks
upon a paingleaned God
too meaningful
to mean?
I just went to bed, she said
of her son's sons' deaths just days apart
from slapcheek,
from brain fever,
from the virus
of us.
And art?
When the rocking stops.
A sense of being henceforth always after.
A hungry angry mule crying its dumb ton
of rust.
LESS
Silas,
say less
than silence.
In a dawn
lost to all
but me,
be,
Silas, beyond
the hay bale
harboring
kittens
no one now
has the heart
to kill;
and touching
nothing
touch
my head
so we can be alive
together,
Silas,
as together
we are dead.
MUSIC MAYBE
Too many elegies elevating sadness
to a kind of sad religion:
one wants in the end just once to befriend
one's own loneliness,
to make of the ache of inwardness —
something,
music maybe,
or even just believing in it,
and summer,
and the long room alone
where the child
chances on a bee
banging against the glass
like an attack of happiness.
BLACK DIAMOND
For a couple of winters during my childhood my family went on skiing
trips with another family from the small town where we lived. The youngest
child, Jeff, was a daredevil, and he and I spent our days together and
became close. He was seven or so, I was five or six years older. Several
years later, after I had left town, Jeff climbed to the top of the raftered
coliseum, perhaps to survey the scene below, perhaps to play a joke. In any
event he slipped and fell two hundred feet to his death.
And ever after rafters would speak to me
of falling:
a child's voice calling
How 'bout a bit a birdseed Birdman?
while the chairlift chugs and jolts us up the snow
of New Mexico
so that downward soundward
we might fly.
Seven years old.
When heaven fears its secrets will be told
it tells them to the least and the lost of us:
Headfirst and howling (so they said)
something that will not stop echoing
in my head, he slips
from the topmost most-banned beam of Snyder Coliseum
downward
soundward
to the lightswirled world that even in my heart
is hard.
There are eyes, there are hands
there are lives so otherlit
so freed of the need to mean
that to elegize is obscene.
Trickster, little broken
jokester,
with your contempt for years
and your disdain for gravity
your highwire haywire feats
your pockets packed with sweets
go
Birdboy
go
faster through the snow
faster down the untracked
black
diamond demanding someone
let there be someone
winged enough
to catch you.
PREY
The peeled-grape feel of sun before sun:
undawn:
light like a live thing
creeping out of cracks and nooks:
don't move
don't breathe:
this chill attentiveness all men are meant to love:
tight in the blind
feeling
feeling
go out of my hands:
sighting down the sightlines
be still
be still
until the shadows coalesce
into something I can kill.
BLINK
We were all an oily rabble,
some spiritless unguent oozing out of us
more surely than the shine
on our possum noggins.
We were all a cuddle of lean fleas,
bovine sundumb Sunday zombies
chewing chewing our little cuds of God.
Jesus, even the horizon's woozy,
and the pumpjacks, galactically black,
fucking the earth; space
so supremely empty
you could hear
an extinction's
last, baffled
blink.
WE LIVED
We lived in the long intolerable called God.
We seemed happy.
I don't mean content I mean heroin happy,
donkey dentures,
I mean drycleaned deacons expunging suffering
from Calcutta with the cut of their jaws
I mean the always alto and surely anusless angels
divvying up the deviled eggs and jello salad in the after-rapture
I mean
to be mean.
Dear Lord forgive the love I have
for you and your fervent servants.
I have so long sojourned Lord
among the mild ironies and tolerable gods
that what comes first to mind
when I'm of a mind to witness
is muriatic acid
eating through the veins
of one whose pains were so great
she wanted only out, Lord, out.
She too worshipped you.
She too popped her little pill of soul.
Lord if I implore you please just please leave me alone
is that a prayer that's every instant answered?
I remember one Wednesday witness told of a time
his smack-freaked friends lashed him
to the back of a Brahman bull that bucked and shook
until like great bleeding wings the man's collarbones
exploded out of his skin.
Long pause.
"It was then," the man said, "right then ..."
Yes. And how long before that man-
turned-deacon-turned-scourge-of-sin
began his ruinous and (one would guess) Holy Spirit–less affair?
At what point did this poem abandon
even the pretense of prayer?
Imagine a man alive in the long intolerable time
made of nothing but rut and rot,
a wormward gaze
even to his days' sudden heavens.
There is the suffering existence answers:
it carves from cheeks and choices the faces
we in fact are;
and there is the suffering of primal silence,
which seeps and drifts like a long fog
that when it lifts
leaves nothing
but the same poor sod.
Dear God —
REST HOME
2011
At the rest home
rest is
precarious:
limbs and times
spasm and
for a time
vanish:
then the little up-
ruptures re-
settling
as of dust
deep in the unhappened
avalanche.
Already not yet
noon
and a line
of squeegied
people
rots and totters,
tilts and mutters
outside the dining
hall. Antbites
of irritation
crawl all over
the attendant's
skin:
will she scream
and fling
them off?
Will the earth
open and God
swallow
this debacle
of animal,
these last
crushed-
cricket
twitches
of existence
testifying
less to survival
than simply
to less?
No.
The doors open
as they always
do, the heart
softens
as it often
does,
and into a dim
Because
limp the loved
and the unloved,
some hungry,
some not,
but each
with a place
they know
today, each
of a mind
to stay.
What voice is this cut in the air
as though a wound itself had speech
Give her small hands
Give her dark hair
Give her a wound no word can reach
AFTER
I got a hitch
in my git-along
she says,
having got along
six decades
and change
without a father,
who got along
passably well
with his irascible will
and rotgut quiet
until,
one night in '52,
while her face
flashed in her knife
and the boys
groaned at okra,
he shot his wife
and himself
too.
I got a hitch,
she says,
who said
nary a word
nearly a year
clenching
like a withered
scripture
a napkin
nearly skin
by the time
they coaxed
her open,
in my git-along,
a little wrong
to right the rift
running
right through
the grain
of things,
like the rat
an undrugged
undressed
husband
whacks at
laughdamning
God, like
the little kiss
and gift
a son
bestows
instead of
himself,
like the kitchen
wall clock
that's ever after
all clocks
saying only
after
after
after:
I got a hitch
in my git-along —
a cactus song
for the twin
infants
unscrunching
out of sleep
to wonder
and coo
at Grandma,
kaleidoscopically
clothed
and grinning
to beat all
git-out,
who lifts
with her hitch
and draws
from her drawl
an almost English
ting:
Here's something!
Once I sat
at the zoo
when your daddy
was just
a little tick
of a thing
like you
and sad
so sad I was
and do you know
what the good Lord
saw fit to give?
Boo!
A pigeon
pooped
upon my head.
SUNDAY SCHOOL
A city of loss lit in me.
Childhood: all the good
Godcoddled children
chiming past
the valley of the shadow:
old pews, old views
of the cotton fields
north, south,
east, west,
foreverness
sifting down like dust
when —
stabdazzling darkness,
icequiet:
towers of glare,
blacksleek streets,
everywhere an iron
eloquence
and a sense
of high finish
hived with space
like a face
honed
by a loneliness
it never came
to know.
I came to know it.
MEMORY'S MERCIES
Memory's mercies
mostly aren't
but there were
I swear
days
veined with grace
like a lucky
rock
ripping
electrically over
whatever water
there was —
ten skips
twenty
in the telling:
all the day's aches
eclipsed
and a late sun
belling
even sleeping Leroy
back
into his body
to smile
at some spirit-lit
tank-rock
skimming the real
so belongingly
no longing
clung to it
when it plunged
bright as a firefly
into nowhere,
I swear.
EVEN THE DEMON
It takes a real cow
to bite beyond
the prickly pear's
sharp spokes.
It takes a brain
of stone
or canny man
to coax
from thorn and husk
sustaining fruit.
It takes hunger,
it takes thirst
to taste
all the tender
interiors
of hell —
upon which,
it is said,
even the Demon
chokes.
WINTERLUDE
Painlady leaning into pain as every day she does:
this time it's mine, this time my spine's
rivering new forms of formlessness:
lava crawling creaturely through my jaw,
one shoulder shot through with shineless light
only the unliving could see by.
Where am I?
What happened to time (to mind)
that I should turn from the safe dangers of memory
to this burn of unbeing,
this mad metastasis of Now?
Painlady lay upon my tongue the morphine moon,
let your opiate hope
bloom once more in my brain
that I might be blessedly less
alive —
not howling homeward like that hound
(I hear him now)
hellfired tongue to gut
by some country Satan
who'd seasoned meat
with shattered glass.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Once in the West by Christian Wiman. Copyright © 2014 Christian Wiman. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Prayer,
ONE: SUNGONE NOON,
TWO: MY STOP IS GRAND,
THREE: MORE LIKE THE STARS,
Notes,
Acknowledgments,
Also by Christian Wiman,
Copyright,