Survival Is a Style: Poems

by Christian Wiman

Overview

Named as a 2020 Book of the Year by The Times Literary Supplement

Survival Is a Style, Christian Wiman’s first collection of new poems in six years, may be his best book yet.

His many readers will recognize the musical and formal variety, the voice that can be tender and funny, credibly mystical and savagely skeptical. But there are many new notes in this collection as well, including a moving elegy to the poet’s father, sharp observations and distillations of modern American life, and rangy poems that merge and juxtapose different modes of speech and thought. The cumulative effect is extraordinary.

Reading Survival Is a Style, one has the sense one is encountering work that will become a permanent part of American literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374539337
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	02/16/2021
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	306,701
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Christian Wiman is the author of several books, including the memoirs My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (FSG, 2013) and He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art (FSG, 2018); the collection Every Riven Thing (FSG, 2010), winner of the Ambassador Book Award in poetry; Once in the West (FSG, 2014), a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in poetry; and Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam. He teaches religion and literature at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School.

Table of Contents

I.
Survival is Style
To Eat the Awful While you Starve the Awe
Drive, 1982
Summer River Rosie Dam
Eating Grapes Downward
Whatever the Birds Were
Fragment of A Lost Scripture
Spirits
All My Friends Are Finding New Beliefs
One Love
1. Sundays at Smilow
2. A Dusk
3. All You Shining Stars
Baloney
Land’s End
Doing Lines at the Cocktail Party
Good Lord the Light
Poem Ending with A Sentence from Jacques Maritain
I Don’t Want to be A Spice Store

II.
Watermelon Heaven
A McDonald’s in Middle America
The Sound
Two Drinking Songs
1. Up with a Twist
2. Neat
Ten Distillations
A Heresy
Assembly
And Someone Wrote it Down
The Priest at the Pool Party
A Sketch
Death Will Have to be Careful Here
How Fun When Young
Something of the Sky
Mild Dry Lines: An Exchange
Ah, Ego

III.
The Parable of Perfect Silence
IV.
Fifty
Even Bees Know What Zero Is
Faculty Meeting, Divinity School
Raccoon Problem
“Meaning is not Man’s Gift to Reality”
“We Pray God to be Free of God”
Maundersong
Dancing with the Ding An Sich
A Light Store in the Bowery
Flight
Never Heaven
After a Lecture with My Love
Joy
Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"Wiman’s greatest asset is his taste for simplicity . . . But these simple melodies are not without deep resonance and even occasional dissonance, as themes of spiritual doubt and physical illness recur throughout the book’s four sections . . . So thoroughly charmed was I that I failed to notice I had boarded the wrong train, hopping off just before it tore out of Manhattan—though I would have indeed welcomed a moment more in Wiman’s musical company." —Elinor Hitt, The Paris Review

"In this new collection, his poetry takes us, once more, on a metaphysical trip through the essential ‘aloneness’ of Being and its endless manifestations. Wiman’s art is concerned with holding mirrors up to our (seemingly) godless existence, searching for hidden divinity in everyday reflections . . . there is great virtuosity and variance of subject to be found within — but above all it is a struggle, a struggle for faith, for understanding, and for acceptance." —Ryan Asmussen, Chicago Review of Books

"This slim book of poems reads as if it were the husk of a magnificent novel. This is partly the effect of Wiman’s style, which has deepened—allowing for some of the lighter touches that admirers of his memoirs will recognize . . . Wiman accomplishes a single narrative arc through the idiosyncrasies of a poetry that will always honor the word over the message. That word is mortal, its survival a style." —Arthur Willemse, World Literature Today

"[Survival Is a Style] rings with hard-wrung truths . . . 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 . . . Wrestling with the self, skepticism, and faith, this collection is a radiant addition to Wiman’s oeuvre." —Publishers Weekly

"The collection’s title yokes Wiman’s directness and aloofness together; the phrase is declarative and whimsical, hard-won and smirk-worthy, provocative and requires a double-take . . . Perhaps the tricks of metaphor such as irony and smoke of artifice have no place in the poetic scene Wiman establishes. He wants a starker sense of verse which makes the description of the clothing all the more ridiculous. Bared humanity we all recognize will survive." —Spencer Reece, The Kenyon Review

"Wiman, for all his spiritual wrangling, is a poet of things, and Survival Is a Style contains some sonically sparkling poems whose raucous music defies too much quiet contemplation." —Declan Ryan, Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher

01/01/2020

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

Library Journal