The Earth Avails: Poems

by Mark Wunderlich

Overview

The anticipated new book by Mark Wunderlich, whose poetry "reminds us how fully the spirit can illuminate the depths" (The New Yorker)

A Publishers Weekly Book of the Week

With your sorghum broom you sweetened my path, pulled the woolen shawl around me while I slept.

That the lightning struck the willow and did not fall—for this I am grateful.

—from "Heaven-Letter"

The Earth Avails evokes an all-but-lost history, when every setting, thought, and action was imbued with ritual: here's the prayer said in a time of sickness; here's the blessing spoken upon entering the house; here's the letter from heaven that protects its holder from harm and misfortune. Rendered in part from folkloric and historical sources, Mark Wunderlich's poems reinvent these traditions with lyrical and emotive force for a new century of readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555976668
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	02/04/2014
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Mark Wunderlich is the author of The Anchorage, which won the 1999 Lambda Literary Award. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College in New York and lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Once I Walked Out 3

Heaven-Letter 4

Coyote, with Mange 6

Waumandee 7

Dwell in My House 8

Stone Arabia 10

Driftless Elegy 12

A Servant's Prayer 17

Prayer for a Journey by Sea 20

Sand Shark 22

Cat Lying in the Grass 24

Prayer for Sunshine during a Time of Rain 25

Ram 28

Prayer in a Time of Drought 30

Palatine Bridge 32

Opening the Hive 34

Prayer for the Fruits of the Field 36

Raccoon in a Trap 38

Prayer during a Storm 39

Wild Boar 41

Heaven-Letter 43

The Corn Baby 45

A Husband's Prayer 46

Winter Study 48

Feral 50

Fire, Abate Thy Flames 51

Fire-Letter 52

Prayer for a Birthday 54

January Thaw 57

Lent 59

White Fur 62

Prayer in a Time of Sickness 63

Editorial Reviews

★ 10/28/2013
“My day will be spent here, in the middle of things,/ feeding split logs into the stove,” declares Wunderlich, or one of his thoughtful surrogates, midway through this ambitiously unified, quietly wise, and insistently rural third collection, where the sadder-but-wiser midpoints of adult lives, the agricultural middle of the United States, and the very center of the literary tradition called georgic (poems of advice for farmers) find unlikely springboards and inspirations in 19th-century German-American prayers. One series (“Prayer for the Fruits of the Field,” “A Servant’s Prayer”) began as free adaptations from a prayer book designed for Midwestern immigrants. Humility, practicality, self-chastisement and hope emerge, in unrhymed couplets, musical paragraphs, and stately free verse, through language at once restrained and humane. “So far I have warded off the worst of things,” begins “Prayer in a Time of Sickness,” though some of his wilder animals—“the albino deer was found drowned in a slough”—are not even as lucky as that. Perhaps the strongest standalone poem, “Driftless Elegy,” considers the poet’s own childlessness and the decline of his western Wisconsin home town. Wunderlich (Voluntary Servitude) became known for warm, urbane poems, often of same-sex eros. Here he switches his stylistic allegiance to plainspokenness, to the speech of the hills and plains, striking a hard-to-match tone of gentle humility, expanding his poetic powers. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Humility, practicality, self-chastisement and hope emerge, in unrhymed couplets, musical paragraphs, and stately free verse, through language at once restrained and humane. . . . Wunderlich became known for warm, urbane poems, often of same-sex eros. Here he switches his stylistic allegiance to plainspokenness, to the speech of the hills and plains, striking a hard-to-match tone of gentle humility, expanding his poetic powers.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“In Mark Wunderlich's terrific third collection,The Earth Avails, the earth is replete with creatures—coyote, bees, 'rat snake coiled in the cellar beams'—and the speaker moves through the world, mindful and voicing apotropaic letters, charms, and prayers. In poems sharpened by luminous details, the outer and inner worlds converge so that an albino buck leaping away becomes 'a white tooth / in the closing mouth of the woods,' and we experience the visible world and 'the imagined world made visible.'” —Arthur Sze

From the Publisher