Christian Wiman’s “Every Riven Thing: Poems”

I have a habit of writing down titles of books I might be interested in reading on yellow Post-It notes, and letting them accumulate until either I toss them all or transfer them to a single page. If they make the single page, I’m likely to buy them at some point.

In 2011, I scribbled Every Riven Thing on a Post-It note. I didn’t write the author’s name, but it sounded like a book of poems, or possibly a book by Stephen King. I looked to up on Amazon, and sure enough, it was a poetry collection; the poet’s name was Christian Wiman. It was written on the same Post-It note as a poetry book by Luci Shaw, which suggested there might be some connection. Or not – it couldn’t have been I ran out of Post-It notes and was conserving space.

I recognized the name. Wiman is the editor of Poetry Magazine. That is, until June 30, 2013, when he steps down to join the faculty of the Yale Divinity School.

I did order it, and then read it during the Christmas holidays just past. I didn’t know anything about Wiman other than he was editor at Poetry Magazine (and how I was often surprised to see some various obvious Christian poems make it into the magazine). But I found the poems haunting, sometimes riveting. They clearly spoke to an experience of serious personal illness, and a difficult spiritual journey. And they spoke of grace, and faith, and even hope. I made a note (another yellow Post-It) that said “find out more about Wiman.”

Within just a few days, the January/February issue of Christianity Today arrived, and as I’m thumbing through it I find a major interview with Wiman. Many of my questions were answered. I was so moved by the interview that I went back and read Every Riven Thing again. And knowing didn’t change understanding, but it surely enhanced it.

The second reading evoked the sense of a deep, deep silence. Not an emptiness, but a silence, a silence enclosed within a sharp wind, sand and

The interview was less about Wiman’s poems and more about his new book of essay, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. The day he turned 39, married less than a year, he was diagnosed with a cancer of the blood. One that’s incurable. According to the article, the essays came after the diagnosis.

I haven’t read the essays, but I suspect that, much like the poem of Every Riven Thing and what he talks about in the interview, they will be the story of a man who lived Psalm 23, and walked in the valley of the shadow of death. “Illness,” he says in the interview, “has brought a great urgency to my work. One speaks differently when standing on a cliff.” Yes, I will read the essays.

In the meantime, I will read the poems. Again.

Here’s the title poem, “Every Riven Thing:”

God goes, belonging to every riven thing he’s made

sing his being simply by being

the thing it is:

stone and tree and sky,

man who sees and sings and wonders why

God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he’s made,

means a storm of peace.

Think of atoms inside the stone.

Think of the man who sits alone

trying to will himself into a stillness where

God goes belonging. To every riven thing he’s made

there is given one shade

shaped exactly to the thing itself:

under the tree a darker tree;

under the man the only man to see

God goes belonging to every riven thing. He’s made

the things that bring him near,

made the mind that makes him go.

A part of what man knows

apart from what man knows,

God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made.