I’ve been reading a biography of the poetPaul Celan(1920-1970). I must confess my ignorance; I’d never read his poetry before. And I thought, for what turned out to be an explainable reason, that he was French. I was close – he lived in France for about the last 20 years of his life.
It was the biography, published this year by Anna Arno (and translated from the Polish,) that lead me to his poetry, which has been collected into two, rather large, volumes. Memory Rose into Thresholdcovers his early poems; Breathturn into Timestead covers the later poems. The two volumes are more than 700 pages each; pat of the reason is that the poems are published in both English and the language Celan wrote poetry in – German.
I hesitated before deciding whether to write about The Dance, the new collection of poetry by Christian Wiman. It wasn’t because I didn’t like; I did, enormously. It was more like the experience of entering the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, or the little chapel in the crypt of St. Bride’s Church in London. You feel the weight of the experience and the inevitable silence, even in a crowded room.
With The Dance, you’ve stepped into a quiet that demands you listen without speaking.
I’ve had this experience before with Wiman’s writing, both his poetry and his memoir, My Bright Abyss. That memoir was so intense that I needed three months to read it, sometimes only a paragraph or a page a day. I was reading it when I took an overseas trip, and I deliberately left it home because I knew it would overshadow everything I was about to see.
My first novel, Dancing Priest, begins at the University of Edinburgh with a conversation between a theology student, Michael Kent, and his roommate and best friend, Tommy McFarland. Michael will earn his theology degree and move to San Francisco. More adventures await in the next four books in the series. But if I was writing that novel today, I’d have to do something different – the University of Edinburgh, after 440 years,is dropping its divinity program.
If you wander around Poet’s Corner in London’s Westminster Abbey, you’ll find an amazing array of tombs and memorial stones – Charles dickens, Geoffrey Chaucer, the World War I poets, Samuel Johnson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rudyard Kipling, Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis, W.H. Auden, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, and so many more. And now joining them with a memorial plaque will be J.R.R. Tolkien.
