Poets and Poems: Christian Wiman and “Once in the West”

Christian Wiman is an essayist, translator, and poet. For ten years (2003-2013), he was the editor of Poetry Magazine. He’s published four collections of poetry; the celebrated My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer; the equally celebrated Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet; and a translation of Osip Mandelstom’s poetry, Stolen Air. And with Dona Share, he co-edited the Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine.

 

His most recent collection of poems, Once in the West, is one of the five finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, the winner of which will be announced March 12.

Wiman grew up in West Texas, and the poems of Once in the West find their source in the upbringing and that geography.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Christian Wiman’s “Once in the West”

I’ve read a lot of poetry over my lifetime, and likely more in the last 10 years than the rest combined. Rarely have I been as taken with a collection as I have with Christian Wiman’s Once in the West: Poems.

The poems originate in Wiman’s childhood and coming of age in Texas. They extend beyond that, into the reader’s mind and own experience, a collection of sharp, piercing stones with cutting edges that leave blood on the floor – the blood of life and of a life lived.

Some may mind the occasional profanity. I didn’t, and it surprised me that I didn’t.

I’ll have more to say later, but here is one example of a poem from the collection.

 

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?

Related:

Christian Wiman’s Every Riven Thing

Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss

Tumbling at the Nightstand

Photograph by Silviu Firulete via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.