Hard Night [Paperback]

Christian Wiman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2005

Make no mistake: Christian Wiman’s poetic endeavors are ambitious. From the personal lyrics of solitude and loss to “Being Serious,” the long poem that concludes Hard Night, his poems examine emotions clearly, without sentimentality. A profound reverence for form and passion for poetry are evident in these artfully shaped poems that contain and find meaning in the unwieldy and inexplicable. Just as he is doing as the new editor of Poetry, Wiman makes intellectually and emotionally engaged writing accessible to an expanding audience of readers.

Christian Wiman is the author of two books and a widely published essayist and critic. He lives in Chicago, where he is editor of Poetry magazine.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Known as the active, controversial editor of Poetry magazine (a post he assumed in 2003), Wiman is also a maker of careful, accomplished verse in his own right; this sophomore effort shows his strengths in a West Coast tradition of clarity, brevity, short lines and direct statement, a tradition whose representatives include W.S. DiPiero, Thom Gunn and Yvor Winters. Some lyric works remember freighted moments: "Wish for something," you said./ A shiver pricked your spine./ The falcon turned its head/ and locked its eyes on mine." Others focus on landscapes, bringing a terse intensity to each scene. A three-part elegy describes the poet's dying father; the best short poem in the book, "Reading Herodotus," gets exceptional weight from its authoritative argument. Most of the book consists of three longer poems. "Sweet Nothing" concerns an upstairs neighbor in San Francisco; "The Ice Storm" (no relation to the novel or film of that name) follows an elderly couple and their memories to the very end of their lives. As if to mock his own outlook, Wiman (The Long Home) concludes with a disquieting 23-part poem called "Being Serious," an abbreviated verse-biography (from womb to afterlife) for a prematurely jaded, frequently frustrated man called Serious. (June)
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From Booklist

In his second collection, Wiman, editor of the influential literary magazine Poetry, presents poems that are unusually welcoming in their sensuous evocation of the sounds and sights of everyday life and the ambience of dreams and reveries. Equally adept in writing formally and in free verse, Wiman, as much a storyteller as a lyric poet, revels in the musicality of language, orchestrating the staccato rhythms of consonants and the chiming and rhyming of vowels. His enticing poems glint with mischievous humor, a keen sensitivity to the weather of landscapes and mindscapes, and a frank fascination with age, death, and the struggle to convince oneself that life has meaning. Deft and flowing lyrics describe foggy San Francisco, the reluctance to get out of bed, and a funeral in the middle of nowhere, while three long narrative poems sail the book like masts. One is an atmospheric musing on desire and peril; another a piquant portrait of a long-married couple; the third a witty and provocative fable about a boy named Serious. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press (May 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556592205
• ISBN-13: 978-1556592201
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #552,777 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Gift, December 23, 2006

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hard Night (Paperback)

Christian Wiman seems comfortable in just about every form of poetry, whether formal in construction or fragmentary in thought and word placement. But reading HARD NIGHT leaves the reader with more than just an appreciation for a craftsman who is as fine as they come.

Wiman finds elusive bits of life, pulls them into focus, revels a while in the moment and then just as suddenly moves on. He seems to place every well-chosen word on the potter's wheel, pulling/pushing/molding it then glazing and polishing it until it is the only word that could possibly fit his need. To quote an example that may perhaps introduce new friends to his poetry is difficult, but for one:
OUTER BANKS

'This isn't the end but there's no going farther.
The sea breathes,
a swirl of oil in the water like a need for sleep.

Fetal seaweed, glintless seaglass,
a seagull wrecked in a dune like a plane.
The living cry out as they flee.

What remains?
One shell the waves won't take.
The intimate distance that it speaks.'

Spending time with Christian Wiman opens our eyes and our memories and our thoughts, and no poet could ask to achieve more. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, December 06

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars At last, something both contemporary and great, June 8, 2005

By 

Rachael Morrow - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hard Night (Paperback)

I'm not sure what to make of that previous review, which doesn't have anything at all to do with this book.

I was sent this book by a friend who said it was the best book of poetry he had read in ten years. That made me a little wary, of course, but the book disarmed me immediately with "Sweet nothing," which is one of the most beautiful poems I have ever read--the wistful, lyical music of it.

There are three long poems in the book. At the center is The Ice Storm, a poem that shifts between the perspectives of an academic and his wife--a poem that seems at first so quiet and particular, but is ultimately devastating. Reading it I got the same feeling I got--I think everybody gets--when reading Prufrock and the Waste Land: This is it. This is poetry. This is what it is meant to do.

And Wiman's final long poem, Being Serious, couldn't be more different--brilliant too, but also hilarious and strange.

It's the range in this book that is so astonishing. Between the long poems--so emotional, human, and lush--there are shorter lyrics. These can be so austere, spare, rigid, with a kind of implacable and almost self-annihilating will--as eerily beautiful and alienating as the landscapes in which they are often set. But even in these there is such range: three beautiful elegies, and Reading Herodotous, which I have photocopied and set above my desk, for when I need to be reminded that there are beautiful things in this world.

A truly truly remarkable work.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is like reading diamonds. . . ., June 13, 2007

By 

Roger W. Wright (Chicago, Illinois) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Hard Night (Paperback)

Well. . .maybe that's a bad analogy (metaphor?). . .but I'm not a poet.

This guy is. Big time. I liked his last book---so I bought this one. And this one is better. Cleaner, tighter, shimmering images of places and people and situations. and just the right sprinkle of mystery.

I won't give specifics---because by the nature of what this is---you can't. That would really diminish the expereience.

So just BUY it!