Customer Reviews

Hard Night

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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:
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'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

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.

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!

Mr. Wiman's book belies his claims for formal verse. Or at least he proves the fact that technical accuracy does not equal technical mastery; and that formal allegiance is hardly a substitue for passion. And even "accuracy" can seem as remote as passion:

and for a long moment I'm still in
I wished and wished and wished
the moment would not end.
And just like that it vanished.

That's about as embarrassing a quatrain as one is ever likely to see--it would be hard to distinguish that from anything one might see in a grade school writing workshop. One longs for a poet who understands that technique without passion is yet another dullness, a truism that applies to free and formal verse alike. Perhaps it's not so odd that his editorship reflects the same preference for banalities.