Customer Reviews

The Keep (Kuhl House Poets)

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It's been a few years after this book was published, and I still come back to it with the kind of fervency it originally called up in me. Why? Because it's prayer where "No church utters up." Because Wilson rewrites W.C. Williams' dictum, "No ideas but in things," to read "All my material/idea." Because its crush of diction and alliteration-- how the latinate and vernacular are woven together through consonance and assonance--thrills the ear and mind simultaneously: "when you've turned yourself/out I'll come to//perennial/paresthesias//the cosmos all//obviate." Because, in a way unique in contemporary letters, the spiritual, natural and moral all meet here fitfully in "unquiet/country," in a poetry of the natural world that makes nature neither pure solace nor utterly alien, but, much like Wilson's conception of God, it is, heartbreakingly, "Unknown but you are." Because of the uncertainty inherent in this world view, the voice of this book is often "Pinched to the far wrong side of pleasure," caught in the line-break between doubt and faith, observation and emotion--and each time I read the book, I learn from this struggle: "Let the good I am bide a little longer."