HAVING ENJOYED WIMAN'S anthology Joy, I felt inspired to catch up on his own poetry. This is not his most recent collection, as he published one last year, but rather the successor to Every Riven Thing (see my post from August 12, 2014).
Once again we get dollops of Hopkins in the sound of the poems ("big-boned Joe Sloane shrivelcrippled / tight as tumbleweed") and in their sense (wonder streaked with anguish), but I suspect the crucial influence here is Dante. Once in the West strikes me as a miniature Divina Commedia.
Part One, "Sungone Noon," mainly recalls Wiman's childhood and youth in west Texas, but feels more infernal than Wordsworthian, heat-blasted, desperate, scoured of anything that feels like meaning or hope.
Part Two, "My Stop is Grand," is a little like Purgatory--mainly work and moving in seemingly endless circles, but with little explosions of grace punctuating the grayness, like the "grace of sparks" seen on the Chicago El train in the poem that lends its title to the section, mentioned again in the section's concluding "Poem for Edward Thomas."
So Part Three, "More Like the Stars," should be paradise, but paradisos are not easy to pull off my friends...not easy at all. The title certainly points towards Paradiso--"stelle," "stars," is the final word of all three parts of The Divine Comedy. But what we get as the conclusion to Wiman's small-scale Divine Comedy is an even smaller scale Divine Comedy, a three-part poem. It begins in a hospital (a good stand-in for hell, I think), proceeds through the faith-under-strain section that opens with the lines "What rest in faith / wrested / from grief," then concludes with Wiman at Shedd Aquarium with his family, which actually makes a convincing heaven.
I ordered the new collection, Survival Is a Style, and hope to get to it sooner than six years from now.
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