Christian Wiman, _Survival Is a Style_

WITH WIMAN KNOWN as a poet who is also a person of faith, this new collection's opening with the lines--

Church or sermon, prayer or poem:
the failure of religious feeling is a form.

--seems like an announcement of sorts. The book's longest poem, "The Parable of Perfect Silence," doubles down with the opening line, "Today I woke and believed in nothing." Wiman's faith was never of the blessed assurance kind--the manifestations of faith in his writing tended to the edgy, astringent, and Kierkegaardian. But this seems like a new note, and I did wonder what was up.

As an accomplished poet whose work is often shaped by his Christianity, Wiman gets shelved next to T. S. Eliot in my mental library, so I pulled up a bit at "To Eat the Awful While You Starve Your Awe" precisely because it seemed like a critique of Eliot:

To eat the awful while you starve your awe,
to weasel misery like a suck of egg,
to be ebullience's prick and leak,
a character pinched. to characteristic,
hell-relisher, persimmon-sipper, sad Tom, sane Tom,
all day licking the cicatrix where your Tomhood lay.

Not an entirely fair critique, I would say, if it is about Eliot. Yes, there is a miserabilist streak in Eliot, likewise a deflationary one. He can seem joyless, and he does sometimes relish the idea of hell and find his own wounds fascinating. Okay. But this salvo seems reductive. Would a poem like Wiman's "Doing Lines at the Cocktail Party" even exist without the women who came and went talking of Michelangelo, or Hakagawa bowing among the Titians, or the pizzicato of tensed nerves in "A Game of Chess"?

Maybe Wiman is just tired of being shelved next to Eliot in readers' mental libraries and wants to move out from the shadow of a poetic father. "Something of the Sky" may be about saying goodbye to a kind of romanticized father figure, and "The Parable of Perfect Silence," the book's anchor, is a meditation-elegy on Wiman's own father. Wiman is no longer young (see "Fifty") and has had to think hard about death--that he is still alive probably surprised some of his doctors--but however old a man is, he is still a son. 

I should have said more about the poems, I think, looking back over this. If you like Wiman's poetry, you'll like the book. A little more acerbic, a little funnier at times, but he still sounds like himself.