THIS IS THE fifth collection by Waldrep that I have read, and it’s my favorite so far (he has published another since this one, I should mention, with another coming out shortly).
I kept thinking of Hopkins—and let me immediately qualify that and emphasize that Waldrep does not sound like Hopkins at all (no one should try to sound like Hopkins). What I have in mind is that Hopkins had an astonishing, even preternatural gift for presenting sensory details but at the same time a kind of mistrust in the body, a suspicion that it was too easily snared. Waldrep likewise serves up an astonishing array of sensory imagery (“From waxy cells bees tender their last dances”) but feels a degree or two of anxiety about the body (“We are all cages / of meat”).
Hopkins found comfort and meaning in traditional rituals of worship, but also experienced terrible doubt. Waldrep moves into the subjunctive mood of prayer often in the book (“Let my frame be a honey-stanchion then, / a sill, a dry milk” or “Let me be the only / casualty, the waking wound towards which the forest / of my fading heat is climbing”), but serenity is elusive (“In the marriage plot / of faith, I drew the Hanged Man.”)
Like Hopkins, then, Waldrep seems a composition of incompatibilities, an ascetic sensualist, a doubting believer. Joshua Corey captures some of this in a back cover blurb, writing of “an ecstatic sobriety.” Even the title—“feast gently.” Indulge yourself, live it up, but with restraint, tenderness, a delicacy of touch.
One last kinship: Hopkins never sounds like anyone but Hopkins, and Waldrep, even when he is going in for self-abnegation, never sounds like anyone but Waldrep. And I am glad of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment