G. C. Waldrep, _The Earliest Witnesses_

 OKAY, NOW I am all caught up, and Opening Ritual (the new one) is supposed to be delivered today. Perfect timing.

"The earliest witnesses" is a term from Biblical scholarship, meaning the oldest surviving manuscripts of  a scriptural text. Older texts are better than the later ones, generally--closer to the source, less corrupted by transmission, and so on. The poem of that title in G. C. Waldrep's volume of that title may be about textual transmission--its opening line is "Let us write, then, the glistening poem"--but it seems to be more about seeing, "witnessing" in most familiar sense, unless it is about not seeing, for it is partly about the polyphemus moth, whose wings feature two big circles that look like eyes but are in fact just camouflage, with no capacity to see at all. 

More helpfully, maybe, the idea of "earliest witnesses" also carries the idea of presence, traces of presence, the fact of having been close to a presence. Many of the poems are set in particular places, most of them in England or Wales, where something sacred may have happened: churches, cloisters, sites associated with saints. The speaker has arrived with the expectation that something of the sacred still lingers about the place--and this reader, for one, is convinced that yes, something of the sacred does still linger, and yes, it found its way into Waldrep's lines, although I could never explain how.

There is a lot of formal variety here. Longer-lined poems that take their time, seem almost conversational, full of surprising lateral leaps and baffling juxtapositions; shorter-lined poems that drill down with a visionary intensity; poems in stanzas that could almost be Pindaric odes; poems in prose that could almost be journal entries; yet for all the variety, the book feels more unified, more a single book, than even the book-length poem Testament.

A sense of pilgrimage adheres to the poems, but also a sense of openness to the unplanned and unplannable. Right about midpoint of the book, there is a series of six poems set in a place called West Stow Orchard, and the first one kept making me think of the eighth chapter of Augustine's Confessions (the "tolle, legge" chapter), but why? Why does Waldrep's poetry seem like the most profound spiritual poetry of our time without any obvious markers of "spirituality" at all? How does he do it? 

"Should I then drink more from consensus's cup," Waldrep asks at one point. Please don't, Mr. Waldrep. Or not yet, as Augustine said in another context. We have a lot of spiritual poetry that has quaffed of that cup, but we only one G. C. Waldrep.