G. C. Waldrep, _The Opening Ritual_ (2)

AS I READ The Opening Ritual, I kept bumping into realizations that I had been getting certain things wrong. 

These realizations started occurring even as I was glancing at the book's front matter.

For instance, I had been annoyed by Kaveh Akbar's not including Waldrep in his Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse, but it turns out Akbar is an admirer. "The Opening Ritual is the kind of furiously curious, unabashedly ambitious poetry book I want to show everyone, to prove such books can still be written," Akbar writes. That's the part of the blurb quoted on the back cover, but lest you think that is just the usual dramatic but vague overstatement poets swap around in blurbs, in the more complete version inside the opening pages Akbar mentions and quotes particular poems in a way that makes me think he means it. I still think Waldrep should have been in that anthology, but perhaps Akbar deliberately chose to focus on  the tradition rather than on living poets.

In another encomium in the opening pages, Sasha Steensen notes that The Opening Ritual is the "third collection in a trilogy centered on illness and healing." I did notice that there was a strong sense of continuity from feast gently to The Earliest Witnesses: the importance of place, health difficulties, wide-ranging interest in possibilities of form, theological concerns. But I assumed it was the same kind of continuity a reader senses between Yeats's The Tower and his The Winding Stair, or between Heaney's North and his Field Work, not the kind between H. D.'s The Walls Do Not Fall and her Tribute to the Angels. The word "trilogy" occurs on the back cover as well, though, so all I can do is own up to my own impercipience. It does make me want to re-read the first two--although I might have done that in any case, I liked them so much.

The poems in The Earliest Witnesses set in West Stow Orchard reminded me much of Augustine (as I mentioned in this blog on Dec. 6, 2024) and made me imagine that Waldrep had drunk deeply of and valued Augustine's testimony, but in "Houses Built from the Bodies of Lions or of Dogs" Waldrep records, "I read Augustine on one of the islands (the first) and disliked him more with every page." Well, wrong again. "You won't have to read Augustine anymore," announces a later poem, with evident relief. 

I almost fell into the same mistake reading these lines in "The Arrhythmias":

               I have not forgotten

the taste shame left in the mouth of my childhood,

like bark stripped from some bitter tree &  then infused,

delicately, with the aroma of a single ripe peach

I'd stolen.

Didn't Augustine steal a peach as a child? I thought. Isn't this an allusion to the Confessions? But no. Augustine stole a pear. 

I wish Prufrock had asked, "Do I dare to steal a peach?"