WALDREP'S NEW BOOK inhabits a zone just beyond my reach, as shown by my not having spotted its kinship to feast gently and The Earliest Witnesses until I saw the word "trilogy" on the back cover, but I have no reservations about giving it my fullest recommendation. This is the real thing.
It shares features with the two preceding collections, but lends those features a higher, more sustained intensity. The attention to place--most prominently, Acadia National Park and Arrow Rock, Missouri--has a sense of pilgrimage, of trying to be open to what is sacred about a particular landscape. Something can linger where people have worshipped, and Waldrep can get at that, as Larkin does in "Church Going," but even more like what Eliot does in "Little Gidding."
The formal variety...Waldrep can be expansive, even chatty ("I grasped the shuttle in my hand it was a very good shuttle an antique you might say") but can also, as in "Saint Sauveur," compress the idea into a diamond-tipped drill going straight down into the core.
He has read widely, and he is not going to pretend he hasn't. He crosses the line from the erudite to the recondite a few times, but hermetic though he sometimes is, he still conveys a spirit of invitation and generosity. How is that even possible? I have no idea. But there we are. The book's final poem, "In the Designed Landscape (Garden of Planes)," its stately stanzas somehow achieving intimacy, teeters on the edge of utter opacity but still wants us to get somewhere together.
"[T]he kind of furiously curious, unabashedly ambitious poetry book I want to show everyone, to prove such books can still be written,"says Kaveh Akbar on the back cover of The Opening Ritual. Let me offer a humble second to that motion.
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