If Christian Wiman’s life story is a journey, then “Once in the West” is the road map, drawn in a riot of color that seems to take on a life of its own. The poems rush by like signposts on the roadside in a blast of blurring imagery and syntax: “icequiet,” “stabdazzling,” “flashlit,” “slaughterhospice,” “rivering.”
Christian Wiman’s most recent poetry collection, published in 2014, follows the poet’s journey from the plains of Texas, to the gray halls of a cancer clinic, to a miraculously anticlimactic conclusion in a family visit to the aquarium. More a three-part epic of personal growth than a selection of individual poems, the collection draws from Wiman’s struggles with faith, human frailty, and the simultaneous presence and silence of God, finally rediscovering the divine within human experience in a triumph of faith and powerful, nearly visionary poetry.
Wiman, the former editor of “Poetry” journal, a husband and father of two children, a cancer survivor, and a current lecturer at Yale Divinity School, has had ample opportunity to map out the connections between poetry, religion, time, place, family, life, and loss.
This focus was sharpened by the awareness of his own mortality after being diagnosed with cancer in 2005. Wiman’s previous poetry collection, “Every Riven Thing,” traveled through the same subject material, but in the midst of a veritable storm of pain, rage, and doubt: “For I am come a whirlwind of wasted things / and I will ride this tantrum back to God.”
Though “Once in the West” is still no fairytale, Wiman’s suffering has deepened into something nearer to a ballad than a cry of despair.
The collection’s opening section, “Sungone Noon,” sweeps over readers like the hot, dry wind of the Texas plains – the burning religious convictions of family members and neighbors mix with the freedom of movement and futility of opportunity of his rural home. Wiman walks the line between pathos and irony in discussing the lives of the fated faithful: “We lived in the long intolerable called God. / We seemed happy.” And though “Love is there … and hate … and art,” Wiman hesitates either to condemn or deify his own history: “can it be / tragedy?”
This emptiness echoes after Wiman leaves home; “Sungone Noon” recounts Wiman’s struggle with cancer in terms that sound like a timeworn fable: “Painlady lay upon my tongue the morphine moon,” and closes with a haunting sense of futility: “I learned too late how to live / Child, teach me how to die.”
Into this barren landscape blasts “My Stop is Grand,” which roars and sparks with a train metaphor that jars Wiman back, if not into the light of faith, at least into the awareness of a bright and unexpected joy. Believing himself to be on the fast track to death, Wiman is shocked by the numinous beauty of ordinary existence, “filled with a shine / that was most intimately me / and not mine.”
With this sense of motion, Wiman maps his changing perspective on the place of suffering in his life: “my sorrow’s flower was so small a joy / It took a winter seeing to see it as such.”
Wiman’s grand finale traces this flowering of small sparks into a wide-eyed wonder that makes all worldly light look “More Like the Stars.”
The closing poem expresses the miracle of divine light shining out of ordinary existence, as Wiman paints his life in full, resplendent color. It’s a beatific vision hidden in a family’s visit to the aquarium, “almost / too green / too blue / to stand / And I held your hand.”
For Wiman, this is love, and this is faith: the inherence of the visionary within the visceral, the divine within the human, the joy hidden in suffering.
In “My Bright Abyss,” Wiman’s collection of essays reflecting on his return to faith, Wiman writes of the paradox of both faith and poetry: “The same impulse that leads me to sing of God also leads me to sing of godlessness.” This desire for God, unfulfilled though it may be, is expressed through poetry. Since God reaches man through words, Wiman’s theology is incarnational, focused on the miraculous presence of grace in this world. This is manifest in the reading and writing of poetry, which both creates and celebrates beauty.
Wiman is not the only poet to run up against religion and metaphysics in poetry. But as he stokes this elusive fire of his own faith — and sometime lack of it — Wiman takes poetry higher than a poet like Wallace Stevens, whose work centers around transcendence, could go.
Wiman’s mission is nothing less than placing the spirit back, burningly, into the flesh, and bringing the eternal to blaze inside space and time. Yet though he flirts with the division between theology and poetry, Wiman never allows poetry to make a smug claim on divine knowledge or truth. Instead, he glories in the limitation of human words when attempting to express and understand the divine.
And it is in these limitations that “Once in the West” succeeds. As an attempt to express the return of an inexpressible joy, “Once in the West” is a daunting conceit, executed with grace and a refreshing sense of wonder. Wiman’s wisdom is the wisdom of a man who has rediscovered life, love, and faith in the very places he thought he lost it – in grief, in suffering, in the very silence of God.
“Once in the West” is all the more authentic in its limits and the poet’s potential to transcend them. The bursts of color in the final poem (“too green / too blue / to stand”) leave the reader with the sense of an unexpected spring, a wisdom that has not fully bloomed, a ballad unfinished, and a tale not yet fully told.
