{"id":11895,"date":"2020-12-12T18:46:34","date_gmt":"2020-12-12T17:46:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11895"},"modified":"2020-12-12T18:47:00","modified_gmt":"2020-12-12T17:47:00","slug":"christian-wiman-survival-is-a-style-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11895","title":{"rendered":"Christian Wiman | Survival is a Style<\/em><\/strong> | reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christian Wiman |\u00a0Survival is a Style |\u00a0<\/i>FSG: $24.00<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In his essay \u2018God\u2019s Truth is Life\u2019, Christian Wiman writes, \u2018What might it mean to be drawn into meanings that, in some profound and necessary sense, shatter us? This is what it means to love. This is what it should<\/i> mean to write one more poem. The inner and outer urgency or it, the mysterious and confused agency of it. All love abhors habit, and poetry is a species of love.\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n

Wiman is a writer who has consistently written at a particular pitch of intensity. As he writes of Mikl\u03ccs Radn\u00f3ti in the same essay, Wiman\u2019s poems \u2018are at once unflinching and uncanny\u2019; this latter in the Freudian sense of umheimliche<\/i>, for which one gloss is \u2018the return of the repressed.\u2019 Both Wiman\u2019s essays and his poetry circle, almost obsessively, around the idea that God abides in us and it is our duty to attend to that even at its most painful. That necessary intensity not only characterises Wiman\u2019s approach to his subject matter but also to the style and voice of the surface of the poems. Therefore, it is no real surprise that Wiman\u2019s new book of poems embraces that intensity in its very title. The poem \u2018Ten Distillations\u2019 from this collection is broken down into ten named couplets. The penultimate is \u2018Natural Theology\u2019, \u2018Dawn, light dew on the grass, the air cool, clear. \/ Nothing more. Nothing mere.\u2019 Natural Theology can be defined as, \u2018The body of knowledge about God which may be obtained by human reason alone without the aid of revelation.\u2019 Wiman is too complicated a believer to ever, I suspect, to feel that we can access God without at least some of the superstructure of \u2018organised\u2019 and revealed Christianity. But the poet in Wiman, the poet who is driven by the necessary intensity of that belief, wants to rejoice in the urgency and agency of that clear, dawn light. The complications of Wiman\u2019s belief are contained in an earlier section in the same poem, \u2018Inspiration\u2019, \u2018\u201dThe clearest morning is a thing to bear\u201d\u2019 \/ he writes, overjoyed, once more, by despair.\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n

It will be clear, even by now, that Herbert is a presiding genius where Wiman is concerned, Herbert and Hopkins, although Hopkins\u2019 dense flourishing of language is not the style that Wiman survives in. For Wiman, Herbert was \u2018conscious of some secular element at the very heart of making art, some necessary imaginative flair in himself that needed to be subdued, or at least tidied up and made fit for sacrifice.\u2019 It might be that Wiman, writing in the first quarter of the 21st<\/sup> century, feels less the need to tidy up his \u2018necessary imaginative flair\u2019; he has, after all, had various platforms on which to exercise his imagination over the years. Not, perhaps, as an editor of Poetry,<\/i> but certainly as a contributor to it and the other journals in which he\u2019s published both his poetry and prose. It is certain, however, that the secular tensions of his time are not sacrificed but are there to be duelled with. <\/span><\/p>\n

Wiman\u2019s duelling with secular tensions is, in this book as elsewhere in Wiman\u2019s writing, manifested in his profound empathy with the duels that others also undergo. In that sense, survival is the style for most of us. And if \u2018style\u2019 seems an inappropriate word for survival, it is a characteristic of Wiman\u2019s very raw, visceral sense of irony. Thus, the \u2018confessional\u2019 in Wiman\u2019s writing sits cheek by jowl with the ironic \u2018sacrifice\u2019 of so many lives. As he puts it in long poem, \u2018The Parable of Perfect Silence\u2019 with its own highly ironised title, these are \u2018Hard lives hardly there\u2019. And he admits that \u2018When I began writing these lines \/ it was not, to be sure, inspiration but desperation, \/ to be alive, to believe again in the love of God.\u2019 It is into the potential abyss between the love of God and the love of humanity that Wiman peers so successfully. And it is the poetry, through its manifold empathies, that Wiman is desperate to build a bridge across that abyss. This is a religious poetry that is written upon a social realism: Wiman\u2019s own hardscrabble upbringing and the obvious tensions with his father; two men on death row who \u2018talk through slots in their doors \/ of whatever mercy or misery \/ the magazine has ordained for the day \u2013 \u2018; \u2018even the undertaker, a friend \/ from high school, has graduated to heroin.\u2019 And Wiman\u2019s own purchase upon that irony enables him to see that so much of this is \u2018local color, peasant levity, the language fuming and steaming \/ rich as the mist of rot that rises off the compost heap.\u2019 Wiman\u2019s writing is never, however, some poeticised, religious misery memoir. What drives Wiman on is a profound sense of that duel with the tensions of intellectual ambition, religious faith and religious doubt, the difficulty of living for so many \u2013 Wiman, himself, is living in remission from cancer – , and also the urgent necessity of witness in writing.<\/span><\/p>\n

by Ian Pople<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christian Wiman |\u00a0Survival is a Style |\u00a0FSG: $24.00 In his essay \u2018God\u2019s Truth is Life\u2019, Christian Wiman writes, \u2018What might it mean to be drawn into meanings that, in some profound and necessary sense, shatter us? This is what it means to love. This is what it should mean to write one more poem. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nChristian Wiman | Survival is a Style | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11895\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Christian Wiman | Survival is a Style | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Christian Wiman |\u00a0Survival is a Style |\u00a0FSG: $24.00 In his essay \u2018God\u2019s Truth is Life\u2019, Christian Wiman writes, \u2018What might it mean to be drawn into meanings that, in some profound and necessary sense, shatter us? 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