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Sum Ledger 
by Adam Tavel
(Measure Press, 2023, 84pp., $25.00)

Adam Tavel—whose sixth book, Sum Ledger, powerfully documents the commonplace wrongs of American life and history—has chosen silence. Not as a poet—in an August 2023 Pine Hills Review interview, Tavel’s commentary affirms his commitment to the art. But as a “public poet”—a working writer engaged in the flurry of online self-promotion that today’s literary culture demands—Tavel is done: “Apart from my poems themselves, this interview will be my last public statement for a very long time.” In our overcrowded, chaotic, fad-prone poetry cosmos, it’s rare for someone to reject the spotlight—especially someone who’s won two national book competitions (the Permafrost Prize for Plash and Levitation and the Richard Wilbur Award for Catafalque), the Robert Frost Foundation award, and one of the top ten regional literary arts grants offered by his home state (Maryland). Tavel’s reasons suggest the same uncompromising vision that informs Sum Ledger and earlier books: he is abandoning “the slick literary commercialism that [he] hitherto rationalized and participated in,” adding wistfully, “Like many, I went in search of fellowship but merely found another cloying marketplace.”

Tavel’s conclusion is debatable—in what art form do market factors not play a role?—but the quality of his work is not: born in 1982, Tavel is one of his generation’s most versatile and accomplished poets. Sum Ledger, deeply felt and thrillingly honest, is the latest in an astonishing run: six full-length books on respected presses between 2015 and 2023, including two in the same year (2022: Rubble Square and Green Regalia). If Tavel hasn’t yet enjoyed widespread acclaim, it’s not for lack of industry. It’s simply that, in an aesthetically balkanized era, quality work doesn’t guarantee recognition (a problem not unique to poetry). Tavel’s retreat may well offer relief, a way to shut out the market’s noise to protect his creative self.

That self is highly attuned to injustice. Sum Ledger’s second section looks toward education, Tavel’s wry wit leavened by darker notes: indifference abounds, shame hovers, and acts of kindness are performative. A father, the speaker of “Thanksgiving Chorus,” watches kindergarteners “beautiful and dumb / beam on risers to sing the goofy words / their teacher drilled ad nauseam all week,” but memory pulls him back to his own Catholic school childhood of Polaroids and pilgrim costumes, a time of “yawning nuns” who “lorded over me,” including on a day when neither parent picked him up: “When no one came I shot November sky.” (The present-day father gamely sings along with the other kindergarteners’ parents.) In “Orphan Lights,” as if granted some great privilege, Catholic schoolboys endure slow-motion glimpses of a well-off neighborhood whose Christmas lights they’re expected to admire. (The makeshift tour is hosted by two priests in “the rectory’s station wagon.”) As the poem ends, title and tone confirm the speaker’s pained detachment: viewing this second-hand splendor, he wonders if the Holy Spirit “flew from bulb to bulb, blessing each / porch’s wreath ribbon and risen / house number tacked in brass / impossible to read inside the glow.” Shame and poverty are closely connected, made worse by the charity outing that holds a bitter taste.

In “The Free and Reduced-Price Meals Program of Anne Arundel County Public Schools,” the speaker confronts his childhood self. Tall tales meant to disguise poverty and pain now seem utterly transparent: “You say the family doesn’t trust / your Velcro wallet: Wolverine comics, / Big League Chew, dough burns a hole / in your pocket.” The boy knows violence, too, his “arms purple,” but “He Who Whales” is, supposedly, the imaginary brother “who leaves / bumpkin sprinters panting / at country meets and gleams until / someone asks why he never picks you / up.” (The same Pine Hills Review interview suggests that the general outlines are factual: “The confessional impulse has taken some shots to the chin in recent decades, but…I can’t pretend my poems are…untethered from the material circumstances of my life”; further, Rubble Square’s “Forever Elegy” begins, “The night my father squeezed my throat and held / me dangling at the wall our thermostat’s / ancient paint-flecked dial dug in my ear.”) In “The Free and Reduced-Price Meals…,” Tavel’s repetitions (every sentence but the last begins, “You say”) underscore the boy’s attempts  both to fit in and to hide his poverty.

Sum Ledger is rich in vividly realized poems of darker memory; these, in turn, gesture beyond autobiography toward history’s cruel march. “Mayflower Bastard,” an affecting sonnet, is a dramatic monologue spoken by the ship’s young scurvy-afflicted dishwasher.  Having seen “the coast emerge despite the fog,” weak sunbeams touch “jaundiced // hands that split and bleed each night in greasy / pot suds.” The orphan’s arrival—the fresh start of American myth—is problematic: diseased, without family, at the bottom of the social order, he speaks for himself and generations to come: “In all these dreams I knew that we would drown.” Tavel’s historical interests center squarely on the poor. “The 1909 Maryland Field Phantoms of Lewis Wickes Hine, National Child Labor Committee Photographer,” lends a voice to the subjects of Hine’s famous images, an influential document of poverty and child labor: a nine-year-old girl and berry-picker explains, “How many cents your picking sweat can grouse / is counted by the boxes at your feet.”

“Deemed,” the opening section of “Until The Beast Was Slain,” written “for residents of the Wicomico County Almshouse, 1871-1923,” uses the jargon of bygone ordinances to showcase America’s contempt for the poor. Among the numbingly listed possibilities, a “vagabond” is someone “who has no visible means of maintenance / from property or personal labor,” who “lives idle, without employment”; the term includes “every nomad, / gypsy, or other person practicing / that which is commonly called / fortune-telling.” With equal coldness, “beggar” and “vagrant” are defined, the latter “every person” who “wanders  / & lodges in outhouses, sheds, / …or in any public building or in the open air / & has no permanent place / of abode.” That legally defining each pejorative holds greater priority than addressing the causes of indigence or homelessness speaks to the era’s callousness and to similar attitudes today. (Historian Kate Masur, quoted by Jamelle Bouie in a recent New York Times column, states that, in previous centuries, laws regarding vagrants, paupers, and the like were “all ‘police’ laws, designed to ensure public peace and protect a community’s coffers”—as Tavel’s poem chillingly confirms.)

Mordant wit regularly leavens Sum Ledger’s determined vision: a “Clearance Tie,” for example, is “Red, like its stickered price / or the acne-cheeked boy who goes / stag to a church dance.”  Less explicit but equally crucial is the tender empathy that also animates these poems. In one dedicated to Tavel’s young son, a hospital room’s “closed blinds / smuggle in tiny coos / of sunbeam,” the infant’s sounds and the weak light blending together. The father dreads an interruption of the moment, speaking to the son he cradles, “Until then, little fox, / your bloodshot eyes / and mine can watch / another rerun gameshow / soundless in the corner” (“Poem Written One-Handed While Holding a Newborn in My Arms”). That same tenderness emerges in “A Drought September,” set in the Depression, whose speaker, facing foreclosure, contemplates suicide: indeed, his shotgun is at the ready “when, echoing off the barn, a breeze / brought my youngest daughter’s voice / from her knotted rope swing / singing olly olly oxen free.” The desperation to escape—from debt, shame, and failure—gives way to an alternative: the blank slate of the future, the freedom of possibility: his daughter’s voice, able to melt despair.

Sum Ledger ’s sequencing also testifies to Tavel’s shrewd intelligence. An example: the book’s fourth section which examines the fragility of home. After “The Houses of the Poor” (where, instead of Christmas lights, the speaker sees “pink / tufts of insulation [that] flutter / past siding torn or broken”), Tavel includes “Room to Room” which recounts the speaker’s alarm on arriving home to find the front door open; as father-protector, he ventures in, “an umbrella clutched like Excalibur / while our puppy trailed, bewildered / and wagging.” The prose poem “House Hunters” balances contempt for smug professionals with sardonic allegory: a tempting “sand-silt mansion,” the real estate agent says, requires an annual blood feeding of its basement’s fire demons which “Chad and Beatrice,” the buyers, agree is fair. Two blank verse sonnets follow: “The Eviction” depicts the family driven from their community, packing their “borrowed truck” (“I see six siblings climb and pass the twine / to bind their jumble like a ransomed child”), while “At the Women’s Shelter” provides a child’s-eye view of fraught, temporary lodgings (“The counselor smiled and said kids called her Nan. / I kicked her arms away…”).  The subtlety of Tavel’s arrangement deepens each poem’s individual impact while raising the thematic and emotional stakes for the section as a whole.

Tavel’s distaste for the market’s influence has its poetic counterpart in, among others, “During the Seventh Inning Stretch, a Country Time Lemonade Commercial Airs.” Here, a smiling, bearded father, “flannel-clad,” cues a bucolic rural scene whose false notes ring out unmistakably due to a skillful use of irony: “we’re transported suddenly / to a dappled mossy hollow / where none of our three siblings / frolicking in slow-mo trip / on the guarded witch-finger roots / beneath a canopy of willows.” The poem ends: “The glass is empty.” For me, the poem distills another special quality of Tavel’s work: his use of seemingly light-hearted or contemporary references to reinforce more serious concerns. In a book so attentive to the plight of America’s suburban and rural poor, from historical indifference to the implosion of families, the media’s saccharine depiction of carefree pastoral bliss must seem especially galling—yet the poem’s descriptive impact keeps it from seeming preachy, its anger sublimated into poetry and wit.

Both wit and resignation define “It Pays in Exposure,” a poem about poetry readings that’s both nightmarish and uncomfortably familiar: almost every indignity of the midlist working poet is combined in a single outpouring. Framed in the second person—that’s “you,” dear reader—the protagonist poet reads for an audience of merely four, drowned out by the zip of a fleeing student’s backpack, an octogenarian’s “shrieking” complaints, and “maintenance guys whamming / like drunk gravediggers down the hall.”

Do such performances, in fact, “pay in exposure”? Tavel’s understandable frustration (shared by myriad writers who don’t say so publicly) calls to mind another of his poems: Rubble Square’s “Selected Poems” in which Tavel discovers a mentor’s cherished career overview “[s]hoved between a Soviet atlas / and an Amish pastry cookbook / at the summer library sale / …unread, / her pages crisp as sliced apple.” In a literary marketplace whose top echelons are, for most, impenetrable, its hierarchy fixed, it’s easy to become discouraged, disillusioned, or both. We could all name artists who’ve abandoned their work, the spotlight, or both, in order to pursue a more sustaining private life. I take comfort in Tavel’s pledge to let his poetry speak for itself: it means we can look forward to more of his writing. I admire his courage in rejecting the marketplace he opposes. But while one proof of Tavel’s critique is that he himself isn’t better known, poetry’s readership is dynamic, overlooked voices emerge anew, and the worth of a deeply authentic vision can’t be measured.

Bears are frustrated by their lack of speech,
Their claws leave blackboards shrieking for repairs,
And that’s why bears are seldom asked to teach
And almost never get Distinguished Chairs
Unless they come across one unawares
Whose rich upholstery they quickly shred.
Some of them have been known to have affairs
With a man or woman lured into their bed—
This often ends up badly with one dead,
The other executed for the crime,
Or given a life sentence in a zoo.
Bears are familiar with existential dread,
Bears put their pants on one leg at a time:
The problems bears have are your problems too.

Suppose there was an app that let you know
Before you ordered at Ye Old Clam Shack
The scallops with their flesh as white as snow,
The blushing salmon or the wild-caught hake,
The bass just lifted from a nearby lake,
If they’d been harvested sustainably;
Suppose there was an app that let you track
Which ones were now at risk or soon to be:

They could be saved by this technology.
The app is here: I have it on my phone,
I told a friend, who answered, “I don’t see
Groupers at all. What list are groupers on?”

Endangered—they can barely hold their own…

She said, “That makes it easy to decide:
Waiter, I’ll have the grouper, please—pan-fried:
I’d better get mine now before they’re gone.”

for Simon

Sasha sent me the birdcage veil
she combed and pinned into her hair
on her wedding day, because she knew

she couldn’t be here: her son was born
just weeks before. Your mother opened
the package, leaving me a voicemail

I still have not erased. Emily,
something arrived for you today.
The dress your mother planned to wear

to the ceremony hung on her bedroom
door the Friday before she died.
Her heart stopped just days before

our wedding. Her younger brother held
her foot, singing the old songs they knew,
while I walked the halls of the hospital.

(He would die just five Septembers
later.) Now, it’s seven years,
and you have lost your elders, one

by one. Does it feel like vertigo,
except you’re staring up, instead
of down? In Piedmont Hospital,

a friend of your parents stopped my pacing,
asked me what size I wore: she left
a lace nightgown in our bridal suite.

We had to push the last guests out
into the champagne fuzz of sunrise.
I don’t remember if we kissed,

but the view from the room was a gold field,
the morning diaphanous with ghosts,
the grass defined in mist.

Remember that old game of telephone?
You’d hear the shadow you didn’t want to see.
The message you receive is yours alone,

a whispered piece of what you’ve always known:
your future opens into elegy.
Remember that old game of telephone?

You know it’s waiting. You hear it in the tone
of voice, the distant, muffled certainty
(the message you receive is yours alone):

the body without disease is yours on loan;
you’ll lose the shimmer on that cypress tree.
Remember that old game of telephone?

When the source is far away, a distant drone,
you disavow the signs that guarantee
the message you receive is yours alone,

coiled in every cell and hair and bone.
And trying to forget, we find that we
remember that old game of telephone:
the message we receive is ours alone.

How did you know November was too late,
that I’d miss most of the leaves? What made you late

as I waited on the curb, wishing I’d worn gloves?
Your campaign was already over, but you withdrew late,

bent on convincing me. You knew what truths
delight; what lies; what tactics to pursue, late

in the game, when you have lost, when nothing remains
but metaphor, when nothing’s left to undo. Late

answers appear to me: sporadic and fugitive
as dragonflies, whose grainy haze, greenish blue, late

in the day, hides hindwing and forewing.
The point of winning is hardest to articulate.

Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair is the kind of book one half-dreams of writing in sleepless hours of the night, when the liminal brain has an almost tactile conception of the thing: sheaves of notes, extensive quotations, inspired jottings and poems cohere in a morphogenic field that never quite reveals its proper dimensionality. It is a project that most would abandon in the morning when what had fascinated by night appears formless, and only a fleeting trace remains. Christian Wiman, however, has enough experience laboring at the hinge of poetry and essay to make it interesting. In a way, the book is just an essay in the original meaning of that word: an attempt, a shot in the dark, a throwing of whatever lies at one’s feet at the nearest and most maddeningly featureless wall in order to see what sticks.

The book contains 50 entries numbered one through 50 and two numbered “Zero.” 22 of the entries are original poems, although, of those, one, “Particular Flesh,” is itself a hybrid construction, containing lineated verse, prose fiction and (perhaps?) essay. The remaining entries are some combination of previously published articles, works of criticism, what might be journal entries, assemblies of quotations, and snatches of literary experimentation. Wiman’s experiences with cancer, with suffering in general, and with faith as well as its opposite are the book’s recurring themes.

A thread of connection is not always evident (one entry is a breezy piece on working out in gyms from New York Times Magazine), and towards the end Wiman frankly admits the collection is composed of “disconnected fragments” that he has “thought and fought” his way through.[1] True, it is fragmentary, but it also has an atmospheric unity. That atmosphere — fevered, dogged, and marshy — is created by Wiman’s repeated attempts to cross or at least to blur the boundary between poetry and theology, to apply his formidable literary mind to the task of saying true things about God. Are those attempts successful, as poetry? As theology? Or is poetic theology a categorical error? Zero at the Bone does not really do theology, at least according to that discipline’s self-understanding. However, it does have a poetics of faith, or, more accurately, a poetics of that capacity for faith without which human beings cannot achieve self-understanding.

 

Aesthetic theology or theological aesthetics?

The references of the first chapter define the field of labor. In what must be a nod to Dante, a leopard makes an appearance in the first “Zero.”[2] The beast, however, is “sedated,” and so we are immediately faced with the modern problem of ginning up a desire for salvation without an awake and snarling sense of sin. The fact that the cat is drugged also marks out that Wiman will approach revelation through the gate of sensation. He quickly affirms this: “One doesn’t follow God in hope of happiness but because one senses — miserable flimsy little word for that beak in your bowels — a truth that renders ordinary contentment irrelevant.” This heralds a subjective approach that will dwell on the experience of faith rather than on the data of revelation itself. The pitting of truth against “ordinary contentment” is also notable.

The Wiman who speaks through these religious fragments is the poet-professor in Yale’s divinity school, where he is surrounded by a formidable cadre of systematic theologians and biblical scholars, as well as ethicists and experts in the application of religion to various practical concerns. Even in such a rarified atmosphere, the materialism of the larger society must be felt, and Wiman makes himself its opponent: In this he is faced with the dual task of coaxing future leaders, ecclesial and secular, to engage with, or at least not to dismiss out of hand, both poetry and faith in the self-revelation of God that forms the data of theology. The matter he presents is lesson-like: poems and snatches of poems are employed to introduce perennial problems of faith — the efficacy of prayer, the reality of evil and suffering, the interpretation of scripture, etc. This focus on problems, on the negative, may be a pedagogical device. Problematized religion is perhaps more appetible to the Yale crowd, and Wiman is patient, keeping the God question fluttering and twisting, obscured, yet at the center of his words.

References to theology ebb and flow throughout Zero at the Bone. “Kill the Creature,” an entry centered on the motif of the snake, is among the high-water marks. In it, Wiman writes of kenosis, the self-emptying of Christ, first in his incarnation, in which God humbled himself to become man, and finally on the cross, where he allowed himself to be killed. Wiman calls this “erasure for the sake of something greater. It is not reality, but relationship that is greater. That is to say, it is not reality as we know it, but the one we intuit at times by means of relationship — both with matter and with other minds.”[3]

The primacy of relationship has a theological pedigree. For the 20th century Jesuit writer Henri de Lubac, it is derived from the relationality that is inherent in God, in the Trinity, which, according to Christianity, is a communion of three divine persons. There is thus a stable, eternal relationality that all transitory relationships derive from and that makes relationship itself possible. Yet Wiman frequently seems to eschew this understanding for the Hegelian view that when God entered history, he succumbed irrevocably to change: “ … either the incarnation is absolute, or it simply didn’t happen. Either God is gone, or he never was.”[4]

It would be tempting to think of Wiman, at least in these passages, as a Hegelian. Yet his dialectical approach is usually closer to that of Marx, who turned the Hegelian dialectic on its head: Zero at the Bone is full of antitheses followed by negations: “ … the final silence that so pains love is the same silence that sustains love. In other words, the knowledge of love and the knowledge of death are the same, and neither is knowledge.”[5] Both resemblances turn out to be superficial, however. The poetic project here, and it is a poetic project, is wresting theology away from philosophy, and that includes political and economic theory. But with philosophy gone, so is the capacity to receive, in a stable way, whatever meaning lies in revelation. Wiman pursues a religion that has “no final ground of meaning, which is not to say no God.”[6] How can human beings with rational souls relate to such a religion? “One follows the sounds.” And ends up where? “Poetry is the only sanity.”[7]

Why then, does Wiman pursue theology at all, if only to throw us back on the fickle mercies of poetry? Would not a literary fideism suffice for his purposes? A passage on the Lutheran minister and would-be Hitler assassin Dietrich Bonhoeffer is revealing. Bonhoeffer’s associate wrote of him, “Because he was lonely he became a theologian, and because he became a theologian he was lonely.” Wiman glosses, “I keep wanting to replace ‘theologian’ with ‘poet.’”[8] In the context of the whole, this comment evinces a desire for poetry or poetic thinking to merge with theology, to do the theological work of understanding God; but what does that really mean?

Absent any clue from Wiman, we could turn to Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, which is perhaps the most famous theological treatise outside of sacred scripture itself. Thomas’ effects are felt far beyond medieval Catholicism, extending to Protestant divines Luther and Calvin, even to today’s evangelicals. The Summa opens with a series of questions about theology, or sacred doctrine, itself; the second of which is “Whether it is a science?” Thomas answers in the affirmative because theology proceeds in a rational way from principles outside itself, those of revelation. Far from being an exercise in abstraction, theology is meant to serve lived faith by supplying it with reason. It supplies faith with expansiveness and stability.

Wiman does try to arrive at the truth about God through certain externals, but they are often fictive. He employs the poetic faculty to make externals, to push things out of his own mind into a reality in which they become truth. This is clearest when he writes about his drug-addicted physician father and mentally ill, also-addicted sister: “My family’s story often feels like fiction to me, especially when I try — as I have been trying here — to tell it to other people. But then something happens, and I experience again the ruthless, relentless nature of its truth.”[9] He never really settles that nature, but triangulates it somewhere between the reality of sin, the greater reality of mercy, and the need for humility in order to see the other two.

There is real insight here, but it is not stable, reliable or expansive. Instead, it is deployed to artistic ends. Is Wiman, then, practicing a modern version of what Swiss theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar termed the “aesthetic theology” of Romanticism, which attempted to speak of God and the world using a single faculty, the aesthetic impulse? Von Balthasar contrasted what he saw as the error of aesthetic theology to his own project of theological aesthetics, “a theology that does not primarily work with extra-theological categories of a worldly philosophical aesthetics (above all poetry), but which develops its theory of beauty from the data of revelation itself with genuine theological methods.”[10] Why does Von Balthasar reserve his sternest warning for poetry? Because poetry is like a river in March: full of melted snow and roaring wherever it must go. It mimics the sound and force of the best arguments, but it can’t yield their delicate conclusions because it lacks their dispassion towards aesthetic concerns. Poetry has its own kind of dispassion: it is unconcerned with stability of meaning where that endangers an aesthetic order of sense. Of course, poetry can borrow from theology, and in doing so make theology crystalline and gorgeous and real; but the operation of poetry is different from the operation of theology, even combined in the mind of a Dante.

To be fair, beauty in the Romantic sense is not one of the preoccupations of Wiman’s book, which plumbs the depths of the ugliness of addiction, estrangement, and chemotherapy. Yet there is a relevant caution about the dangers, both aesthetic and theological, of mistaking the distinct operations of theology and art for a merely departmental division. In Zero at the Bone, abstract passages on religion sometimes dampen the strange and clarion chords of Wiman’s poetry.

Yet Wiman does find in poetics a means of faith. That is, poetry does not reason about the data of revelation, but it may provide a way to persevere when one is pushed to a breaking point by pain and disappointment. “When Job needs to scream his being to God, it’s poetry he turns to.”[11] This is an honest estimation of what Zero at the Bone is up to.

 

Zapping rats and other bright sallies

Wiman shines as a critic, serving up penetrating close readings of Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson and bringing in obscure mystical poets such as Gustav Sobin, whose verses he interweaves with the events of his own life. His entry on the Stevens-esque William Bronk is illustrative of Wiman’s whole critical enterprise in the way it allows him to get his fingers between the tectonic plates of poetry: “This is the dilemma of every poet (and it’s a tiny minority) who is both forced into and freed by an idiolect. Basil Bunting and David Jones are such poets. Robert Frost and W. H. Auden are not. Gwendolyn Brooks, yes. Elizabeth Bishop, no. Bronk’s place in the schema is obvious. His poems are quirks, freaks, almost belligerently unbeautiful, thought that suggests a stance and not a nature.”[12] He laments Bronk’s “privacy so absolute that there can be no such thing as shared speech,” yet ultimately decides to redeem at least one of his poems “Because it is beautiful, and beauty triggers an instinct for an order beyond the one it enacts.”[13] Brilliant. The whole chapter is inspired criticism, as is the one on Lucille Clifton.

Then there are Wiman’s own verses, which pop and shimmy like one-winged angels amid the turbid gray of disquisitions and dialectics. “Zapped rats abounded / on signs behind the house / but never once did we see one. / Zapped that is,” begins “Remembering a City and a Sickness.”[14] The bodies of the rats are “like hirsute breadfruit.” There is something Dantesque in these stinking lumps of verbal corporality slung amid all the philosophizing of the essays.

Other lyrics are more directly related to the themes of the prose passages. The single stanza poem “I Don’t Believe in the Soul” reads like Emily Dickinson on psilocybin and is worth reproducing in full:

“The quick flints avid at the feeder.
The bare trees like dendrites intuiting blue.
The burl that, looked at, blurs into a squirrel.
The little nonethelesses that keep me you.”[15]

The same careful modulation of and resistance towards religious meaning that marks the essays is at work here, but to artistic rather than discursive effect.

The “Against Despair” of the title is clearest in Wiman’s original poems, in which cancer references are surprisingly few and indirect. Instead, the lines lance upward to the life of the soul, to spiritual suffering and spiritual exuberance. An illuminating foil for this is L.E. Sissman (1928-1976), whose fastidious blank verse remained stubbornly fixed on the bleak observables of the hospital rooms where he sickened and died. Another useful comparison is Paul Murray, the Irish priest whose 2014 Scars: Essays, Poems and Mediations on Affliction covers similar territory using similar methods to Wiman’s. Murray’s verse, though, is unflaggingly pastoral. Like George Herbert (whom Wiman frequently references), Murray presents an experience of affliction that is calibrated to become medicine for the suffering soul. Zero at the Bone has none of this ministerial quality, even when it becomes didactic. It is the voice of one man revealing himself and letting others do with this information what they may — the voice of an artist. It is self-revelation, not divine revelation.

Subject matter aside, Wiman’s skill and range as a poet are on full display here. He is a master at supplying free verse with its final freedom — that of approaching meter, incorporating it, almost dancing with it, and then sending it back to the church basement wall with a flick of his elbow. Eliot is a guide in this of course, but so is Stevens:

Poverty is like a genetic bequest, polar loneliness.
The finical, fanatical, reciprocal chiseling of mind and matter.
And the long silences, late saliences of God and sound
set like glyphs in the mother country,
childhood….[16]

At times, though rarely, he even bursts into stolid American plainsong:

“The door she’s never thought to lock
is open when the neighbor needs some mayonnaise.
The Sunday they forgot to change the clock
they missed the preaching and went straight to praise.”[17]

The verse is not the most disciplined, but then, you wouldn’t want it to be in a collection like this, which is more like a chili than a consommé. The poems and essays abrade one another roughly, each asserting its individuality for a hot minute before succumbing to the flavor of its neighbors.

 

So, what is ‘Zero’?

Zero at the Bone takes its title from the final line of Dickinson’s 1096 (“A narrow Fellow in the Grass”), and in so doing amplifies the Edenic symbology that Wiman supplies snakes in “Kill the Creature.” It is not only tempting, but plausible to see Milton’s Satan, perhaps updated for deconstructing evangelicals, as the unifying thread of the book if not its secret hero. In seeking God beyond God, Wiman is most weary of the “essential and lethal skepticism” that was the Reformation’s gift to modernity.[18] He candidly admits that problematizing religion is rewarded in his circles and that it can even form the basis of a false spirituality: “You can become so comfortable with God’s absence and distance that eventually your own unknowingness gives you a big fat apophatic hug.”[19] His greatest survival tool against this cynicism that he deplores in himself and others, within religion and outside it, is poetry.

Yet, quoting Fanny Howe, he also reminds us that, in The Zohar of the Kabbalah, zero stands for God, or at least the place where “the end and the beginning become inseparable.”[20] So zero has something of a double meaning in this collection. It’s God and it’s his disgruntled creature, the devil. It’s poetry and it’s magic. It’s everything and anything that allows Wiman to encompass and purify religion, to bring it onto the page and give it a flickering complexity that eludes the leaden tongues of tent preachers back in the Texas of the 1980s. It’s also a weapon against the spiritual despair that comes from cancer, from its toxic treatment, from family struggles, from his own “Ninja blender for a brain”[21] that too easily reduces the comforts faith affords other people to mush. Most importantly, though, this zero (and it, stripped to the bone) is the authenticity, the poverty in a way, needed to smuggle something of the second person of the Trinity into the Bible-thumped, tradition-allergic, yet still Christ-haunted world of American letters.

 

Footnotes

Silt-sifted shadow of a heat-shagged hedge
beside a beige building, a faded parking lot,
gum-dappled, ambling fissures traced in tar.

Barberry, scab-red, on beds of neat black mulch,
stopped firm by a sinuous rubber edge
near the mica-flecked grill of a heat-ticking van.

Transport of family-firming weal, it brims
with trade tools: rackets, goggles, cleats, and mud;
steel hardtail bike shoved bent-barred in the back;

dash mirror draped with a dark, beaded chain
that dangles down the body of a man,
limbs mantis-like on his black, brass-capped cross.

He’s swaying slightly, dulled with human blear,
suspended over sun-blanched leopard frames.
Each lens a different mirrored homage pays

from fish-eyed depths against the summer sky,
salmon-tinged cloud scraps clinging to his frame:
a crazy cloak, pearlescent, ludic, royal.

Vents in the beige outbuilding spit lint petals
that cling pungently—then fly across the mulch
through the blue, silt-sifted shadows of the hedge.

for & after William Shakespeare

 

…………………………………………& now drag my verse
like a moan through clay,
a dead bell
………………………unspieling its
………….own decay: gone, gone.
……………………………………………………….For this grief,
one cannot rehearse. Forget woe, they say.

 

I dwell.

This little lake has held us like a looking glass
for more than fifty years, and here I am again,
alone, unless ghosts go with us, roaming as we
so often did—as I do now—around this small
drop of water caught close within these long
familiar hills. Somewhere among the trees,
beside this beaten path, everything is still the
same—and different.

.

…………………………………….I’ve surprised myself
by coming back so soon without you—although
I knew that you would be here, somewhere near
—a whisper in the air, or a faint configuration
in a favorite tree, or simply something somehow
somewhat less clear, yet still distinct, something
that we might have talked about a time or two,
or, more likely, written of, when we were so
far apart that even distance was a kind of art.
Certainly, that was always true for you—you,
who always made even foreign things and
unfamiliar maps mean whatever you wanted.

.

This day is overcast, but a huge Ruisdael cloud
has just floated by, much like one, I think, you
said you’d seen somewhere in Italy, Florence
(was it?) almost half a hundred years ago. Time
does seem to scrap and scatter things, but keeps
them together too, just as it often did for us
when we were apart. You probably would have
called it art. I guess it was, or always is. Yet,
I’m here still, still searching for words suitable,
trying to make them mean, sending them to you.

.

How we travelled—Martin’s Ferry brought
to Boston, and then on ships to sea, back and
forth, again and again, time after time. You
knew the routes better than I did—and often
told me so. I tried, vicariously, to keep you
always in view. It’s true that we shared several
foreign places (if at different times) and some-
times even some of the same things—from
our own quite different perspectives, true. You
painted them in poetry; I in pedestrian prose.

.

A woman with a little dog has just cut across
the path ahead. Now, the dog has scampered
off, on his long leash, and the woman is trying
to reign him back in. And then, just as quick
as that, they have both gone, off the beaten path,
into the deeper trees, and I’m alone again. I can
only provide these brief details and this short
report; you, I’m sure, would make a story of it.

.

So. I take my time, and wander where I will.
I can stop and rest, or circle back. I can go
round, and around again—as I just have. But,
since I’m now near the end of what has seemed
like one of our long walks, and turning to return
again, I wanted to let you know that our little
lake, this early autumn afternoon, is calm,
the water cold and crystal clear.

—after Helen Lundeberg’s painting “Persephone Returns”

She stands alone, surrounded by a vast
apocalyptic landscape, a few dead trees
and two crumbling castles in the lowered

distant distance. Closer, the landscape
is split open; a scene of an other, under-

world, can be seen. Her yellow dress falls
almost to her feet. Her head, wrapped in
a long scarf, twisted beneath her chin,

draped over her shoulder. She holds
a fruited flowered wreath in her hand.

She is staring straight ahead, no doubt
remembering what she cannot forget.
Behind her is another mountain, topped

with a whitened castle, backlighted by
faint fading light. All the old myths are

out of date; we make our own choices,
but Persephone will continue to patrol the
borders of these precipices like a ghostly

presence we all know. We must restore
her story. We must let her silence speak.

You were a good tarantula,
wide as the hand that types this line,
eight legs long as the line itself,

little caesuras jointing segment to segment.
Mom kept you in the divorce.
Had you been male, you’d have died

before the marriage did, the husbands
of your species snuffing out like sitcoms
while the wives drag on for decades

like senators. We fed you crickets
fat from Pet City, miller moths trapped
under our Tupperware and burped

into your silky den. You pounced, supped,
collected their brittle exteriors.
When we forgot to cinch the rubber band

around your little globe’s screen ceiling,
you showed me what to do when I escaped:
épater les bourgeois—my stepfather,

paralyzed upon the asterisk of you
inside the dining room’s Still-Life with Pears,
inching toward the frame.

You led me to find a footing
in art, to need little, to want more.
Now I, too, am childless, one of the gals;

and if someone dangles a pencil
in front of my eight eyes,
I’ll rear up on my hind legs and bare

the fangs no man would dare remove.

The snowy cab to the airport.
The takeoff in starlit dark
to land in a bright Manhattan
with redbuds in Central Park,

or at Dulles (that whizbang vision
six decades have rendered retro)
to step into humid breezes
and make my way to the Metro

in March or April or May,
some family obligation
bidding me south to Virginia,
its dogwoods in celebration,

its gardens of blowsy tulips,
tall alliums, little squills.
Or Nags Head, heady with roses
in swags and arches and spills.

Or Boston: the Public Garden,
the Charles aflap with its sails.
Or kite-lifting San Francisco—
Yet somehow the spirit quails

and the heart shrinks to remember:
I find it never forgives
those flights back to the snowstorms
and darknesses where it lives.

is a spirit guide. Witness
the lives of the Hopi Ant People,
how they assisted human

survival of the fire
of the First World, the ice
of the second, quarrying

through subterranean Earth,
excavating panicled
chambers, sacred archetype

for the kiva. Diligence.
Collaboration. Accord.
Horace’s she-ant hoarder

of necessities, hardy
and industrious, heedful
of the clan, advantageous

recommendations for our
prodigious upright species.
Or Virgil’s stern battalions’

tenacity, swarming fields
for winter provisions, ranks
soldiering plunder homeward.

The ant world: dominated
and mobilized by females:
warriors, hunters, farmers,

nurses, workers, the fecund
queen controlling the whole show
while the males, flightworthy, all

huge eyes and genitalia
but small brained—the handiwork
of unfertilized eggs—do

little. If all goes well in
their nuptial flights they will
inseminate a virgin;

then die; sperm missiles, as one
well-known myrmecologist
calls them, exiled by sisters

from home. And those plucky
women!—the ones seen at work,
or war, or surveying land.

Camouflaged, timid, trap-jawed,
martial. Creeping. Scurrying.
Digging. Building underground

cities sound enough to last
decades, grain by earthy grain—
loosen, lift, haul, deposit—

for miles; tunneling steeply
as they can to the angle
of repose; the fine balance

between standing and collapse,
eloquent architecture
to house a tribe of millions

with nurseries for the young,
farms for food cultivation,
and dumps for trash or the dead—

travelling great distances,
fording streams, legs linked to jaws
in a writhing bridge, or massed

together like matted reeds
rafting harmlessly through floods,
bivouacking, foraging,

ambushing other communes
in slave raids, or slaves themselves,
stolen as pupae, hoodwinked

to believe that their captor’s
colony odor is theirs
when they emerge credulous

adults. Chemosensory
language for returning home,
tracking and trailing a meal,

transmitted through antennae
tapping, sweeping side to side,
interpreting the scent lines

of its house mates like echoed
infrasonic song. Evolved
from the solitary wasp,

now social, adaptable,
a biotic motherboard,
a superorganism

of innumerable bits,
each settlement of siblings
linking tarsi to survive.

Head, thorax, the abdomen.
We’d like to be just like them—
steady, sturdy, efficient—

and miss them for our boot-souls.
Little thing that runs the world,
Oh, Ant! scrambling over us.

Every Mardi Gras Day we would go to that stiff party
Thrown by a member of the Landrieu family:
Not sweet Mayor Moon, who had integrated the city,
But the one with a gun shop in Kenner or Metairie.

We’d stand on our feet for hours on the roped-off lawn
(A hired security guard ejecting would-be crashers)
As Rex lumbered by with its dewy debutante queen
And paunchy businessman king as old as her father.

I’d get my revenge at the poetry readings
You’d sit through confused but gallantly polite.
Your uptown friends were appalled by my lack of proper breeding.
My poet friends were convinced you were not too bright.

Not even I believed that we would last this long,
But “If Ever I Cease to Love” was Rex’s song.

It’s the fault of those Broadway musicals on my mother’s hi-fi
that I half-expected my fellow drunks to burst into song
(Cue “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific)
the night you walked into the room at my AA home group

I half-expected my fellow drunks to burst into song
while an orchestra rose from the church basement floor
the night you walked into the room at my AA home group
Love at first sight may just be remembering the future

A tall, skinny black-haired man walks into a church basement
and time stops, a heart stops, a mouth drops open
Love at first sight may just be remembering the birth room
Someone imprinted on us before we were conscious

Time stops, a heart stops, a mouth drops open
once in every musical, that showstopping moment
when rationality yields to the pull of the unconscious
I was raised on Broadway musicals from my mother’s hi-fi

A murky-blue, indifferent sky
intervened by clouds,
and front yard gardens along the road,
are in bloom on summer’s doorstep.

Then a topaz butterfly wanders
into a flock of daffodils,
its wings emblazed in hieroglyphs
I can’t decipher—

sipping the nectar and hovering
like a bookmark to mark its place
between pages of the quiet air,

and the sun is going down
in such a way that I can’t tell if it is me
or the day that is ending.

My great uncle smuggled his daughter
into the home of a Catholic family
to hide from the Nazis, rooms with rosaries

and saintly crowns, a wooden crucifix
nailed to the vestibule wall. She attended school
with the parish girls in her white smock

and leather shoes, a locket with a tiny picture
of her patron saint, Genevieve, and marched
in the All Saints Day parade, clutching her

bouquet of red roses. By ordinance,
the Germans forbid Jews from growing
anything but vegetables in their gardens—

no pristine flowers with romantic names,
only ugly things: potatoes, potatoes,
and more potatoes. Along the flanks of the road,

onlookers opened shutters, as they marched
past the old Jewish section, shattered glass,
houses burnt to cinders, rotting potatoes and turnips

strewn over the ground like intact grenades,
and she kept stabbing her fingers on the thorns,
trying to remember what hurts.

Vermont: roads, rivers do-si-doed.
Now water runs where once was road,

and Harry’s Hardware Store’s back room –
the plumbing department – is a flume.

The torrents passed.  They will return.
On Greek islands, hillsides burn.

The sky is orange, dark, and dire.
Between the water and the fire

tourists wait till help arrives.
And others – babies, husbands, wives –

have for how many years now been
trapped in a hellish in-between:

war and drought and poverty
or – also unrelenting – sea.

The Aegean, Aeschylus wrote,
blossoms with corpses. He was right.

Blossoms: the scarlet of bee balm,
lavender hostas, dewy calm.

Not far from here, they’re pitching tents
in cemeteries.  It makes sense:

cheek by jowl a house/a tomb.
They’ve had to leave their motel room.

The pandemic is almost over.
Why should the state provide their cover?

Empty houses in every town;
nowhere for families to lie down.

So distribution should undo
excess?  Gloucester in Lear hoped so.

Tourists huddle on the beach.
Solutions seem out of reach.

Under a bridge on the rail trail
a homeless man lives, fierce but frail,

barefoot and bearded, so they say.
Watch out for him.  My thoughts segue

to this screened porch, the steady croon
of busy bees all afternoon.

Foxglove, hosta, and snake root –
tempting targets, tall and sweet

flowers the humming birds attack
avidly with their needle beak.

A humming bird sideswipes a bee
and zooms away too fast to see,

its buzz in harmony with the bees.
A man emerges from the trees,

crosses Route 2, comes to a halt
in Marty’s parking lot, asphalt

glistening with rain.  And who is he?
Nobody knows his history.

The Muses help us poets tell
lies like the truth, but truth as well.

Such was the poet Hesiod’s claim.
The muses spoke to him by name,

taught him a song to glorify
both what was and what would be.

Would be…now?  What to celebrate?
Fire and flood and people wait.

Elemental apocalypse:
tourists are herded onto ships.

Migrants packed in a leaky boat
rock to and fro to stay afloat.

In the woods by the rail trail,
rain clouds lower, grim and pale.

Rivers and streams will overflow
once more.  Where should the homeless go?

Under a bridge or in a park?
The days are shorter.  It’s getting dark.

Cemetery?  Rail trail?  No.
All these are against the law.

Fire and flood and ruination:
what will be our celebration?

Listening daily to the news,
I keep an ear out for my Muse,

who inspires us to tell
lies like the truth, but truth as well.

The sky is all that I can see
through this window as I lie
and think about time and poetry.
Stars suspended sparkle: stay.
Bright, black, the sky’s an open book
inviting anyone to look.
A seminar table is piled high.
Why am I here? To give away
my books. My: category error.
Nothing is anyone’s forever.
Every poem is a mirror.
Every line, each word is rife
with meaning drawn from someone’s life.
Reach in and you will find a thread
to guide your progress as you read.
The seminar goes on and on.
Sky pink with promise: sunset? dawn?
That world outside the window – wait.
Before you go, take time to write.
Paper? I have some extra. Take.
You need a pen, for goodness’ sake?
I can offer tools, it’s true,
but the rest is up to you.
You have language, you have hands
to sketch what last night’s dream demands.
Scribble down what you love and fear.
Each day becomes a seminar
in this school of poetry
where keeping equals giving away.
Nothing was ever ours to keep.
The stars tonight: too bright for sleep.