Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair by poet Christian Wiman (Hammer Is the Prayer; Once in the West) serves as counterbalance to a world inclined to confident statements and loud rally cries. It claims little certainty, choosing instead to focus on the universal and the ineffable in its mélange of critical essays, personal anecdotes, quoted passages, and poems.
The essays are full of insights on poets like Lucille Clifton or Emily Dickinson, but the poems punctuating those longer entries are the thing. They exceed every expectation, offering light and sound and silence, as seen in lines from "Ars Poetica," a poem in two parts: "--a plum and othering dusk/ something renunciatory in the light,/ until the sparrow takes the old tree's shape/ and the trees untreed are everywhere./ If I could let go/ If I could know what there is to let go/ If I could chance the night's improvidence/ and be the being this hard mercy means." Similar to a commonplace book, Zero at the Bone is an uncommon work from an uncommonly beautiful mind, full of compassion and built of dazzling intellect. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian