Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair by poet Christian Wiman (Hammer Is the Prayer; Once in the West; My Bright Abyss) 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. Wiman wanted to create "a book true to the storm of forms and needs, the intuitions and impossibilities, that I feel myself to be. That I feel life to be." Even his prose is driven by poetic impulses and, for Wiman, poetry is a reflection of--or a voicing of--unknowable things rooted in spiritual faith.
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." Zero at the Bone is a book about doubt and despair, love and belief--and always about the power of language. Similar to a commonplace book, it is an uncommon work from an uncommonly beautiful mind, full of compassion and built of dazzling intellect. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian