THE LONG HOME

by Christian Wiman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 21, 1998

Winner of this year's Roerich Prize, Wiman's austere volume derives its plain aesthetic from the landscape in which it dwells: the west Texas where his family settled in the early part of the century, a terrain as spare and still as the calm centers of Wiman's tight and meditative poems. Though very much a family historian, Wiman's ""he"" remains smartly impersonal as he tries to recover a fading past of a woman who communed with storms (""Revenant""), another who's losing her hearing (""Hearing Loss""), and a dying fisherman solaced with his friends' fish tales (""Fisherman""). The thoughtful narratives work toward their hardscrabble insights: a half-standing house in a clearing leads him to think ""a nun could suddenly want his life' (""Clearing""); his father's profound aphorisms resonate in ""What I Know,"" and he understands impermanence, and his presence as ""only a passing/havoc"" in ""Elsewhere."" The long narrative poem of the title chronicles a family's history as it settles western Texas in the early '20s--how they eked a living from the unyielding earth, first sharecropping, then owning their own farm through drought and depression. Biblical in tone, Wiman's tale of ordinary madness, fire and death, and loss ends amidst the rubble of the farmhouse, in the ever-present stillness of empty space. Wiman finds God in this past, in lines that are like the rain in ""Lakeview Cemetery"": clean and elliptical. The debut of a poet we will reckon with over time.

Pub Date: Nov. 21, 1998

ISBN: 1556592698

Page Count: 80

Publisher: Story Line

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998

Categories: FICTION