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Survival Is a Style, Christian Wiman's first collection of new poems in six years, may be his best book yet.
His many readers will recognize the musical and formal variety, the voice that can be tender and funny, credibly mystical and savagely skeptical. But there are many new notes in this collection as well, including a moving elegy to the poet's father, sharp observations and distillations of modern American life, and rangy poems that merge and juxtapose different modes of speech and thought. The cumulative effect is extraordinary.
Reading Survival Is a Style, one has the sense one is encountering work that will become a permanent part of American literature.
His many readers will recognize the musical and formal variety, the voice that can be tender and funny, credibly mystical and savagely skeptical. But there are many new notes in this collection as well, including a moving elegy to the poet's father, sharp observations and distillations of modern American life, and rangy poems that merge and juxtapose different modes of speech and thought. The cumulative effect is extraordinary.
Reading Survival Is a Style, one has the sense one is encountering work that will become a permanent part of American literature.
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Reviews
"In this new collection, his poetry takes us, once more, on a metaphysical trip through the essential 'aloneness' of Being and its endless manifestations. Wiman's art is concerned with holding mirrors up to our (seemingly) godless existence, searching for hidden divinity in everyday reflections . . . there is great virtuosity and variance of subject to be found within"
but above all it is a struggle, a struggle for faith, for understanding, and for acceptanc
"Wiman's greatest asset is his taste for simplicity . . . But these simple melodies are not without deep resonance and even occasional dissonance, as themes of spiritual doubt and physical illness recur throughout the book's four sections . . . So thoroughly charmed was I that I failed to notice I had boarded the wrong train, hopping off just before it tore out of Manhattan"
though I would have indeed welcomed a moment more in Wiman's musical company."