Three Poetry Books

In the last few months of this past year, I read three books of poetry of which I’m providing brief reviews. To those who enjoy poetry or to play with words, I recommend each collection.  They’re all delightful and very different.

Holly Haworth, The Way The Moon, poems

 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2004), 71 pages.

Drawing on the 13^th moon cycles a year (every 28 days), Haworth has written 13 poems, each in four parts representing the four stages of the moon. In each section, she explores the natural world around the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southern Virginia. Haworth captures not only the cycles of life, but also how fleeting it can be. She writes with a naturalist eye, capturing and recording sightings in nature. I enjoyed her collection and reread it, but my one criticism is that at times her poetry seemed more of a list without a perceivable narrative other than the changes of the moon’s phase. 

Among the wildflowers which Haworth is enchanted with are chicory and Queen Anne’s Lace, two plants in which I have written a few poems about. (To read one of my poems titled “Chicory and Lace,” click here.) I read this book in late summer/early fall, as the last of the chicory appeared and the Queen Anne’s Lace was balling up tight, as stockings stored in a drawer for another year. 

Wayne Caldwell, Woodsmoke, poems 

(Durham, NC, Blair, 2021), 81 pages. 

Caldwell employs two voices in these poems which are all set around Mt. Pisgah in Western North Carolina. The main voice is Posey, a widower who misses his late-wife, Birdie. Posey lives alone and shuns most things modern. He still heats his home with wood, has a mule name Maud and a dog named Tomcat. According to his poems, he has learned to slow down with age. He doesn’t go to church, but his poetry is filled with Biblical allusions. While he burns most trees in his woodstove, the one exception is dogwood, because of the myth that Jesus’ cross was a dogwood. Posey shares the history of the area as well as his family and his interest in his new neighbor, Susan McFall. 

There are a few poems written by Susan McFall, whose husband had run off with a younger woman. She builds a house above Posey’s, where she explores nature and looks out for Posey. 

These are wonderful poems whose narrative captures the heart of Southern Appalachia.  

Christian Wiman, Hammer is the Prayer: Selected Poems

 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 207 pages. 

I heard Wiman speak last years at Calvin University’s Festival of Faith and Writing.  While I had heard of him before and had read a few of his poems in journals, I found myself wanting to read more of his work.  Unlike the other two books of poetry above, which have a unifying theme, this collection of selected poetry is more complex. The pieces are drawn from several Wiman’s works. If there is a unifying theme, it would be around illness and death, as many of the poems deal with Wiman’s battle with cancer. 

While many of these poems stand alone, some build upon each other. The longest poem, “Being Serious,” contains 20 parts and an epilogue, 35 pages, that captures the life of “Serious,” from his birth to death and to God. While this collection is not at all “preachy,” God is another theme that reoccurs frequently. In addition to his own poetry, there is a section of poetry by Osip Mandelstam which Wiman translated. Mandelstam was a Polish/Russian who died during Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s. 

This is a deep collection of poetry that will be worthy to be read many times.