Christian Wiman Libri

A moving meditation on memory, oblivion, and eternity by one of our most celebrated poets.

A visionary selection from one of America’s foremost poets One of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American poetry, Christian Wiman has forged a singular style that fuses a vivid and propulsive music with clear-eyed realism, wry humor, and visionary lament. In his “daring and urgent” (The New York Times Book Review) memoir, My Bright Abyss, he asks, “What is poetry’s role when the world is burning?” Hammer Is the Prayer: Selected Poems might be read as an answer to that question. From the taut forms of his first book to the darker, more jagged fluencies of his second, into the bold and pathbreaking poems of his last two collections, Hammer Is the Prayer bears the reckless, restless interrogations and the slashing lyric intensity that distinguish Wiman’s verse. But it also reveals the dramatic and narrative abilities for which he has been widely praised—the junkyard man in “Five Houses Down” with his “wonder-cluttered porch” and “the eyesore opulence / of his five partial cars,” or the tragicomic character in “Being Serious” who suffers “the world’s idiocy / like a saint its pains.” Hammer Is the Prayer brings together three decades of Wiman’s acclaimed poetry. Selected by the author, these poems reveal the singular music and metaphysical urgency that have attracted so many readers to his work and firmly assert his place as one of the most essential poets of our time.

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.

Christian Wiman braids poetry, memoir, and criticism to create an inspired, career-defining work.

Mein Gott mein heller Abgrund In den all mein Sehnen nicht gehen will Wieder komme ich an den Rand all meines Wissens Und nichts glaubend glaube ich dies. So beginnt Christian Wimans wilde, wunderschöne, mutige und poetische Pilgerreise nach einer Krebsdiagnose zurück zum Glauben an einen Gott, den er - oder der ihn - aufgegeben zu haben schien. Das beste moderne Buch über den Glauben. New York Times, David Brooks Vielleicht braucht jede Generation einen Autor, der vom ausgetretenen Weg abweicht und dadurch den Zugang zum Glauben erneuert, wie es Christian Wiman tut. Wall Street Journal, David Yezzi