Christian Wiman

Christian Wiman Poems

Christian Wiman Biography

Christian Wiman is an American poet and editor born in 1966 and raised in West Texas. He graduated from Washington and Lee University and has taught at Northwestern University, Stanford University, Lynchburg College in Virginia, and the Prague School of Economics. In 2003, he became editor of the oldest American magazine of verse, Poetry, a role he stepped down from in June 2013. Wiman now teaches literature and religion at Yale Divinity School. His first book of poetry, The Long Home (Story Line Press, 1997) and reprinted by Copper Canyon Press (2007), won the Nicholas Roerich Prize. His 2010 book, Every Riven Thing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), was chosen by poet and critic Dan Chiasson as one of the best poetry books of 2010.[6] His book Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (Copper Canyon Press, 2007) reviewed by The New York Times Sunday Book Review, is "a collection of personal essays and critical prose on a wide range of subjects: reading Paradise Lost in Guatemala, recalling violent episodes from the poet's youth, traveling in Africa with an eccentric father, as well as a series of penetrating essays on poets, poetry, and poetry's place in our lives. The book concludes with a portrait of Wiman's diagnosis with a rare cancer, and a clear-eyed declaration of what it means — for an artist and a person — to have faith in the face of death." His poems, criticism, and personal essays appear widely in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker. Clive James describes Wiman’s poems as being “insistent on being read aloud, in a way that so much from America is determined not to be. His rhymes and line-turnovers are all carefully placed to intensify the speech rhythms, making everything dramatic: not shoutingly so, but with a steady voice that tells an ideal story every time.)

The Best Poem Of Christian Wiman

Night's Thousand Shadows

1. deathbed
There is a word that is not water,
has nothing to do with heat or light,
is unrelated to any one pain
though the torn body tears itself further
trying to speak it.
There is a sound
beyond all the sounds that I have made,
the needs that one by one I've tried to name.
It burns clear in the eyes searching mine,
the lips beginning to bleed again,
her hand squeezing my hand,
pleading and pleading that I understand.

2. living will
All afternoon in the afterlife
of little things that love,
or pain, or need could not let go of
I hunt for the will
that will let me let you go.

I am distracted and slow—
all the grainy faces
in old photographs, letters
from the dead, deeds to places
that are only air,

some bright nowhere
of broad fields and sunlight
that was my idea of heaven
one long afternoon
of clouds and steady rain

when you sat and explained
where a garden was, a well,
excited by it, the hell
ahead of you
just a brief tightness at your heart.

Outside in the yard, crickets start,
cry here and here and here,
night's thousand shadows growing tall.
And now I have it, formal, final.
I touch each keepsake like a wall.


3. going
In the hard light and hum
of the room to which I've come
to stay, I watch the clock,
and wait, and hour by hour
begin to disappear.
Movements, mutterings: the brain
darkens like a landscape. Pain
in the pale arterial hills
flashes and vanishes,
takes with it one whole year.
Cotton and killdeer, a cloud
looks down, something's happened
in the wellhouse, someone runs
through tall trees, breathe and breathe,
is it my hand you hold?
The fever climbs. You grow cold,
then warm, now cold again,
a hive of nerves in the skin.
Some glimmer breaks through
and I bend whispering as fear
like a wind shakes you,
I'm right here, I'm right here...

Midnight, moonlight gauzing
the walls, the iron and umber
of intensive care:
I watch as it swells and falls
the puttied scar at your heart,
and read each beat and falter
on a screen and match my breathing
to the breathing of a machine
to know this time as it passes,
each moment as it goes—
until, early, you shudder
and quieten, blood gases
begin to rapidly rise
and somewhere behind your eyes
I fall in fragments away:
a child surprised at his play,
encroached upon by air,
a shattered man near dawn,
something about the way
he holds so still, his hair.

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