The Unraveling Strangeness: Poems

by Bruce Weigl

Bruce Weigl's poetry has been acclaimed by C. K. Williams as "powerful and frightening, poems [that] force us to repudiate our comfortable uncertainties, our drowsy vagueness," and Carolyn Forche has said that Bruce Weigl "is one of the most important poets of our time." With Song of Napalm and followed by Archeology of the Circle, Weigl has established himself as a poet of incomparable power and lyric fury. For Weigl, home is where the heart is and where the soul must reside. To leave one's home is to leave a vital part of oneself behind, and to return is to reconnect with one's history. The Unraveling Strangeness represents the record of a man in the middle of his life who comes back to his home after being away for twenty-five years. In these poems we find odes to New York City neighborhood life -- live from the front stoop. Poems such as "Hinckley and Nixon" point to a larger national turmoil that seeps its way into the consciousness of the mean streets of New York. Weigl closes with poems penned by a world-weary eye that extends childlike tribute to the wonders of the country. At stake in this journey is a rediscovery of deep and abiding connections to place, to family, and to old friends. Reginald Gibbons has raved that Bruce Weigl's poetry contains "a largeness of spirit that is filled with both hard memories and forgiveness."

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published November 13, 2002

Reviews

[Peycho Kanev · Rating 3 out of 5]

HOME

I didn’t know I was grateful
for such late-autumn
bent-up cornfields

yellow in the after-harvest
sun before the
cold plow turns it all over

into never.
I didn’t know
I would enter this music

that translates the world
back into dirt fields
that have always called to me

as if I were a thing
come from the dirt,
like a tuber,

or like a needful boy. End
lonely days, I believe. End the exiled
and unraveling strangeness.

[Mia Tryst · Rating 5 out of 5]

So few pages, so few words and yet, so much is clear: Bruce Weigl is a humble poet with a poet's sensitivity: building up every poem, word by word by word in between breaths, silence and gravitas. Sample Poem:

Oh, Atonement

Through lonely motel walls
I heard that human ah
of pleasure from a woman
with a man,
I don't remember who I was then,
only that I was
alive again somehow,
so I sat up all that night,
grateful for whatever
noisy business they could give me,

but there was never enough,
so I entered the stream
and moved then
at my ease
with the current
and the dark
shapes of my baggage
through a winding
journey of a life
until some people
murdered the truth.

Yet this evening,
along the roads
I have come home to
after the many deaths
and the many betrayals,
I can watch a giant
thunderhead
grow and form itself
like a living thing
into one corner
of our flat Ohio sky
and I can say,
This is where I'll pray.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really adored much of this—these poems are quieter than what I've read of Weigl before now (which, to be fair, has been limited), and it looks good on him.

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weigl's poems are accessible to the average reader. He has written about Vietnam, but these cover a wide range of topics.