The Wanderer

by Christine Gosnay

"In The Wanderer, Christine Gosnay writes, 'The beginning of the marriage? Oh yes. / A bitter cold day, in a public park. No swans. / I was the only woman there.' The first time I read those lines, I recognized the voice of the wanderer as the voice of our collective, internal exile from America. I was shocked by the strength of that recognition. I hadn't known, before I read these poems, that I had no words to speak my exile. Gosnay gave me words." —Shane McCrae

Genres: Poetry

36 pages, Unknown Binding

First published May 1, 2019

Reviews

[Claudia Putnam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This beautiful chapbook from Beloit Poetry Journal is packed with lines and images to seduce and intrigue. Here are some that I loved:

The hawthorn branches pass the moon up,
hand over smooth hand.
Years go by with few important changes.

....
Someone else is roping her stone around your neck.

--From Wild Hawthorn

A scientist will call anything beautiful if it is new.
--From The Spear

That my desire goes out to you and does not return is
evidence that I travel through a region
with central boundaries that are not defined.

If there is anything original about this, it is the questions.
--From Sidereal Message

In the past I have arranged for a great deal to be taken from me
--The Space Inside

If this isn't 5 stars for me it's just that the title is allusive and IMO doesn't quite land on the OE song. In THE Wanderer, the warrior grieves his exile, the loss of his ability to return home, the loss of his love, which is his liege... kind of different, though at least here Gosnay does attempt to represent a kind of surrender that may approach what the narrator in THE Wanderer is talking about. It may not be something that we can understand anyway. The loss of his compass...okay, she gets that. But mostly, the loss of his CAUSE. Anything he does now is for no reason. For his own survival, which is no reason at all. He is also wrestling with enormous guilt in not having predeceased his lord.

Anyhow, beautiful book with lots of relevance to many of any gender in our time.

[Lee Patrick Patterson]

Around two years ago, I stumbled on Christine Gosnay's "Strangers" a poem from Even Years, and thought that her work demonstrated a necessary voice in the poetry genre. That it can take some time to become accustomed to reading the poems in these collections is only a testament to their tempered design. I hope that her work continues to find new audiences.

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christine Gosnay's chapbook "The Wanderer" contains some of the finest poetry I have read from a poet of the new century so far. Gosnay is not afraid to use imagery from nature, but she does it in a fresh way.

Yellow heat strafes
the hand-deep water
where the shade-eyed darner makes its notch.

At the same time, she also revivifies the commonplace of living.

It means that when I pull nothing out from the soft center
where my stomach, pale and useful, longs,

pulling as if at a doll's string to say ache
in a bright, unrecognizable voice,

I move my ind by the hand from the dark blue room
where it is thinking-feeling

toward the edge of the blank graph...

Her poems are collages of experiences, images, and thoughts that still maintain an overall unity of feeling and thinking. Unlike many collections, "The Wanderer" does not falter or contain poems that show obvious need for more rewriting. There is a consistency of tone and craft throughout.

Gosnay's work here shows a poet in prime and vital voice worth reading and rereading.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here again the congruence of German romantic philology, ancient mathematics, and a modernism that understands "in an image, compression creates dithering," navigates the "theory of mind," one bellwether of this writer's rather startling ambition: "Yesterday the Snake River passed me | a dozen times more than the hours I drove. | Only once I stopped, for huckleberry ice, | my tongue's unstopping want." It takes skill and a sense of reiterative danger ("once"/"tongue"; "stopped"/"unstopping") to leave these metonymies for who will find them. Here is the close of a poem in the voice of Psyche -- "The Space Inside":

Why each night this roar of stars, as if I'd lost
by day the fullness of my imagination?
I will frighten you by saying
you have never seen a portrait of a sun.
I wonder at the drunken tracks he draws over Venus.
Space is a female vessel.
She watches you make your cool appraisal.

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A chapbook of poems about love, desire, the universe, and nature.

from Stopping Alone in Gold Country: "The past skips its question in my head as it does— / asking my why I left before I had loved— / where the leaves course downstream with the sun. // My jeans pocket is full of lovely rocks / because I will never come here again."

from New State: "Yesterday the Snake River passed me / a dozen times more than the hours I drove. / Only once I stopped, for huckleberry ice, / my tongue's unstopping want."

from I Permit Myself to Return to a River: "How the sheer curtains move the light, / bargain between origin and entrance. / Dark room, bright land."

[Brandon Amico · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vibrant, clever, and intimate poems that illuminate the vastness of our internal spaces.