Divine Fire: Poems

Georgia Review Books

by David Woo

How to find wisdom and spiritual sustenance in a time of crisis and uncertainty? In Divine Fire , David Woo answers with poems that move from private life into a wider world of catastrophe and renewal. The collection opens in the most personal space, a bedroom, where the chaotic intrusions of adulthood revive the bafflements of childhood. The perspective soon widens from the intimacies of love to issues of national and global import, such as race and class inequality, and then to an unspoken cataclysm that is, by turns, a spiritual apocalypse and a crisis that could be in the news today, like climate change or the pandemic. In the last part of the book, the search for ever-vaster scales of meaning, both sacred and profane, finds the poet trying on different personas and sensibilities―comic, ironic, earnest, literary, self-mythologizing― before reaching a luminous détente with the fearful and the sublime. The divine fire of lovers fading in memory―“shades of the men in my blood”―becomes the divine fire of a larger spiritual reckoning. In his new book of poems, Woo provides an astonishing vision of the world right now through his exploration of timeless themes of love, solitude, art, the body, and death.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2021

Reviews

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such a thought-provoking collection of poems, but it was also dense in the topics it covers. I was so taken to Woo’s distinct word choices that placed particular weight in his writing style. These poems were haunting, apocalyptic, called upon the divine beings—it was a true focus on the sacred and profane that called for your attention to the world around us. Furthermore, so many of these poems are visceral which, again, is definitely a result of Woo’s particular choice in words that will send shivers down your spine.

I wish I had spent a little more time reading these with more care, but it’s definitely a collection I’ll have to revisit in the future. It feels far too relevant in today’s climate and society.

Some favorites: “On Being Asked What’s New,” “For Love,” “The Leaf Blower Among the Swimming Pool Lights,” “Revelation: The Light,” “Double Soul,” “The Visitation of God,” “Divine Fire (After Luis Cernuda’s ‘Apologia Pro Vita Sua’),” “In Praise of Disquiet,” and “The Death of the Man Who Was a God”

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is a 5-star book, though to be honest, I'm not sure I'm smart enough to know. These are challenging poems, thick with reference, alive to seemingly every rhetorical possibility in the language. Through it all we hear a modest, questioning, self-effacing narrator who is aching to know what is true and what is projection, what is real and what is intimation. There are no easy answers, of course--only more questions, and an affirmation that uncertainty is inescapably human. "No more apocalypses!" the fanatics never cry./Extinction is bliss for those who resent human life.