Grove Press
Grove Press
Grove Press
“[Weigl’s] subjects reveal a great deal of wisdom about life. Weigl is a meditative poet without being sententious; he writes about nature and death without melodrama or pity.” –Ken Tucker, The Baltimore Sun
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. It is a moving reflection on the deep and abiding connections to place, family, and old friends.
“[Weigl’s] subjects reveal a great deal of wisdom about life. Weigl is a meditative poet without being sententious; he writes about nature and death without melodrama or pity.” –Ken Tucker, The Baltimore Sun
“This collection is suffused with the search for beauty, along with the lurking question of whether or not beauty can provide a counterbalance to pain.” –Leonard Kress, The Ohioana Quarterly
“Like all great poets, Bruce Weigl tries to make sense of the idiotic mix of beauty and pain in the world. In The Unraveling Strangeness, he weighs the difference between what people can bear and what they must. ‘We hide so many fears inside, so many lives,’ he says, and while his perfectly turned mid-American lines reveal the disappointments and regrets of the lost and unloved, he somehow holds on to a childlike wonder–also American–yearning after a misplaced innocence and withheld forgiveness we all deserve.” –Stewart O’Nan, author of Wish You Were Here
“Because Bruce Weigl’s poems are so plainspoken and so incorrigibly beautiful, they’re dangerou
s. The Unraveling Strangeness is a book to read and reread, all the way to hell and back. You’ll be a better American for it when you get home.” –Russell Banks, author of The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction
“Bruce Weigl is unafraid to give us the ugliest information, but the poem is beautiful. Perhaps he is afraid, but knows it has to be done for beauty’s sake.” –Grace Paley, author of Begin Again: Collect Poems
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 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.
Excerpted from The Unraveling Strangeness
” Copyright 2002 by Bruce Weigl. Reprinted with permission from Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.
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