Strange What Rises

While much of America is roiling with heady hysterias, along comes Whitehead with quiet, observational poems that impale the heart. “All at once you’re out of love again,” he says, “and it’s like the earth has jerked on its axis”—gorgeous, lapidary lines that have clearly risen from the earth, through the poet, through heart and brain, and, in every poem, established a newfound state of strange grace and shrewd balance. These poems are not soft and harmless; don’t for a minute, expect that. They’re energies that establish the ground we all rise from, and they give us a place to stand while we watch his “hanged man kick the air.” —Renée Ashley,The View from the Body

It is such a pleasure to sit with Gary J. Whitehead’s latest book, A Strange What Rises, as these meditations continually search for the profound with deep attentiveness, whether in moments of stillness or in moments of tumult. I was hooked from the very first poem, “Wild Columbine.” Here is a keen eye for the lyric sweep of a poem braided with a narrative propulsion. Whitehead never averts his gaze, whether in service to beauty or in witness to the painful. He says, “Let me raise the storms,” and he does just that, with "an avian choir, / days with repeating phrases, // whole summers of arias.”—Brian Turner, A Phantom Noise