Wednesday, February 13, 2019

After the Others by Bruce Weigl :: Book Reviews Poetry Essays

After the Others by Bruce Weigl With a new century approaching, Bruce Weigls twelfth collection of poetry, After the Others, calls us to expect on the millenniums indeterminate edge. This book, opening with the last four limits of Miltons Paradise Lost, parallels our expiry from this century with Adams fearful exit from Eden, beyond which is all abyss, / Eternity, whose end no eye can reach (Paradise Lost). Weigl posits that we stand at the centurys uncertain gate naked, cold, and greedy he refers often to a looming future, to give break through our collapsing present more urgency. Weve forgotten, he says, how to love and live simply, how to write candidly and well. With all this forgetting, weve also forgotten that God gave Adam and Eve a chance to recreate a world mirroring the beauty and goodness of the upset one. Yet, as their heirs, weve constructed an earth where we live inside a history that no longer remembers us. Weigl wonders if we reinvent history to give ourselves identity, rendering ourselves powerless because were unconscious mind of our present. He examines human suffering, hedonism, and desire, wondering if we can re-learn how to love, be loved, and forgive. As a mature poet working at the height of his craft, Weigl writes that we must weed out the snare of the devil in our hearts to pass through the patent end of the twentieth century bravely, with grace. After the Others returns to themes of previous books. In sweetish Lorain (1996), forties the States is depicted through life in charred, industrial Ohio, and in What Saves Us (1992) the speaker relies on religious epiphanies to rescue him from what hell regret. Weigls colloquial language, as in previous books, comes unadorned I didnt know what I didnt know. I didnt want a life of anything then, only a life. Weigls line and stanzas vary he uses couplets, tercets and quatrains, as well as undivided lines. He relies on internal and slant rhyme, but occ asionally writes infelicitous lines She sing out loud about a cloud. His tone is generally ironic, as in Cult of the Car somebody wanted a eruption job / on a gorgeous freeway in America but it doesnt matter who / this near the millennium.

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