Wow! eBook
Westminster West
Author(s): Chard deNiord (Author)
- Publisher: Tupelo Press
- Publication Date: April 24, 2025
- Language: English
- Print length: 87 pages
- ISBN-10: 1961209233
- ISBN-13: 9781961209237
Book Description
Westminster West traverses the worlds of here and beyond. Chard deNiord divines “the everydayness of the mystery . . . in which being and making poetry are the same.” From posthumous correspondence between Abelard and Heloise to such poems as “Skywriting Over The Rockies,” “With A Bone In My Heart,” and “I Call Out To You,” this collection betrays a mortal charge, bearing witness to what Emily Dickinson called “each ecstatic moment/ to which we must an anguish pay” and which Aridjis in his defiance of death calls “dust in love.”
Ambitious and masterful, deNiord renders such ancient subject matter as love, betrayal, landscape, loss, grief, aging, and ecstasy new throughout
Westminster West. He transforms the echo chamber of futility, silence, and failure by aspiring to cross over to “the other,” whatever it may be, a stone or cloud or lover or garment, or cancerous lung, with a “negative capability” that allows it, no matter its identity, to speak memorably in a way that transcends simple definition and ultimately any personal connection to it.Westminster West is divided into three sections that complement each other in their archetypal themes which range historically, mythologically, and cathectically. The poems in the first section imagine correspondences and dialogues between couples, including Heloise and Abelard, Adam and Eve, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Odysseus and Calypso, a widower and his deceased wife in the time of Covid, and a lovesick husband in the air above the Rocky Mountains and his beloved on the ground. The second section also features love poems but focuses on more instructional and metaphysical themes that vary from metaphorical pedagogy on the topic of sex to “the harsh advice of loss” to the memory of a young couple’s transcendent, romantic walk by a river. Section three moves away from love poems to mortal and environmental themes, including elegies, pastorals, and a concluding confessional credo on the bittersweet reality of poetry’s irony and blessing.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“I recently told a young editor who was guilty of agism that, unlike UFC boxers, poets get better as they age. Chard deNiord certainly proves that dictum right in his brilliantly written and always surprising Westminster West. deNiord has spent his entire career mastering the art of seamlessly blending the imagery and rhythms of the learned and natural worlds, equally comfortable writing about Enkidu, Odysseus, and Heloise and Abelard, yet ready at any given moment to shift gears and explore the secret life of lambs, fish, and locusts. The stunning metaphors and unexpected leaps in the first three poems of this volume persist until the final poem “Credo,” where the narrator writes: “Time is at the mercy of thought. / I either live in this mercy or not / singing in the dark.” We can only hope that deNiord keeps on singing and that his song reaches a current poetry audience, who, like the rest of America, is certainly in need of some uplifting.” ―
Peter Johnson, author of While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems“Chard deNiord’s poems are philosophical, clever, erudite, and spiritual in the best sense. He can invoke Roethke, Clare, Shakespeare, Abelard and Heloise, at the same time he finds a quiet joy in his rootedness to Vermont’s earth, the singing of insects and birds in the title poem. This is a poet who wrestles with memory, most vividly in “Bronchoscopy,” where a boy eager to watch his doctor father work ends up with a patient’s sputum in his eye. There is deep compassion here, too, watching a Medevac helicopter in the sky, or in “Night Nurse,” the portrait of a healer with a gift for the art of listening. There is even advice on teaching poetry to freshmen. Few poets are both lyrical and grounded, wise with years and yet so open to the new day. Such a poet is Chard deNiord.” ―
Martín Espada, author of Floaters
