The Hurtling

These poems are grounded in the things of daily life - persimmons, jury duty, vises, giving blood, geese. From there we journey. "Vise" for example, begins with a familiar tool to become a meditation on heaviness, on metals, gems, wealth, and blood, and finally on plutonium which delivers a warning not to enter "the darkness within / a closed mouth / how it holds us this love of pig / and ingot bullion..." Many of the poems (they could be called meditations - many of them read like the condensed free movements of the mind in meditation) contain distant echoes of Christianity, but the touch is very light, often no more than traces of old faith and practice embedded in language. We find "psalming bees," and "her garden her gospel." In "Honey", an angel delivers a scroll. There is no church here, but the poems are so permeated with a sense of the sacredness of life and of being (in spite of their elemental darkness) that even - especially - without a church reverence prevails. That extends to language. In all forms of communication except for mathematics, memory and language interact with experience to effect telling. Witte attends to these interactions, and involves the reader. The poems are largely without punctuation, a device that is true to how we think and feel, but also gives the reader space to make some of his own associations. I can't identify a favorite poem, although certain ones stand out. "Deluge" is a fine homage to Leonardo's late prophetic drawings of the implications of the Renaissance: apocalypse delivered by tools and geometry. "Glissade" is a beautiful (but, unlike my words here, completely unhackneyed) celebration of love in a dark time. I don't understand "Honey" but that makes it no less magical or suggestive of the joy and the price of word that come as gifts. And I have to confess that I like "Vise" very much.