The Earliest Witnesses

G.C. Waldrep

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781800170377
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

An Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021

This is how the witness ends: touch, withdraw; touch again.

'American Goshawk', the opening poem in this collection, concludes with these words. The word 'witness' comes with a wealth of meanings. The poems are, at one level, acute observations of the world in its physical and dramatic detail. But eye and ear detect, in what is there, shadows and figures of what is beyond, what imparts to the things perceived their deeper form, significance and beauty. Such seeing is a craft, a form of translation that engages not just the surface but the essence of what is seen, what the poet calls 'eye-proofs of the epiphenomenal world'. The ophthalmologist in 'A Mystic's Guide to Arches' keeps asking, 'Can you see this?' And we can, seeing it more fully each time we re-read the poem and the separate things configure into a single, powerful seeing. Language obscures - until it releases what it names to the senses.

The Earliest Witnesses is G.C. Waldrep's British debut.

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CONTENTS

1. Title Page
2. American Goshawk
3. Caynham Camp
4. I Have a Fever and Its Name Is God
5. A Mystic’s Guide to Arches
6. Croyland Abbey
7. Mutter Museum with Owl
8. Native, Like a Quince
9. North Walsham
10. Broken Things
11. Never-Ending Bells
12. Shall Bear Upon His Shoulder in the Twilight
13. On the Feast of the Holy Infants Killed for Christ’s Sake in Bethlehem
14. In Him Were Hidden All Our Tongues
15. Blue Heron, Marlborough
16. Jones Mountain Eclogue
17. The Constellations
18. On Being Mistaken for “Part of the Art” at the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh
19. Only Coerce Yourself Gently, & Show
20. (Wordwell I)
21. (Wordwell II)
22. (Wordwell III)
23. On Hearing a Cuckoo at Pentecost
24. Pentecost, Risby
25. [West Stow Orchard (I)]
26. [West Stow Orchard (II)]
27. Denizen (West Stow Orchard)
28. [West Stow Orchard (III)]
29. [West Stow Orchard (IV)]
30. [West Stow Orchard (V)] vi
31. To the Bank Holiday Caravans in Eastnor Park
32. [St Melangell’s Day, Eastnor (I)]
33. [St Melangell’s Day, Eastnor (II)]
...