World Without End

Poems

Claude Wilkinson

• Publisher: Slant Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781639820382
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

World Without End, Claude Wilkinson's fourth poetry collection, takes its title from the last words of the Gloria Patri. But the preceding words--"as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be"-- also echo the book's overarching theme: the seemingly infinite spiritual implications woven throughout our experience in the natural world. The poems are organized into meditations on family and community, spiritual worldviews, art and its insights, and nature's endless source of ever-relevant metaphor. The poems also speak to each other across these sections--and even with poems in Wilkinson's earlier collections. World Without End opens with "Among Other Things, My Father Teaches Me How to Mow Grass, " exploring the relationship of father and son, something that is revisited later on in "Salvia." Both poems long for conciliation between father and son through yard work--restoring order in the garden, a lost Eden.Wilkinson's gift for ekphrastic poetry remains strong in World Without End, though here it is more referential and allusive. Rather than engaging specific works of art, the poet strives to understand the broader aesthetic visions of figures like Theodore Dreiser, Vincent Van Gogh, and Walter Anderson. In the title poem, a reference to Edward Hicks's The Peaceable Kingdom suggests art's ephemeral yet sustaining power--and an irrepressible yearning for a return to paradise.

IV

Weed

What easy, gluttonous bumble rolls

through the dusty-rose desserts of clover

till I rip the cord of my mower

for the first time each year.

Were it not for neighbors and vanity’s sake,

I’d simply let them be as beautiful as they are,

all the lawn daisies with their halos

of white rays circling pastel heads

on near impossible to nip, supple

green stems waving like standards

in early April’s chilly breeze—

and not just them, but the self-heal

and creeping buttercups, the star-shapes

of ragwort, bumper crops of dandelion,

slender speedwell, or Veronica filiformis

by its fancier handle, the purplish and white sprays

of bull thistle and wild carrot,

a skulk of foxtail, velvet leaf, lady’s thumb,

lamb’s quarters, dead nettle,

such orange wings of hawkweed,

the brilliant, brilliant yellow wood sorrel

which must spring up overnight

like a fairy tale or Jonah’s beloved

gourd and seems too sacred to kill.

Wasps

Then without fail the wasps come,

pheromonal ladies awakened

by our warming sun—

bitter, syrupy-brown sprites,

maybe from under an elm stump,

zooming in turbulent flight, as if notes

of Vaughan Williams o...