"If there's a gap then there must be a witness": A Review of G.C. Waldrep's The Earliest Witnesses

Many of the poems, in G.C. Waldrep's collection, The Earliest Witnesses, were composed while walking. In a February 2021 poetry reading with Carcanet Press, Waldrep spoke of the realization that, after suffering from a chronic illness, he might never walk again. In "I Have a Fever and its Name is God," Waldrep is witness to an ailing body, "The nurses place bowls of fruit / around my prone body, / as sacrifices. Not to you, / they explain, / but to the heat you bear." The body becomes holy because of the fever inside of it.

Many of the poems read as prayers, which is not surprising knowing Waldrep's relationship to Christianity. In "American Goshawk," he writes, "The problem / is that I am not able to respond as you demand— / and you, it seems, are not able to respond as I demand, / or would demand. And so we wound one another." This may be an address to a fellow forest wanderer, but because of the first line, "I strode into the woods in a brute faith, certain the forest / would give me what I needed," I read it as an insistence to a divine source: please God, help guide me. The poems read very quietly: poems about the Eastern English landscape, about Welsh saints, about a very particular kind of remembering. There is, as William Wordsworth puts it, "a not unpleasant sadness" in the collection. The North American Goshawk reminds him, "I was no longer in love with my life, or with anyone's."  In "On the Feast of the Holy Infants Killed for Christ's Sake in Bethlehem," Waldrep starts, "It is banal to return to the past but a past is all I have" and finishes, rather brilliantly, with "What I love about the past is that it does not break. It is breakage. It is broken." The poems take on a Romantic melancholy. Similar to the Lake Poets and yet also a Whitman like ecstaticism for the body.

Waldrep's work is influenced by Michael Palmer, a language poet who writes, in "Notes for Echo Lake" (Codes Appearing), "Memory is kind, a kindness, a kind of unlistening." I read Waldrep's work as a collection of memories which serve to unlisten. In "[West Stow Orchard (III)]" he reflects, "That is the problem with listening, why stones refuse to do it, / categorically." Waldrep's poems aren't trying to forget the past, but to listen to the memories differently, perhaps both to the silence and the sound. In "West Stow Orchard," we find the speaker limping through an apple forest, "I held silence as in my palm, watched it stretch, flex" and then during this silence, this unlistening, he is able to contemplate time past, "Distance of was. Distance of legible syntax." Traveling with his two Canadian hosts, he is quiet again, "And so I drew from that place a reticence, as from the deck of reticence. It / lodged in my body, guest within guest." He is both a guest to these people and perhaps to this silent intruder in his body, which at times, feels like God itself.

In "Hephaestus in Norfolk," during a stroll under the East Anglican sky where rabbits are his only mammalian company, he writes, "This is all a paraphrase, a voice whispered / but when I asked 'of what?,' all I heard was the sky's / low and level drone" And isn't that the spirit he seeks? Isn't that what the unlistening is for? So, we may hear the space, the silence of our quiet gods. Of all the lines in the book, the one I keep repeating, palming over and over in my hand is in "On the Feast of the Holy Infants Killed for Christ's Sake in Bethlehem," the peculiar and wonderful line, "If there's a gap then there must be a witness." The book is titled The Earliest Witnesses and is a collection that reckons with a personal and collective past. A person who spends considerable time in an old castle. A person trained in music who, in "[Additional Eastnor Poem (III)]" is listening to the objects of earlier times, "history has no grammar, no melody; it is most / akin to the medieval drone." The poem is trying to figure out what winter's antiphon (a chanted sentence before or after a psalm) sounds like and the poet tells us, "Like a doll sewn from scraps of calm." How strange and fantastic. What is poetry but to surprise someone with the possibilities of language?

During the poetry reading, I asked Waldrep if some of these poems were eco-poems. After some debate about the definition of the word "eco," he came to the conclusion that, no, these poems were more conventional. However, I see them as ecologically focused. They are poems of landscapes, of hawks and owls, of stars and sky. But, more than that, they are poems of walking. A body walking through a castle. He spends much of the book thinking about Eastnor Castle, a place where, in "[Additional Eastnor Poem (1)],  he "catalogued & numbered the various smokes as they emerged/from the plain beyond the ridge.” In these poems, he often walks with a companion. Someone he speaks to, but never names. I am left wondering if it is the person whose life he is "not in love with" or if perhaps not a person at all, but a guide with a spiral notebook. He continues in this same poem, "Tell me more about the spiral book, I asked, but you would only / shake your head. 'I can't describe it more clearly than that,' / you said." The poem ends with a metaphor on faith, "We can't see most stars by day."

In an interview with Image Journal, Waldrep speaks of the difference between poetry and prose, "I’d say poems exhibit a level of tension on language interior to the sentence, rather than among or between sentences. . . If I can discern that tension, it’s a poem. If not, it’s prose." There is a tightness to Waldrep's work. A sense that the poem is building itself line by line. Sometimes, the poems don't move forward. They stick together. Lines glued within themselves. As I walked through the poems, I found a lovely definition of poetry, in "St. Melangell's Day Eastnor (1)"  to "Say a poem is like that, / a bit of silence the world acceded to, for a finite duration."

His work reminds me of the British artists Hamish Fulton and Andy Goldsworth. Both use nature as the medium for their work and in doing so create mystery. Parts of Waldrep's work I could understand and parts I could not. And yet, he creates a spiritual universe that I can understand very well. It is the mystery of poetry. In Fulton's work, he spends days walking, alone, silently and then presents images / maps / data of the walks. Goldsworthy takes fallen leaves and builds wondrous patterns with dark holes in the center. Waldrep's poetry falls somewhere between these two artists' work. He is asking us to walk quietly, to speak to the God inside of us and perhaps to find in his poems, these dark holes of intrigues: spaces not quite comfortable and yet places where we feel at home with ourselves.