… Hammer Is the Prayer by Christian Wiman, reviewed. (Hat tip, G. E. Reutter.)
The sense of impermanence, the speaker’s inability to communicate an emotion, the inscrutability of the natural world—these themes wouldn’t be out of place in the sort of poems that flaunt their modernity, that tend to refuse any kind of formal whalebone. But Wiman’s deceptively retrograde rhyme scheme conspires to move the reader to a conclusion that’s all the more harrowing for being set in sing-song trimeter.
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