The Earth Avails: Poems

by Mark Wunderlich

The anticipated new book by Mark Wunderlich, whose poetry “reminds us how fully the spirit can illuminate the depths” (The New Yorker)

A Publishers Weekly Book of the Week

With your sorghum broom you sweetened my path, pulled
the woolen shawl around me while I slept.
 
That the lightning struck the willow
and did not fall—for this I am grateful.
     —from “Heaven-Letter” 

The Earth Avails evokes an all-but-lost history, when every setting, thought, and action was imbued with ritual: here’s the prayer said in a time of sickness; here’s the blessing spoken upon entering the house; here’s the letter from heaven that protects its holder from harm and misfortune. Rendered in part from folkloric and historical sources, Mark Wunderlich’s poems reinvent these traditions with lyrical and emotive force for a new century of readers.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published February 4, 2014

About the author

Mark Wunderlich was born in Winona, Minnesota and grew up in rural Fountain City, Wisconsin. He attended Concordia College’s Institut für Deutsche Studien, and later the University of Wisconsin from which he received a BA in German Literature and English. Wunderlich earned a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University’s School of the Arts Writing Division where he studied with J.D. McClatchy, William Matthews and Lucie Brock-Broido, among others.

Wunderlich’s first book, The Anchorage, was published in 1999 by the University of Massachusetts Press, and received the Lambda Literary Award. His second book, Voluntary Servitude, was published by Graywolf Press in 2004. A third volume of poems titled The Earth Avails, is forthcoming from Graywolf in 2014. He has published individual poems in The Paris Review, Yale Review, Slate, Tin House, Poetry, Ploughshares, Boston Review and elsewhere. His work has been included in over thirty anthologies and has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. His work has been translated into Italian, Bulgarian and Swedish.

As a teacher, Wunderlich has taught in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, Ohio University and San Francisco State University. He has taught undergraduate writing and literature courses at Stanford University, Barnard College and Stonehill College. Since 2003 he has been a member of the Literature Faculty at Bennington College in Vermont where he also serves as a member of the core faculty in the Graduate Writing Seminars. In 2012 he was named the Director of Poetry at Bennington—a series of on-campus readings, lectures and short residencies by prominent American and international poets.

Wunderlich is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University where he also served as a Jones Lecturer. He received two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Amy Lowell Trust. He is also the recipient of Writers at Work Award, the Jack Kerouac Prize, and a fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the MacDowell Colony. In 2012 he received an Editor’s Prize from the Missouri Review and was also selected for a residency at the Arteles Creativity Center in Hämeenkyrö, Finland.

As an Arts Administrator, he has worked for the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Poets & Writers, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center where he was Acting Director. He currently chairs the Artistic Advisory Board at the Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, New York. He also serves on the Advisory Board of Noemi Press.

Wunderlich lives in New York’s Hudson Valley near the village of Catskill.

Reviews

[Jayson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved this book. Wunderlich takes his rural early- and seemingly current life and the particularly Germanic character of that upbringing and produced this volume. Using some historic sources—Anglo Saxon poems, a book of prayers he found, the PA German tradition of heaven-letters— he offers contemporary renditions of this material as well as poems entirely of his own creation. Some of these poems include the word “prayer” but they seemed to me at least to be a prayer in the sense of a momentary wish, rooted in a clear-eyed appraisal of the present and a sense of their own futility. That at any rate is how it seemed to me. Alas I am of PA German/“Dutch” stock and I am, in some sense “religious” in that I lazily attend services of a particular denomination. So I am not I guess entirely unbiased.

I found out about Mark wunderlich while deep in a fit of Rilke; he’s teaching a course on Rilke at one of those wonderful (and to me recently discovered) adult creative ed programs that seem like such a lifeline to the non-creatively professionally employed who feel like their working lives are horrifically dismal and generally unfulfilling.

[Michalina · Rating 3 out of 5]

2,75 stars

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful writing and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the more religiously voiced poems. Personally, I found few poems that really held me in place and stopped me.

[Michael P.]

I have little tolerance for religious mumb0-jumbo and rewriting religious mumbo-jumbo is the essence of this book. I read the first nine poems, only liked one OK, and bailed.

[Kasandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems, many of which are prayers, are full of wonder at the natural world, our place in it, and the vagaries of time. They celebrate both living and lost locations, and are gently illuminating and verbally surprising at the same time. This book feels pastoral in both the countryside and the religious sense, and the fact that I enjoyed it immensely even though I am an atheist and don't normally gravitate to anything based on works of prayer says a lot. The book is not at all preachy, don't get the wrong idea, though it is tender without being overly sentimental; the documents and research beneath it have to do with ritual prayer. I especially enjoyed Waumandee, Driftless Elegy, Ram, Palatine Bridge, Heaven-Letter, Fire Letter, January Thaw, and Lent.

[Denise Huntington · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this book from a Goodreads giveaway which I chose to enter because I love poetry. Until now, I have not liked much of the poetry I have read by Goodreads authors.

However, I loved this book. I read 2/3 of it in one sitting then set it aside and forgot about it while in a flurry of my own writing and artistic pursuits. I picked it up again this weekend and it brought me right back into the natural world of the coyote, the stream, the hawk. I am a small town girl, at home in nature, and Mark's devotional prayer-like poems to Nature resonate with me. I am NOT religious but, if I were, it would be the natural world that I would pray to and praise. I am now looking for other books by Mark Wunderlich to read.

[Gail · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings about this collection. While some poems made me tear up a bit, the rest made me feel very uncomfortable without even sending forward a definite feeling or meaning. I got lost in fancy words resting in places they didn't quite fit. I plan on rereading this in a few days to see if I can perhaps gain a better understanding of what Wunderlich was trying to communicate with these poems. As for right now, however, meanings are still cloudy and I am still unsatisfied. 3/5 for the more wonderful poems.

[Terri · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Earth Avails is a collection of poems by Mark Wunderlich. Before this book, I was not aware of this poet. However, I have to say that reading this collection puts you in a serene, countryside type of setting. While many of these poems are prayers of some type, these pieces also include a sense of history, place and are descriptive enough to put you right there with the narrator. It was an interesting collection and I look forward to reading more from Wunderlich.

*Reviewer received the book for free through Goodreads First Reads

[Debbie Payne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to say that it has been a long time since I sat down with a book of poetry. Mark's poetry was delightful and resonated with me. I am not exactly a city girl but neither am I a country girl and reading these poems brought me fully into the country life: complete with its smells, sound, beauty and it's hardships. I would definitely be interested in pursuing his other works. I particularly liked "Ram" and "Driftless Elegy".

[Lynne Fort · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with most poetry collections, I liked some of these poems a lot more than others. This collection is very spiritual, so if that's not your thing, I don't recommend picking it up. Regardless: many of these poems and prayers were beautiful and inspiring, and honestly I want to copy some of them down so I can take them with me wherever I go.

[Liam Malone · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this collection despite the poems that are called prayers. They are not necessarily addressed to any one god in particular. Very readable poems with all the good subjects like nature and animals, weather, love, hope and death.

[Lawrence · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not as impressive as his earlier collections. Many of the poems seemed too restricted by the underlying form which served as the basis/inspiration for them. Too much of an exercise in stylistics for my liking.

[hh · Rating 4 out of 5]

timelessly charming.

[Catherine Pikula · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely collection of pastoral and devotional poems. Well paced with some really stellar imagery.

Re: an albino deer

and leapt away---
a white tooth
in the closing mouth of the woods

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Beautifully written, perfectly polished. I miss the raw prose of his first collection, The Anchorage.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a fine book of poems. A collection that tells the story of a small town in incremental verses, daily minutia and prayer-like poems.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wanderlich's precise language provides a working, breathing definition of faith.

[Hailey Leithauser · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many gorgeous poems in here. I didn't give it the five stars reserved for a collection where every single poem is stunning, but would have been happy to give it a four and a half.

[Phyllis Katz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing collection of poems.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and hopeful. Prayers a deity would swoon over.

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning.