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Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining
Winner of the 2016 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining explores the South and its history through the eyes of the living, the dead, and the inbetween.
- GenresPoetry
120 pages, Paperback
Published July 3, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 23, 2020
Thank you to Red Hen Press for gifting me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
"Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining" by Mark Wagenaar is a collection of poetry that does it all! Looking for a book about life, death., love, lose, nature, literature, and history? Well here it is.
Throughout this collection Wagenaar explores his own experience while flushing out several topics on their own. He talks about a wide range of topics, starting with nature, and horses, and then leading into conflicts of religion and death. The only topics that didn’t really grab my attention were the more historical, telly-moments.
There seemed to be a disconnect between the intimate, beautiful stories that Wagenaar tells, and the more historic, educational sections – oftentimes even within the same poem. Sometimes he starts a poem by painting a beautiful scene, and then goes on a tangent that loses the reader. In some instances though, he does the opposite and the poem becomes more clear as it goes, like he does in one of my favorite poems in this collection “VIII. String Theory.”
One subject that Wagenaar explores extensively is that of fatherhood. He first talks about this in another one of my favorite poems “The Trick”. As he talks about his experience and perspective change once he becomes a father, he also talks about his wife’s transformation. He seems to cherish fatherhood while at the same time being humbled and almost belittled by the experience as a whole.
Wagenaar also talks about the subject of language, tricky translations, and words in general. This also mixes well when his literary subjects such as Dante’s Inferno. Wagenaar even uses language to understand his own loneliness, saying,
“& again I don’t know what to say,
I’m a word
migrated to another language.”
Towards the end of this collection Wagenaar grapples with big topics such as God, resurrection, cremation, death, and reincarnation. He talks about his experience but also his hopes and thoughts about God,
“I’ve always hoped for a God generous enough
to be wounded by this world,”
These topics were interesting to me, especially when combined with the seemingly contradictory ideas of nature, faith and inevitable randomness of it all.
Enjoy some of my favorite quotes from "Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining" below,
“The days fall into each other.
At some point the empty rooms become you.”
“Quiet as the applause of ghosts
three horse sidle up to us at the white fenceline,”
“you know that feeling? Talking about nothing
until nothing’s enough,”
“There's a hole in heaven where some sin slips through,
& that’s where Mississippi’s rolling to.”
“Somewhere out there is the step I lost between my twenties & thirties”
“How long
will faith mean a belief
in what I cannot see?”
“You can take ten thousand steps & get no nearer to heaven,
some once said, but the smoke
is halfway there”
"Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining" by Mark Wagenaar is a collection of poetry that does it all! Looking for a book about life, death., love, lose, nature, literature, and history? Well here it is.
Throughout this collection Wagenaar explores his own experience while flushing out several topics on their own. He talks about a wide range of topics, starting with nature, and horses, and then leading into conflicts of religion and death. The only topics that didn’t really grab my attention were the more historical, telly-moments.
There seemed to be a disconnect between the intimate, beautiful stories that Wagenaar tells, and the more historic, educational sections – oftentimes even within the same poem. Sometimes he starts a poem by painting a beautiful scene, and then goes on a tangent that loses the reader. In some instances though, he does the opposite and the poem becomes more clear as it goes, like he does in one of my favorite poems in this collection “VIII. String Theory.”
One subject that Wagenaar explores extensively is that of fatherhood. He first talks about this in another one of my favorite poems “The Trick”. As he talks about his experience and perspective change once he becomes a father, he also talks about his wife’s transformation. He seems to cherish fatherhood while at the same time being humbled and almost belittled by the experience as a whole.
Wagenaar also talks about the subject of language, tricky translations, and words in general. This also mixes well when his literary subjects such as Dante’s Inferno. Wagenaar even uses language to understand his own loneliness, saying,
“& again I don’t know what to say,
I’m a word
migrated to another language.”
Towards the end of this collection Wagenaar grapples with big topics such as God, resurrection, cremation, death, and reincarnation. He talks about his experience but also his hopes and thoughts about God,
“I’ve always hoped for a God generous enough
to be wounded by this world,”
These topics were interesting to me, especially when combined with the seemingly contradictory ideas of nature, faith and inevitable randomness of it all.
Enjoy some of my favorite quotes from "Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining" below,
“The days fall into each other.
At some point the empty rooms become you.”
“Quiet as the applause of ghosts
three horse sidle up to us at the white fenceline,”
“you know that feeling? Talking about nothing
until nothing’s enough,”
“There's a hole in heaven where some sin slips through,
& that’s where Mississippi’s rolling to.”
“Somewhere out there is the step I lost between my twenties & thirties”
“How long
will faith mean a belief
in what I cannot see?”
“You can take ten thousand steps & get no nearer to heaven,
some once said, but the smoke
is halfway there”
February 20, 2022
This is a fine collection. And I loved his poem in Crazyhorse! But the Appalachian pieces just…rankled me. Like the mountain people I come from, I am petty. Have three stars and don’t say I never gave you anything.
August 2, 2019
Mark Wagenaar is one of the best poets writing today, and the poems in this collection are wondrous, from beginning to end.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews