Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining: Poems

by Mark Wagenaar

In his third collection, the award-winning author crafts poems that “reckon with the sins of history and the human-made scars on the natural world” (Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi).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.“The songs of Charles Wright, Rilke, and Blind Willie Johnson have tuned Wagenaar’s ear, but the music is his own, irresistibly so. Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining is a brave and difficult grappling, ending with the difficult joy of a child’s birth and the world’s subsequent remaking. This is, simply put, poetry that adds to the glory of the human endeavor.” —Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling“In Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining, there is a rapturous beauty that encompasses the American South, the United States, and the world, a poetic rooted in the space around the poet and extending outward to the world with questioning, compassion, grief, and hope.” —Afaa M. Weaver, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award“The speaker searches constantly for evidence of God’s presence in the world. It is a book of doubt just as much as it is a book of faith. Indeed, doubt threatens, at every line break, to wrest faith from the speaker’s hands. But books of doubt are books of faith, and Southern Tongues understands this.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

Genres: Poetry

130 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 10, 2021

Reviews

[Julia Cirignano · Rating 3 out of 5]

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”

[Vivian Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Denton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mark Wagenaar is one of the best poets writing today, and the poems in this collection are wondrous, from beginning to end.