Survival Is a Style: Poems

by Christian Wiman

Survival Is a Style, Christian Wiman's first collection of new poems in six years, may be his best book yet. His many readers will recognize the musical and formal variety, the voice that can be tender and funny, credibly mystical and savagely skeptical. But there are many new notes in this collection as well, including a moving elegy to the poet's father, sharp observations and distillations of modern American life, and rangy poems that merge and juxtapose different modes of speech and thought. The cumulative effect is extraordinary. Reading Survival Is a Style, one has the sense one is encountering work that will become a permanent part of American literature.

Genres: Poetry, Poetry Plays

112 pages, Hardcover

First published February 4, 2020

About the author

Christian Wiman is an American poet and editor born in 1966 and raised in West Texas. He graduated from Washington and Lee University and has taught at Northwestern University, Stanford University, Lynchburg College in Virginia, and the Prague School of Economics. In 2003 he became editor of the oldest American magazine of verse, Poetry.

Reviews

[David Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Christian Wiman has been a favorite poet of mine for a while now, and it was with enthusiasm that I began reading this newest collection. I have occasionally wondered when I will next encounter a book of poetry from a beloved poet that will fail to meet my expectations and disappoint me with its failure to provide the satisfactory experience of previous collections. No such concerns were warranted in this instance. Survival Is a Style may possibly be my favorite of Wiman's works thus far. On several pages I found myself re-reading certain poems because they were so good I was unwilling to move on to the next. A couple of times I felt the need to stop and share a poem with friends, because it seemed urgent that such beauty be circulated immediately. If it is indeed true that the more one knows, the more one realizes how little one actually knows, it is fascinating to watch Wiman ask increasingly thoughtful questions concerning his faith, his health, and his aging. He and I share a few commonalities: age, home, and religion, and it is particularly moving to be presented with surprisingly similar treatments of many of my own thoughts, questions, and emotions reflected in these amazing poems. I cannot recommend this one highly enough.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for the electronic advance reader copy.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn’t put it down but the last poem might be worth the whole book

[Josh Nisley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sharp edged and sensitive, Wiman’s poetry goes down like bitter whiskey (or at least how I, as a 90% teetotaler, imagine it goes down). It’s 5-star poetry by any objective standards. I just find myself a bit alienated by his brutally honest tone.

[Billy Jepma · Rating 5 out of 5]

“In league with the stones of the field
I am by being healed.”
—————————————————————

Everyone who knows me knows that I love Christian Wiman. His poetry and his prose resonates with me on a level few other writers can, and when asked who my favorite writer is—even though I read mostly fiction—I don’t hesitate to name him.

With his newest volume of poetry, his first one in years, Wiman’s signature struggles and adulations of faith, sickness, grief, and joy are more pronounced and nuanced than I think they’ve ever been. This may not be his most consistent volume of poetry—that title probably belongs to “Every Riven Thing,” where every poem feels like a springboard of emotion for the next one—but “Survival is a Style” may be his most impressive poetry yet.

There’s a depth and clarity here that is often stunning, and even when his work drifts into a dense ambiguity with metaphors layered upon metaphors, he captures a *feeling* that is both very unique and very familiar. This book contains some of my favorite poems Wiman has ever written in it, and even after finishing it once (and then a second time) I’m still returning to it, eager to delve deeper into the images and emotions that Wiman planted into his work here.

If I were to recommend a book of Wiman’s poetry, it would be “Every Riven Thing,” not only because it was my first exposure to his work and thus my personal favorite, but also because it provides a snapshot of a poet that helps frame all the work he does. But if I were to recommend a book of Wiman’s *best* poetry, I would recommend “Survival is a Style.”

[JP · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is an under, always,
through which things still move, breathe,
and have their being,
quick coals and crimsons
no one need see
to see

Good night knowledge,
goodbye beyond,
good God the winter
one must wander
one’s own soul
to be.


It’s hard to explain just how relevant, poignant, resonating this collection of poems is for me as someone navigating their own strange Christian agnosticism. And the texture of Wiman’s writing is remarkable.

[Lara Ryd · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first time I saw Christian Wiman, he was in the middle of a reading of one of his poems, entitled ”Native,“ spitting out syllables with a rhythmic drawl, drawing the dramatic significance out of every word. Prior to that night, I‘d never heard any poet read his own work with such complete control over the tone and cadence of his voice.

This collection is about memory, grief, and unbelief. ”I need a space for unbelief to breathe,“ the poet admits in ”Prologue.“ When he says ”unbelief,“ I wish he meant the kind of unbelief that the man in Mark 9:24 begs Christ to meet. These poems are less hopeful. But they are very, very good poems.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wiman examines Christian faith in the shadow of cancer. This is the third of his books that I’ve read; I’m consistently impressed by how he makes room for doubt, bitterness and irony, yet a flame of faith remains. Really interesting phrasing and vocabulary here.

[Seth Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another glorious, haunting collection.

[Natalie Jones]

“The more I think the more I feel
Reality without reverence is not real.”
-Epilogue, Christian Wiman

[Timothy Hoiland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Christian Wiman has done it again. These poems teeter on the brink of (un)belief, leaving me pondering their layered meanings. Like this: “The love of God is not a thing one comprehends /
but that by which – and only by which – one is comprehended.”

[Crystal Hurd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wiman is just so, so good. One of the finest poets I've encountered. I couldn't wait to get this book in the mail today; I gobbled it up like chocolate. ❤

[Stephen Lamb · Rating 5 out of 5]

From The Parable of Perfect Silence:

People ask if I believe in God and the verb is tedious to me. / Not wrong, not offensive, not intrusive, not embarrassing. / Tedious.

[Aaron Cohen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some startlingly touching/moving/thought-provoking poems in here.

[Marcela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here’s one of my favorite poems of this book

A light store in the Bowery
by Christian Wiman

Some love is like a light store
you slip inside only to escape
the rain. Something to see, it turns out:
the plasma lamps, mosque and lava,
the elegant icicles of the chandeliers,
shapes and shades so insistently singular
that rooms can’t help but happen around them,
lives can’t help but acquire choices and chances
inside. Some love is like an old owner
who when a child walks in with her parents
can only imagine shatterings.
And some love is like that child
asking with an earnest and exemplary awe,
“Where do they keep the dark?”

And there’s this other one that I’ve read about 20 times, and you can read and listen here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newy...

[Katie Karnehm-Esh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to read all of Wiman’s poetry twice because each poem contains layers of word and sound. This collection is no exception, but the work pays off in epiphanies about faith, despair, and paying attention. “Flight” is an 8-line masterpiece.

[Eliana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wiman is a master of poetry’s sonic qualities and of bringing together fragments of existence and disjointed beauty in ways that always feel right, like they were meant to be seen that way all along.

[Caroline Sweeney · Rating 5 out of 5]

My absolute favorite collection of contemporary poetry to date. Contains incredible depth and wit, and truly showcases the immense talent Wiman has as a poet, theologian, and philosopher.

[Harrison Glaze · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

[Glenda · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection best described as questioning faith, relationships, and one’s purpose and place. Among my favorite poems are “I Don’t Want to Be a Spice Store”(great mentor text); “Prologue,” and “Sumner River Rosie Dam.”

[John Anders · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Christian Wiman’s unique voice from the depths of pain, of isolation, of belief and unbelief. In each of his collections you will find every now and then a verse which grabs you, resolute and bright hot, which burns white in the heart for years.


“””
The more I think the more I feel
reality without reverence is not real.

The more I feel the more I think
that God himself has brought me to this brink wherein to have more faith means having less. And love's the sacred name for loneliness.
“”” from EPILOGUE

[Christopher McCaffery · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found these mostly tedious, sadly. There are a few poems I enjoyed and very clever lines throughout. Wiman is best when he's not talking about God or how mopey he is, I think.

[Joshua Novalis]

“I need a space for unbelief to breathe.
I need a space for failure, since it is what I have.”

[Stephen Ramsek · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ts pmo icl 😭

[Nathan]

I believe this is the first book of poetry I've read basically from cover to cover. (Dag Mammarskjold's Markings isn't quite poetry, but it took me a while.)

So, yea, all 90 pages consumed. Yet, I don't really think we are to consume poetry, like we do a novel. It's more like a bite you savor. And I'm not sure how well I've learned to savor. Some day - here's one of those bucket list aspirations - I'd love to take a poetry class and actually learn something about it. For now, no ratings can be given. I have no idea how to "rate" the quality of poetry.

To me, poetry feels like painting emotions with words. Direct, concrete stuff I'm able to "get." Much of Wiman soared above me like a bird. Nevertheless, "to get" it no doubt misses the point. Maybe I should rather be "got."

Here are a few of my favorite lines:

"I need a space for unbelief to breathe.
I need a form for failure, since it is what I have."

(from the bit of the prologue)

---

"He talked of nothingness until it wasn't.
He bragged his gravity into God.

...

He names is love by naming what he hates.
Joy generalizes. Pain individuates."

---

"What I should have answered is that there are no heretics, or that there are only heretics; that humans - mere and mirrored creatures that we are - move toward God in language, and to speak language is to profane him." [This quote comes from A Heresy, which was prose,... I think.]

Some of the poems need the whole thing, and perhaps it profanes them to cut lines out like I have. And Someone Wrote It Down is too good not to quote the whole thing, but I won't here.

---

"Today I woke and believed in nothing.
A grief at once intimate and unfelt,
like the death of a good friend's dog."

---

"To be is to be confronted with a void,
a blankness, a blackness that both appeals and appalls.
Once known--known by the void, I mean--one has three choices.
Walk away, and unlearn the instinct of awe.
Walk along, and learn to believe that awe asks nothing of you.
Are you with me, love?



(For love read faith.)"

---

"The more I think the more I feel
reality without reverence is not real.

The more I feel the more I think
that God himself has brought me to his brink
wherein to have more faith means having less.
And love's the sacred name for loneliness."
(From the epilogue)

... I don't want to write the rest of epilogue... it's beautiful.

I hope I haven't quoted too much (and broken copywrite laws). I hope I leave you wanting more. To me, it was wonderful, and believe it or not, a hard book to put down.

[Paul Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

WITH WIMAN KNOWN as a poet who is also a person of faith, this new collection's opening with the lines--

Church or sermon, prayer or poem:
the failure of religious feeling is a form.
--seems like an announcement of sorts. The book's longest poem, "The Parable of Perfect Silence," doubles down with the opening line, "Today I woke and believed in nothing." Wiman's faith was never of the blessed assurance kind--the manifestations of faith in his writing tended to the edgy, astringent, and Kierkegaardian. But this seems like a new note, and I did wonder what was up.

As an accomplished poet whose work is often shaped by his Christianity, Wiman gets shelved next to T. S. Eliot in my mental library, so I pulled up a bit at "To Eat the Awful While You Starve Your Awe" precisely because it seemed like a critique of Eliot:

To eat the awful while you starve your awe,
to weasel misery like a suck of egg,
to be ebullience's prick and leak,
a character pinched. to characteristic,
hell-relisher, persimmon-sipper, sad Tom, sane Tom,
all day licking the cicatrix where your Tomhood lay.
Not an entirely fair critique, I would say, if it is about Eliot. Yes, there is a miserabilist streak in Eliot, likewise a deflationary one. He can seem joyless, and he does sometimes relish the idea of hell and find his own wounds fascinating. Okay. But this salvo seems reductive. Would a poem like Wiman's "Doing Lines at the Cocktail Party" even exist without the women who came and went talking of Michelangelo, or Hakagawa bowing among the Titians, or the pizzicato of tensed nerves in "A Game of Chess"?

Maybe Wiman is just tired of being shelved next to Eliot in readers' mental libraries and wants to move out from the shadow of a poetic father. "Something of the Sky" may be about saying goodbye to a kind of romanticized father figure, and "The Parable of Perfect Silence," the book's anchor, is a meditation-elegy on Wiman's own father. Wiman is no longer young (see "Fifty") and has had to think hard about death--that he is still alive probably surprised some of his doctors--but however old a man is, he is still a son.

I should have said more about the poems, I think, looking back over this. If you like Wiman's poetry, you'll like the book. A little more acerbic, a little funnier at times, but he still sounds like himself.

[Jenny Webb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Christian Wiman, Christian Wiman, Christian Wiman. There: I’ve incanted the poet’s name, and hopefully this will break the utter spell his work has cast over my soul this year.

I’m reading him slowly—so slowly—and re-reading as I go. The space he works in—the ordinary sacrality, the banal mystery, the secular faith, the beautiful word—that is the space of my own nature, with its sickness to death and ordinary landscapes and relationships carved from literal ribs.

Survival is a Style is not the place to start with Wiman (start at Every Riven Thing), but it is a fantastic place to go with Wiman. The poems skim along the thing line between heaven and earth, belief and atheism, trust and doubt. In doing so, the highlight the tensions inherent in the acts of human life.

——

Good Lord the Light

Good morning misery,
goodbye belief,
good Lord the light
cutting across the lake
so long gone
to ice—

There is an under, always,
through which things still move, breathe,
and have their being,
quick coals and crimsons
no one need see
to see.

Good night knowledge,
goodbye beyond,
good God the winter
one must wander
one’s own soul
to be.

———

Epilogue

The more I think the more I feel
reality without reverence is not real.
*
The more I feel the more I think
that God himself has brought me to this brink
wherein to have more faith means having less.
And love’s the sacred name for loneliness.
*
I speak a word I have not spoken
and by that word am broken open
a cry entirely other entirely mine.
*
In league with the stones of the field
I am by being healed.

[Angie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read Wiman's Zero at the Bone last year, a sort of commonplace book of essays, poetry, and criticism. His use of language and ideas sent me back to check out his poetry. I'm glad I read Zero first, because some of his biography gave me more context for the poems. Like with Zero, I found I connected more to individual passages than entire poems (or essays). A few favorite poems from this collection were "One Love", "Good Lord the Light", "And Someone Wrote it Down", and "How Fun When Young." And a couple of favorite lines.

How slowly the mountain/takes it in/like a diagnosis/of darkness.//The consolation/of a continuation/that has nothing to do/with you. (from "One Love")

To eat the awful while you starve your awe/to weasel misery like a suck of egg,/to be ebullience's prick and leak (from To Eat the Awful)

Like a man who tucked his deepest truth in rhyme/so no one would ever find it, or only the right no ones. (from Raccoon Problem)

...Said it, I imagine,/with the same lonely catatonia of the saint/when God withdraws, and then withdraws His withdrawal,/until there's nothing but a word for what had been a world/ Someone picked up the pieces. Someone scrubbed the blood. / Someone clung to something human, and someone wrote it down" (from Someone Wrote it Down)

[R.W. Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

One thing (of many) that makes Christian Wiman such a beautiful and meaningful voice, and in that, such a good poet, is his dedication to honesty (though at times cryptic and subtle). Good poets accept what they see and what they feel without worrying about it's tidyness or exposure, and those of us who get to read it are moved by those things, whether darkly or not.

It is in that regard that I give this book it's deserving five stars and recognize it as one that I'll keep handy through the years, revisiting and possibly pulling more truth, and weakness, and strength from it's pages. Not all poets speak the same to everyone, but Christian Wiman continues to speak volumes to me and my soul, reminding me that even the darkest of nights are beautiful in their tenacity and dread, if just to remind us, though the darkness persists, that it's just as much a part of us as the loveliest of days. That life is an unwinding and sometimes, as he so painfully admitted, "to have more faith, means having less".

[Emily Magnus · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really truly wanted to love this one more than I did. I’ve read other Christian Wiman stuff in the past and let me tell ya there are some diamonds in the rough in terms of content. But it felt like most poems left me going “huh” vs. “mhm” (disclaimer: this could be due to a lack of my expansive vocabulary- lots of large words in these poems). It was refreshing to read more about the questioning of belief. It felt like Wiman weaved words upon what it means to stray away, question and be human.

QOTB: “When I began writing these lines it was not, to be sure, inspiration but desperation, to be alive, to believe again in the love of God. The love of God is not a thing one comprehends but that by which- and only by which- one is comprehended. It is like the child’s time of pre-reflective being, and like that time, we learn it by its lack.”

This one was a THINKER (it deserves more than 2 stars probably but again @goodreads we need some half star ability)

[Jeffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the poems in this collection felt stream-of-consciousness about random memories and these I did not enjoy very much. While others seemed to be more focused on the theme set out by the Prologue, dealing with a struggle in faith in a world that seems not to line up with theology. The poems that focused more on belief/unbelief, faith versus a complex world, I found to be a lot more interesting personally and some of them particularly struck me with a well-turned phrase or a resonating thought.

The prologue and epilogue poems speak of this theme: belief in God in a complicated, messy world. I found both of them interesting and tied some of the poems together (as above) while other poems didn't seem to align with this investigation.

"Church or sermon, prayer or poem:
the failure of religious feeling is a form
...
I need a space for unbelief to breathe.
I need a form for failure, since it is what I have."