Goldbeater's Skin

by G.C. Waldrep III

Winner of the 2003 Colorado Prize for Poetry
Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University

"The poetry of G. C. Waldrep is a prolific liturgy, intense and conversational by turns. And the turning is telling; it comes round right. Bright idioms become bright branches, and the branches become the further architecture of Word. Christopher Smart and Hart Crane applaud these poems in Heaven because the Earth of these poems is true."
—Donald Revell, final judge and author of My Mojave, Arcady, and There Are Three

"Goldbeater's Skin is a gorgeous debut; reading these poems renews our recognition of the world's precarious splendor."
—Arthur Sze, author of The Redshifting Web and Archipelago

"In Goldbeater's Skin, as in the work of Wallace Stevens, the reader encounters a fiercely intelligent and fiercely playful interiority that is astonishing. Displaying a brawny, hierophantic lexical range with breathtaking swerves into a warm vernacular, G. C. Waldrep's poetry is made even rarer in its accomplishment by a lapidary tenderness."
—Dean Young, author of Skid, First Course in Turbulence, and Strike Anywhere

Genres: Poetry

108 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2003

Reviews

[Jennifer Collins · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection has some fantastic moments and lines, but it's also incredibly dense and sometimes all but inaccessible in meaning. I'd say it's more academic than enjoyable in a lot of ways, because as much as I don't mind sitting with and parsing through difficult poems, I need to have something more holding me to them--and, ideally, not an entire collection that requires such determined focus. I'm sure studying this book and reading and rereading it repeatedly would shed clarity on the meaning and lead to more appreciation, but I can't see myself doing so.

Not recommended for casual poetry readers, for sure.

[Ryan Bollenbach]

How many ways are there to know something? How many questions to ask? G. C. Waldrep's answer is a helluva lot. And maybe no *one* at all. This quick turning, and highly philosophical collection was quite an invigorating read, read over a long time. Waldrep's connections are at once intellectual, logical, innate, and alchemical. I felt like the first third of the book was the strongest, but I there are some great poems throughout.

[Farren · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am having a lot of difficulty working through all the things I want to say about this book because I had such a transcendental experience with it.

There are a lot of things, I think, at stake in this book; Waldrep uses science and math, language's profusion and lack, history and nature as different tools in the attempt to situate the human Self in the world.

A lot of people who read this book say that there were sucked into some of the poems and alienated from others, and that seems apt. The journey through Wadrep's poems is challenging, full of associative images and lexical switchbacks ( after the murder when men rise to the moon/ I will be thinking larceny, I will be thinking spandrel,/ I will be thinking anything except coterminous resolution/ of the ineffable, I will express this absence as euchre, I will cast lots for each trick as it falls/ in the signature of this or that affections/ I will not meet their gaze"), sprinkled with obscure words I believe he may mean to invoke as incantation (favorites: incunabula, isonomy, imbrication, irredentive, discalced, aspidistra, etc) and also as an invitation to make an associative leap – sometimes words disrupt, and that's an exciting thing, a moment of deliberate mis-understanding designed to encourage the mind to make leaps, invoke spirits, cast spells, take charge, imbue the poem with meaning, ENACT.

Here, from Noli Me Tangere, probably the hinge poem of this book for me:

...A child travels further
and further from self, wild terrain rising in altitude,
inland brush fading from basin to basin.

The child is immaculate.
She will never grow old, she presses the blank face of a dream
to her tired eyes and thin lips. She is the absence
and repository of all signifiers.

2.
Ecce faber, then.
To invest the soul in imagination,
in the prescribed economy. This patch of earth.

3.
She is the absence and repository
of all signifiers. She is hungry. She walks
or is carried
a long way, through sandy hills.
–Do you want to believe this?
(And what does it mean, then, being a child?)

4.
Do you want to believe she wanted to return.
Do you want to be certain, do you want
to propel that single photon along it's journey
to the mirror.

presuming, for the moment, the existence of a lid
we call time. Presuming, for the moment, its suspension:
the bracken,
the flat rocks of the falls,
salt tang giving way to bearblossom.
And will when matter,
so that I can call it rape for you; is that
what you're thinking. Your finger
loose on the trigger.
Do you want her to survive.
Or, do you want to be the mirror. Or,

(5.)
do you want to be that certain.

6.
The brush of green blades against her footsoles.

7.
Do you want this to be about race.
–When I open my heart
there's an infinite paper cut-out
strung accordion-like, hand in hand, every figure
its own simulacra.
–When I open my heart
I think the tree gap in the south line
holds the last coal of available perfection.
I could reach with my left hand, cover that space
where the light gives all
appearance of failing. Babies know this, like poets
reaching for the moon's flat disc.
–When I open my heart
two moths flutter from the wound, wet and pulsing.
One light, one dark.
Or, do you want this to be about sacrifice.

[Clay Wackerman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intricate and a bit abstruse. Reading this was like walking into a math class and seeing the complex work on the board left from the previous period—specific elements of it make sense, and much of it does not, but as a whole it has a mysterious, incomprehensible coherence. While I don’t understand it now, perhaps I will be able to some day in the future.

[Joe]

Found myself very interested in the final 1/3rd of book when Waldrep writes out meditations on movement, placement that are written outward from some specific place but feel that this suffers from prestigious-first-book-itis. Like you can see the beads of brain sweat forming behind lines like
"This is the superscription of an immoderate regret."
or a poem that begins
"That lucidity could draw such associations,
regardless of distance. Sandstone and cinder. And the vectors
of desire converging in empathy, in natural sacrifice"
WTF is Waldrep talking about? I like difficult poetry but, man, I don't get this. It is...stingy.

Also think I gotta stop buying books from poets I've been waiting to read at used book stores. It's always the wrong book. Which is why it is in the used book store. Should I have read Archicembalo? Am I being a lazy reader? Probably.

[Melissa Barrett · Rating 4 out of 5]

So many beautiful lines in this book. Here are a few:

-"I stumble / from illumination to illumination on sharp miracles."

-"What I want is for / someone to thrust me beneath the flow of you and stencil a first word."

-"You assign slim chance / a random number and call it God"

-"Outside the piebald trees / glint like polished rocks"

-"a jet lays its crabbed hand / against the sky's blank score."

-"Babies know this, like poets / reaching for the moon's flat disc."

-"The candles of winter gutter in their cold flame."

[Kate Birgel · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Waldrep style, he views the world through a surreal lens. Be prepared for much allusion, imagery, reference to individuals from 1900s. Excellent. Still reading.

I now want to understand the work of sculptor/multimedia artist Joseph Campbell due to one of Waldrep's poems

[Rauan · Rating 4 out of 5]

really beautiful in many places. but a bit too smart for me much of the time. some of it reminded me of Ammons.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the poems I absolutely loved. Others failed to keep my attention, but I will definitely read his other books.

[Wendy Trevino]

I wish there was a way to give this 2.5 stars. It was "it was ok" + (rather than "liked it" - )...In college I read lots o' Augustine and Plato...I'm tired

[Deb Vanasse · Rating 5 out of 5]

So glad I discovered this poet. Much to ponder, enjoy, and share from this collection.