Böcker av William Wenthe

The poems in The Gentle Art, a compelling new collection from William Wenthe, move between the life of the painter James McNeill Whistler and a poetic version of the author, who is at once inspired and disturbed by Whistler. The present-day author sheds light on Whistler's artistic vocation and the beauty of his paintings, most notably the liminal London riverscapes that he named Nocturnes, yet recoils at the cost of Whistler's devotion to art: lovers abandoned, friends turned into enemies, his own children given away to adoption. Creating a kind of dual biography, Wenthe grapples with feelings of admiration and disaffection toward Whistler as he tries to perform his own roles as parent, partner, and poet. While some of the poems are narrative, their overall effect is associative--two lives superimposed in a double exposure, with attention to what the contrast of two centuries, the nineteenth and the twenty-first, reveals about the relationship of art to money, class, and politics.

St Paul writes "the foolishness of God is wiser than men." The poems in William Wenthe's God's Foolishness mine the feelings of human uncertainty in matters of love and desire, time and death, and uncover difficult truths with transformative insights.

William Wenthe's third collection begins in the domestic realm then moves outward in subject and place-to a bird market in Paris, the Jaffa Gate in Old Jerusalem, the Chain Bridge in Budapest-before returning to the familial. The poet recalls his own cherished experiences of fatherhood: rocking his infant daughter in the early morning, lying with her outside on a pink flannel sheet, and watching her joyous reaction to the sight of roses. While actively engaged in the artist's struggle to represent reality, Wenthe draws attention to the particular, to moments and events that seem to exist beyond thoughts and words. In "Uhte," Wenthe reflects on the Old English name for the hour before dawn: "that word / has haunted me-wondering how that hour / had first called forth a need / to be distinguished by a sound." In well-crafted free verse, traditional meter and rhyme, prose poems, and nonce forms, Wenthe meditates on family, language, art, history, and the natural world, striving to find words to capture the richness of life.

Beginning with the necessary dislocation and loss that accompany adulthood, these strong and moving poems tell a story of a man's losing his way in the midst of personal tragedies - the death of his parents and the end of a marriage - only to discover the true depth of his connection with others and ultimately with the divine.