After the Others by Bruce Weigl :: Book Reviews Poetry Essays

After the Others by Bruce Weigl With a bare-ass snow approaching, Bruce Weigls twelfth collection of poetry, After the Others, c each(prenominal)s us to stand on the millenniums indeterminate edge. This book, opening with the last four lines of Miltons Paradise Lost, parallels our departure from this century with Adams fearful exit from Eden, beyond which is all abyss, / Eternity, whose wipe erupt no pith can reach (Paradise Lost). Weigl posits that we stand at the centurys obscure gate naked, cold, and greedy he refers often to a looming future, to give our collapsing resign more urgency. Weve forgotten, he says, how to love and live simply, how to write honestly and well. With all this forgetting, weve also forgotten that God gave Adam and Eve a guess to recreate a world mirroring the beauty and goodness of the lost one. Yet, as their heirs, weve constructed an earth where we live inside a history that no longstanding remembers us. Weigl wonders if we reinvent his tory to give ourselves identity, rendering ourselves powerless because were unconscious of our present. He examines human suffering, hedonism, and desire, wondering if we can re-learn how to love, be loved, and forgive. As a advanced poet working at the height of his craft, Weigl writes that we must weed out the noose of the devil in our hearts to pass through the visible end of the twentieth century bravely, with grace. After the Others returns to themes of previous books. In Sweet Lorain (1996), mid-forties America is depicted through life in charred, industrial Ohio, and in What Saves Us (1992) the speaker relies on religious epiphanies to rescue him from what hell regret. Weigls conversational language, as in previous books, comes unadorned I didnt know what I didnt know. I didnt want a life of anything then, only a life. Weigls line and stanzas turn he uses couplets, tercets and quatrains, as well as undivided lines. He relies on internal and slant rh yme, barely occasionally writes infelicitous lines She sang out loud about a cloud. His tone is generally ironic, as in Cult of the Car somebody wanted a blow occupation / on a gorgeous freeway in America but it doesnt matter who / this near the millennium.