Christian Wiman's new memoir begins and ends with the same four-line stanza from one of his uncompleted poems:

My God my bright abyss
into which all my longing will not go
once more I come to the edge of all I know
and believing nothing believe in this

The two versions of the stanza, whose paradoxes (God as an abyss, believing nothing yet something) set the tone of the book's reflections, differ in only one respect. The first ends with a colon, the second with a period. The shift is subtle but momentous. It suggests that the unfinished poem has now been completed, but in a very unusual way: not with additional stanzas or the reciting of a traditional creed, but with every word in this dazzling book.

Wiman's story is well known in the poetry world. After growing up on the barren plains of West Texas, he set out to become a poet during his college years. "When I read Samuel Johnson's comment that any young man could compensate for his poor education by reading five hours a day for five years," Wiman wrote later, "that's exactly what I tried to do, practically setting a timer every afternoon to let me know when the little egg of my brain was boiled." This apprenticeship included four years bouncing around Europe, followed by a variety of teaching positions and two well-received books of poetry.

Then things took a radically different turn. Poetry, America's most prestigious poetry magazine, was suddenly flooded with money in 2002, thanks to a $200 million bequest from Ruth Lilly. After an intensive search for a new editor, the magazine's foundation chose Wiman. In this role he would instantly become one of the leading voices in American poetry. But winning a lottery is never an unmixed blessing. His days would be filled with the business side of poetry, and poets would constantly cozy up to him, hoping to win his favor, neither of which seemed to bode well for his own writing.

In 2005, Wiman learned that he has a mysterious, incurable cancer of the blood, which has meant frequent hospitalizations and a bone marrow transplant. (The cancer, Wiman says, "is as rare as it is unpredictable, 'smoldering' in some people for decades, turning others to quick tinder.") During this period, he has somehow managed to publish a collection of essays, highly original translations of selected poems by the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, and a stunning third book of poems, all while continuing to edit Poetry.

He also has discovered, or rediscovered, his Christian faith.

My Bright Abyss is divided into eleven chapters with titles like "O Thou Mastering Light," "Dear Oblivion," and "Mortify Our Wolves"—most of which are references to poems or other writings that figure somewhere in the chapter. Although Wiman recounts a spectacular religious experience he had when he was twelve, his drifting away from faith later and how, almost despite themselves, he and his wife began praying over meals in the months after his cancer diagnosis, My Bright Abyss is no traditional spiritual autobiography. It is a series of often brilliant meditations (the subtitle says "meditation," but the musings, which Wiman calls "fragments," seem too diverse to be contained by the singular) in language that is at times as lovely and intricate as Wiman's highly charged poems:

I grew up in a flat little sandblasted town in West Texas:
pump-jacks and pickup trucks, cotton like grounded
clouds, a dying strip, a lively dump, and above it all a
huge blue and boundless void I never really noticed until
I left, when it began to expand alarmingly inside of me.

With its assonance ("flat," "sandblasted"), alliteration, rhymes, and lovely lyric shift from the sky to a sense of internal emptiness, this sentence, like many others, blurs the boundaries between poetry and prose. If the 19th-century English poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins were transported to early 21st-century America, this is the kind of memoir he might have written.

Wiman is inclined toward mysticism—toward direct communion with God—and its characteristic paradoxes, such as "unmeaning" as a source of meaning. Yet he repeatedly insists that our experience of God must not take us away from the world. Praying must always be linked to doing, and meditation to communication. "I felt almost as if God had been telling me," he writes at the end of a short chapter centered on the French mystic Simone Weil, to get out and "do something."

His poetic assessments make the same point in reverse, advocating verse that is visionary as well as grounded in relationship and the details of ordinary life. He praises A. R. Ammons, for instance, "who had no religious faith at all but whose work has some sort of undeniable lyric transcendence," while confessing a lack of enthusiasm for William Carlos Williams and Elizabeth Bishop. Wiman's claim that both Williams and Bishop, brilliant as they were, lack a religious imagination, strikes me as both right and—since few poets have been as universally praised as Bishop in recent decades—refreshingly unconventional. Poets who earn an effusive endorsement include Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and the 17th century-English poet George Herbert ("read him!").

Wiman's own vision of God and the universe is characterized by contingency and interconnectedness. "God is given over to matter," he writes, "the ultimate Uncertainty Principle. There's no release from reality, no 'outside' or 'beyond' from which some transforming touch might come." This suggests that "faith is folded into change, is the mutable and messy process of our lives rather than any fixed, mental product." Here and elsewhere, Wiman is feeling his way toward a theory of God's presence that chimes with the findings of contemporary physics.

In one of the book's most moving meditations, Wiman suggests that the interconnectedness of matter extends not just to this life but also to the next. Musing (in an essay about the deaths of his grandmother and Aunt Sissy) about Gerard Manley Hopkins' last words—"I am so happy. I am so happy. I loved my life"—Wiman asks himself how Hopkins could be so happy to leave a life he loved. Perhaps, Wiman concludes, "there is some way of dying into life rather than simply away from it, some form of survival that love makes possible."

There are so many lovely passages and fine insights in My Bright Abyss that it seems almost criminal to leave most of them unmentioned here. Wiman includes a handful of his own poems, and offers fascinating insights into several. After seeing the works of Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh frequently in these pages, readers may find themselves looking for more, as I did.

One curious omission from My Bright Abyss is the language of the Bible itself. Other than Christ's dying words—"My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me," which appear in a multitude of the meditations—most of the book is devoid of direct reference to biblical language. The absence is puzzling, standing in vivid contrast with St. Augustine's Confessions, a key inspiration in other respects.

At only one point in My Bright Abyss did I find myself saying, "No, No, No!" Late in the book, Wiman says, "I'm a Christian not because of the resurrection (I wrestle with this) …." Even here, Wiman does go on to describe, in beautiful and powerful terms, how Christ's suffering "shatters the iron walls around individual human suffering" and "makes extreme human compassion—to the point of death, even—possible."

But Christianity without the resurrection isn't Christianity. Whatever the flaws of the early 20th-century fundamentalists in their battles with theological modernists, surely they were right to insist that a literal resurrection lies at the very heart of Christianity, and that Christianity with no resurrection is another religion altogether. "[I]f Christ has not been raised," as the Apostle Paul puts it, "then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain."

What a relief, then, a chapter later, to come upon the assertion that "to be a Christian has to mean believing in the resurrected Christ," despite Wiman's qualification that "I grow less and less interested in the historical argument around this." Yes, I said to myself, I can wholeheartedly commend My Bright Abyss not just to secular friends and to a certain strand of Barthians, but to my fellow evangelicals—perhaps especially to fellow evangelicals.

Those who write about an illness that may lead to their death often worry that pity will prevent readers from engaging with the ideas they are conveying. My Bright Abyss deftly subverts this temptation. There are moments, of course, where the cancer stares us straight in the face, as when Wiman compares the agonizing pain of his bone marrow transplant to being "skinned … on the inside," or when he considers what it would be like if his two young daughters were to lose their father. But the prospect of dying is so fully integrated into living in My Bright Abyss that both are fully before us.

In the chapter that reflects at greatest length on his cancer, Wiman describes how he and his wife both "began spontaneously crying" in the last room of a retrospective exhibition of Lee Bontecou, an American artist whose sculptures make use of materials as diverse as metal and mail bags. "[W]hat is so moving about her work," Wiman writes, "is the sense of enclosed and solitary suffering that is slowly transfigured through the decades …. [D]eath and life are so woven together that they are completely indistinguishable: you cannot see one without the other."

This marvelous book, with its mastery and insight, its comfort and challenge, may well become part of our literary-theological canon. It may also be a hint of things to come: shortly before My Bright Abyss was released, Wiman announced that he will be stepping down from Poetry this summer and taking up residence on the faculty of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School.

David Skeel is a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author most recently of The New Financial Deal: Understanding the Dodd-Frank Act and Its (Unintended) Consequences (Wiley, 2011).

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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