The Fall and Other Poems

New England comes to flower dying, writes J. Bottum in The Fall and Other Poems. In this powerful new collection of poetry, he argues for the centrality of winter, spring, summer, and fall - mourning their loss of meaning, celebrating their symbolic power, and finding in their cycle a figure for God’s presence in the world. The literary editor of The Weekly Standard, poetry editor of First Things, and a syndicated radio host, Bottum has written essays and reviews for the Atlantic Monthly, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, National Review, and many other publications. His poetry tends toward formal, structured verse, often issuing in paradoxical, epigrammatical lines: Words weigh more than words can bear,
Nothing stays until it’s gone,
We are the stream of old intent, / the current in the places left,
a crippled thing still has to live,
the undivided heart that springs / to fill the broken heart of things. In the 33 works that make up The Fall and Other Poems, the reader will find both grief: I should have knelt beside his bed and said in life we are in death, I should have told him sons survive to keep their father’s death alive. and comedy: The college girls wore black this spring, army camouflage and green, and the kind of high-top sneaks Bob Cousy wore to play the Knicks. I asked them why they dressed this way, but Love is dead is all they’d say. Religious, philosophical, formal, and yet sentimental, J. Bottum’s is a voice unlike any other in American literature today.