The Earliest Witnesses

Poetry. Waldrep’s seventh collection begins where his prior collection, FEAST GENTLY, left off: This / is how the witness ends: touch, withdraw; touch again, according to the opening poem in THE EARLIEST WITNESSES. If these are poems of witness, then they are also testators to the craft of seeing: eye-proofs of an epiphenomenal world. Can you see this, the ophthalmologist in A Mystic’s Guide to Arches asks over and over again. Sight becomes both the facilitator and impediment of desire, in collusion with language itself. She said, When you say pear, I see p-e-a-r for a second before I see, in my mind’s eye, a pear, Waldrep carefully records in [West Stow Orchard Poem (II)]. The desire-poems in THE EARLIEST WITNESSES want the thing itself, its image of the mind, and the language that transmutes both thing and image into song.