The Earliest Witnesses

In the poems of The Earliest Witnesses, witnesses need a place to begin-they spiral off from a walk, a church, an orchard, to go into deeper meditation about faith, earth, restraint, desire, and violence. Waldreps 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. The status of witnesses is never constant and never settled in this book: sometimes, witnesses foster, touch, and stain the places they inhabit; other times, they befriend, or document, or think. Sometimes, witnesses forget themselves-in questions of blame and responsibility-and sometimes they feel forgotten and unknown. If these are poems of witness, then they are also testators to the craft of seeing: Can you see this, the ophthalmologist in A Mystics Guide to Arches asks over and over again. Here, sight facilitates and impedes desire; it colludes with language itself. She said, When you say pear, I see p-e-a-r for a second before I see, in my minds 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.