A colleague who is an alumnus of Bennington College, where Mark Wunderlich directs the Writing Seminars graduate program, recommended God of Nothingness to me last month, but I saved it so I could read it as my first book in this year's Sealey Challenge. Many of the poems are couplets, all wonderfully crafted, with internal rhyme and brilliant meter. I especially admire the way in which Wunderlich presents poems of autobiography and self-reflection without it ever seeming egotistical or precious. I am not saying this well. What he has done is difficult to define, but apparently, if you are as talented as Mark Wunderlich, you can write about yourself and your life and ancestry in a way that is careful and detailed but also expansive and generous. The work is tender, sad, raw, and beautiful. These adjectives sound so trite next to the mastery of the poems, but there it is. I am not as talented as Wunderlich.
I was especially interested to see that the poet thanks Spencer Reece in his Acknowledgments page, because I am a big fan of Reece's work, and recently found my way to the Ecotheo Collective. (Reece is on the Board of Directors for the Collective.) This may seem tangential to some, but I find it another example of synchronicity.
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