Review of He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith and the Faith of Art

One of the themes that speak most powerfully from Christian Wiman’s writings—poems, essays, memoirs—is that of the absence of inspiration or the absence of God. To begin with the first formulation, Wiman concedes of the texts closest to his heart that for page after page they will fail to inspire. For one of the most prominent Christian poets working in North America today, it might seem surprising to see how he—in his first volume of essays, Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2007)—calls the Bible, for the most part, ‘cold ash’. This poet has to be patient, as his art doesn’t care for him in the same way he cares for her.