The Long Home Book

Winner of the 11th annual Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, "The Long Home" is Christian Wiman's

Library Journal

A tribute to a vanished world, Wiman's prize-winning first book consists of a long narrative and 12 short poems about rites of passage of a large "shadowed family" of sharecroppers in north Texas. Josie, Wiman's narrator, describes how three generations of her "day-laboring" family face up to nature and death in "the wide/ wind riffled whiteness someone farmed." Behind the narrator's (and Wiman's?) act of remembrance ("lives like smoke unspooling from a candle's/ Flame") is the ongoing moral development of character. Unachieved needs for nourishment deepen into a quest for quality of life. Rural Texas is presented realistically ("broken hoe, heel-bolts and clevises"), and often Josie's plain speech grows poetic: "I turned, dream-fingers linked with mine to lead/ Me home, the way I'd taken like a seam/ Laid out between the unsown fields of darkness." Although this sophisticated vision is at odds with gritty henhouse and warped floorboard, still one comprehends that "Home/ is momentary, a way/ of seeing." Wiman's empathetic story of belonging, endurance, and memory is a delight.--Frank Allen, Northampton Community Coll., Tannersville, PA