Hammer Is the Prayer
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Christian Wiman. From Hammer Is the Prayer: Selected Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.
In a review for The New Yorker of Christian Wiman’s essay collection My Bright Abyss, Adam Kirsch writes, “[Wiman] speaks passionately about Christ, and he embraces the idea of Christ’s Incarnation, because it offers a vision of the divine bound up in the material world. For him, God is always already among us—'the infinite inhering in the specific, atomic . . . insights that disclose our beings and situate us in something larger than ourselves.’” Kirsch movingly writes, “To argue for faith, at least in the twenty-first century, is already to lose the argument. What believers can give nonbelievers is an account of what it means to live in faith—not a polemic but a description, a confession, a kind of poem.”