Morning of the World by Jane Wiseman

In Jane Wiseman’s new collection, Morning of the World, we bear witness, in poems that are intimate, deeply philosophical, and flush with startling images, to this flawed and beautiful world and to one poet’s quest to both praise and mourn the intimate life and the larger world we inhabit. The range of these poems is impressive—minute details of the natural world, the inner and spiritual worlds, the borderless cosmos. The intangible is made tangible here through a masterful use of language: here we enter the “sunlight’s fabric,” the “wind’s name” that “swerves the wild field,” and time itself, that drives into us “the cruel blue of its tooth.”  “Why could I not/reknit the world’s unraveling?” asks Wisemen in her poem “You, Who are gone.”  These marvelous poems take us on a journey to try and answer this question and force us to ask if such a reknitting is possible, even through poetry,  

 —Jude Nutter, author of Dead Reckoning and four other collections.  

As she did in her previous chapbook, The Bee Telephone (Choeofpleiorn Press, 2024), Jane Wiseman displays in Morning of the World an astonishing range of subject matter and a masterful grasp of language. In the nautical ars poetica “Taking Ship,” she writes, “Who knows how / it tosses out its parcel of words, // cargo bursting its carton and spilling.” The carton of this book spills over with poems of heartbreaking love, astronomical enormities, childhood uncomfortably-up-close, unsettling fairytales, awesome phenomena of the natural world—but this is a mere taste of the abundance within its pages. Wiseman’s unique voice magnetizes this reader. It is at times ornate (“…the spell-struck seat strewn with the duff”); at times quietly meditative (“The air’s hum dampens, / redstarts flown”); at times tender (“the balm of the world lies on us / as benediction”). She wields the power to frighten, amuse, instruct, and move us to tears. Morning of the World is a pied thing. It ends with the praisesong “It’s a new day.” “Fields stretch dark beneath trees. / Praise them. / Praise these.” Praise this marvelous book.       

 —Joan Barasovska, author of Orange Tulips; Unblessed, Unsung