“& this is where you stand with a gun the size of American centuries” so begins Michael Wasson’s World Made Visible and truly, what a beginning. Within this stunning collection of poems, World Made Visible, Testament #90, and Torso, One Summer, & Fingers Or The Bars of Cages Wasson’s images do the true work of illumination, each line pulling us closer and yet closer into the minutia of each moment with incredible grace. “Like any/January, you were born inside/the cut out tongue of winter: you/were a body, craving light: begging/the faceless gods & the full-/bellied monster who gave you flesh-/to be spared” and here at the end of Testament #90 Wasson brings us to birth, out into the cold light, out into the word that thrums just beneath the breast of this suite “again.”
I think here I would invoke Kevin Young’s The Grey Album, his belief that to number a suite implies perhaps a shadow archive, a repetition in which the poem stands, a tradition of recursion. And in these poems of tenderness and violence, loss and nostalgia; poems in which “we had/the hands/of gods-for only/a summer.” It seems that we are always surrounded by weight of memory, a memory the size of American centuries, a gun “loaded with the teeth of those who sang you”
This pulsating again within Wasson’s brilliant work is not always sweet and not always searing, more the complex space in between. Rather, like any survival it is present and achingly so, returning to where we have begun and living it again. “& this is where you stand with a gun the size of American centuries & now take it from your spent mouth & enter the warmth of the water” and so it is that Wasson’s speaker brings us into something that feels like grace, like an irrepressible again.