Book of the Year:

After Adam:
The Books of Moses
laurance wieder
highland books

This book, the author explains, “is a prosimetrum, a story told in prose and verse. Mortality is its theme. Populated by rabbis, storytellers, mystics, poets, travelers, and philosophers, the book belongs to the same small tribe as the 1001 Nights, Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla, Dante’s Vita Nuova, Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire.” Wieder adds that each chapter in his “Old Testament saga corresponds with a Sabbath portion of Moses’ five books, as written in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. I think of my synagogue—Congregation Beth Israel in Charlottesville, Virginia—and its traditional, lay-led minyanreading aloud from the Torah scroll every Saturday morning as Jewish Arcadians, gathering to recount the living history in tale and song.”

And keep an eye out, early in 2020, for Wieder’s A Look Ahead: Selected Poems 1966-2018 (also from Highland Books), to which I contributed a foreword. I’ll quote from that foreword here: 

I don’t know a lot about Larry Wieder’s antecedents, but that’s no constraint on the imagination. Perhaps among his ancestors there was a curious figure, maybe a distant cousin of Elijah of Vilna, “The Genius,” unmentioned by Martin Buber and other chroniclers of the Hasidic sages: hard to pin down, neither a founder nor a follower of any school.

Certainly in his poetry, Wieder is elusive in just this way. Near the end of this book, in a short poem titled “Orientalia” (one of a set that plays deftly with formal measures), you’ll come to a line that demands “Deliver me from solemnity.” At which point you’ll laugh, because whatever else he need fear, this poet has no worries on that score. And yet if he’s never guilty of solemnity, his entire body of work—poetry, prose, combinations of the two, as in After Adam: The Five Books of Moses—violates fashionable prohibitions against worship. A jester is not incapable of praise.

John Wilson is a contributing editor for The Englewood Review of Books.