Testament

"Ultimately, Waldrep's poem seeks a way in which to morally imagine and inhabit our dependence upon other bodies, and its discovery--its revelation and testament--is that one's poem must in turn be inhabited and imagined by this dependency. Thus, the poem repeatedly opens itself up, vents, releases, incurs more and varied content, and bears the marks of it all: the seams are everywhere; it is a poem of seams. The poem acts as an endless receipt of things heard, taken in, mistaken, distorted, fought, and believed in... In its utterly singular way, regardless of the dissonance it incurs along the way, Testament effects this reciprocity between the world within the poem and the poem within the world. Waldrep has given something wonderful: a poem whose testament can be trusted because it allows us to doubt." --Poetry Northwest "In dialogue with the historic tradition of the American long poem, Waldrep's contribution to that tradition is elliptical, political, and memorable." --Academy of American Poets "Testament is the sort of poem you have to wander through. It is ambitious and athletic, ever-climbing (like Icarus, who appears often) toward a breakthrough. The results can be messy, and not everything here fully arrests, but the endurance of attention has great rewards, and the poem promises lasting power and new insights with each reread." --NewPages "Hyper-referential, allusive, as private as it is public or pop, Waldrep's Testament is thoroughly non-diegetic--exterior to the event of its compressed and cloistered writing. It is, therefore, and in its own strange way, a statement of faith: 'blessed is he / who does not see and yet, somehow, believes.'" -Colorado Review "The scope of the book is difficult to convey in a brief review, or I would try to unpack Waldrep's exploration of sense and memory in the recurring image of the bee, the eye, and the flower; or attempt to summarize his inquiry into language in the third of the book's five sections; or ask whether the references to ribs and flaming swords are intended to evoke Eden and the Fall, and whether that fall connects to the various references to Icarus. The most concise reference point that occurs to me, though--Notley, Robertson, and Harryman notwithstanding--is that Waldrep is the closest American poetry comes to Geoffrey Hill, in the music of his language, the range of his erudition, the integrity of his intellect, and the honesty of his doubt." -Paul Scott Stanfield, of Ploughshares