In Ghostlight - (Southern Messenger Poets) by Ryan Wilson (Paperback)

About the Book

"The poems that make up In Ghostlight, a new collection from Ryan Wilson, meditate on the passing of time in light of the imaginative presence of absent times, both past and future, exploring the difficulty of being humanly present in the moment. Screens grab our attention and spirit us away; remembrance leads us toward repetitions of lost moments; idealism propels us toward utopian visions breeding disdain for the lives we have here and now. Formally and thematically, Wilson's poems navigate the tension between the desire for individual escape and the need for community, between hope and regret, between the spirit and the body, the eternal and the temporal. Rather than providing simplistic answers to these dichotomies, In Ghostlight reveals how each move in one direction is haunted by possibilities in the other. The progress of the book is a movement toward a union, or synthesis, of these diverging possibilities, allowing one to see each passing moment in the context of the eternal, and vice versa. Blending the autobiographical with the mythic, the contemporary with the ancient, the prose of twenty-first-century life with old and ancient verse-forms, these poems reveal, ultimately, that it's impossible to know anything without the past and without memory, that it's impossible to see fully what life, or hope, is without a spiritual katabasis, without seeing one's own experiences in ghostlight"--

Book Synopsis

In Ghostlight, a long-awaited second collection of original poems by Ryan Wilson, considers the haunting of the contemporary mind. With virtuosic formal variety and masterful craft, these poems range from rural America to Italy to the Holy Land, as they chronicle the dynamism of a spiritual odyssey toward the eternal through both past and present. Wilson employs sonnets, Pindaric and ballad stanzas, alliterative hemistichs in imitation of the Anglo-Saxon, and other ancient forms to enlighten the modern experience, from smartphones and Facebook to jumbo jets, entangled in a reciprocal relationship with myths, sacred literature, and traditions.

Revealing that the past and the everlasting can inform the present at any given moment, In Ghostlight conveys how a vision acknowledging this dual illumination helps us understand ourselves and others in our fraught, complex era.

Review Quotes

"Ryan Wilson is an excellent poet and In Ghostlight an outstanding book that proves, at least to this reader, that poetry in meter and rhyme is enduringly vital, necessary, and passionately engaged with such universal themes as place, history, and ancestors, both familial and literary. Wilson's command of craft is at the highest echelons of accomplishment and the inheritor of such august poets as Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, and even Theodore Roethke."--Orlando Ricardo Menes, Notre Dame Review

"Fog fills the hollows of the land and the contours of Ryan Wilson's soul in his masterful new book of poetry, In Ghostlight. This volume is a stunner, blistering quietly through shrouds of fog and mist and longing."--Joe Hoover, America Magazine

"In Ghostlight is a major book. With it, Wilson places himself among the best poets of his generation."--Dana Gioia

"I have been waiting for a poet like Ryan Wilson, an unapologetic formalist whose metrical agility is precise and varied, and whose uncamouflaged rhymes unleash an intelligence that is at once wild and sensible."--Rodney Jones

"These are brilliantly clear poems to read and read again, poems to study and to love. Few American poets working in rhyme and meter today could write poems to match them."--Shane McCrae

About the Author

Ryan Wilson is editor-in-chief of Literary Matters and author of The Stranger World; How to Think Like a Poet; and Proteus Bound: Selected Translations, 2008-2020. Raised in Georgia, he now lives in Carroll County, Maryland, and teaches at the Catholic University of America and in the University of St. Thomas-Houston's MFA program.