Clive Wilmer Among the Builders (extract)

A striking development which marks the latter half of this large book sets its writer apart from poets anywhere now active in English. Most of the work that makes this evident this was either first collected in the extant volume The Mystery of Things (2006) or arranged here as books for the first time: King Alfred’s Book & Other Poems (1992-2000) and Report from No¬where & Other Poems (2006-2011). Although a key supposition for this de¬velopment remains unstated in both Wilmer’s poetry and criticism, it nearly breaks surface in the poems that I shall deal with here: namely, that architecture, rather than music or sculpture, now provides the foundational analogy, among the arts, for poetry. While one epigraph to this New and Collected invokes Ruskin on building, a few of these poems go Ruskin one better, in adopting a practice akin to Pound’s central innovation as Hugh Kenner mapped it, of replicating in Bucky-Fuller fashion consistent constructive ratios across a range of scales. (Probably Ruskin on Gothic anticipated what Kenner traces between the units in Pound’s Cantos and in Fuller’s geodesics: that certain ornament in the cathedrals is to their construction what small unit is to large in The Cantos and a Bucky-dome.) The sequence climaxing with “The Holy of Holies” will demonstrate how most of this comes to bear, in a poetry which, like Gunn’s, has continued to draw on the traditional braveries. Thom Gunn valued Wilmer’s work for its absence of both attitu¬dinizing and lies. Almost certainly he also would have esteemed its chosen Modernist means for their ability to touch on mystical-erotic analogies...

You can read the full article on the Notre Dame Review website: click here.