The Opening Ritual

The conclusion of G. C. Waldrep’s trilogy exploring chronic illness.

In The Opening Ritual, G. C. Waldrep contends with the failure of the body, the irreducible body, in the light of faith. What can or should “healing” mean when it can’t ever mean “wholeness” again? And what kind of architecture is “mercy” when we live inside damage? These are poems that take both the material and the spiritual seriously, that cast their unsparing glances toward “All that is not / & could never be a parable.”

The collection concludes with a sequence of truly grand meditations on spiritual consciousness—in one the poet notes how, in the stillness of contemplation, the world begins to hum and resound with music. The Opening Ritual attends to and fashions its song from that music.

G. C. Waldrep is the author of several collections of poetry, including feast gently, also published by Tupelo, which won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the long poem Testament. Waldrep’s work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Paris Review, APR, New England Review, New American Writing, Harper’s, Tin House, Verse, and many other journals, as well as twice in The Best American Poetry and in the second edition of Norton’s Postmodern American Poetry. He has received prizes from the Poetry Society of America and the Academy of American Poets as well as the Colorado Prize, the Dorset Prize, the Campbell Corner Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Writing, and a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he teaches at Bucknell University and edits the journal West Branch.