New poetry collection captures stillness in motion
Boston Globe, October 29, 2023
by Nina MacLaughlin
Cambridge-based poet Gary Whited’s new collection “Being, There” (Wayfarer Books) concerns itself with the solid stuff of the world — hay, a fencepost, a pitchfork, a horse — and reckons, too, with the unsayable largeness of being, and “hours lost in looking.” Whited locates the vastness in the simplicity of a task, a spider weaving a web, a carpenter swinging a hammer, a boy mucking stalls, and has that rare vision: He sees movement in the stillness, and stillness in the movement. The book includes Whited’s poems as well as a selection of his translations of fragments from the Greek philosopher Parmenides, where translation becomes more an act of listening, of attunement, of seeing and hearing, what comes from the cracks. These cracks, in us, in a stone, in a statue, speak “for what is unspoken, for what’s/ Sturdy enough to dare to fall apart.” Whited, who grew up on the plains of Montana, has an ear for what moves through the unlatched gate, which “as it sways sends out/ its ancient tone of longing.” The wind moves through these poems, against the solid, silent things that give it voice, like the fencepost which “delighted my eyes/ And my fingers to touch some thing that lived/ Right there inside where forever might arrive.” Forever arrives in the silence; so much is there to be heard in the silence. Whited listens. He, like the fencepost, like all of us in time, is cracked but still standing, “open to something not yet known.”
Boston Globe, October 29, 2023
by Nina MacLaughlin
Cambridge-based poet Gary Whited’s new collection “Being, There” (Wayfarer Books) concerns itself with the solid stuff of the world — hay, a fencepost, a pitchfork, a horse — and reckons, too, with the unsayable largeness of being, and “hours lost in looking.” Whited locates the vastness in the simplicity of a task, a spider weaving a web, a carpenter swinging a hammer, a boy mucking stalls, and has that rare vision: He sees movement in the stillness, and stillness in the movement. The book includes Whited’s poems as well as a selection of his translations of fragments from the Greek philosopher Parmenides, where translation becomes more an act of listening, of attunement, of seeing and hearing, what comes from the cracks. These cracks, in us, in a stone, in a statue, speak “for what is unspoken, for what’s/ Sturdy enough to dare to fall apart.” Whited, who grew up on the plains of Montana, has an ear for what moves through the unlatched gate, which “as it sways sends out/ its ancient tone of longing.” The wind moves through these poems, against the solid, silent things that give it voice, like the fencepost which “delighted my eyes/ And my fingers to touch some thing that lived/ Right there inside where forever might arrive.” Forever arrives in the silence; so much is there to be heard in the silence. Whited listens. He, like the fencepost, like all of us in time, is cracked but still standing, “open to something not yet known.”
