After the Others by Bruce Weigl :: Book Reviews Poetry Essays

After the Others by Bruce Weigl With a new century approaching, Bruce Weigl's twelfth collection of poetry, After the Others, calls us to stand on the millennium's indeterminate edge. This book, opening with the last four lines of Milton's "Paradise Lost," parallels our departure from this century with Adam's fearful exit from Eden, beyond which is "all abyss, / Eternity, whose end no eye can reach" ("Paradise Lost"). Weigl posits that we stand at the century's uncertain gate naked, cold, and greedy; he refers often to a looming future, to give our collapsing present more urgency. We've forgotten, he says, how to love and live simply, how to write honestly and well. With all this forgetting, we've also forgotten that God gave Adam and Eve a chance to recreate a world mirroring the beauty and goodness of the lost one. Yet, as their heirs, we've constructed an earth where "we live inside a history that no longer remembers us." Weigl wonders if we reinvent history to give ourselves identity, rendering ourselves powerless because we're unconscious of our present. He examines human suffering, hedonism, and desire, wondering if we can re-learn how to love, be loved, and forgive. As a mature poet working at the height of his craft, Weigl writes that we must weed out "the snare of the devil in our hearts" to pass through the visible end of the twentieth century bravely, with grace. After the Others returns to themes of previous books. In Sweet Lorain (1996), forties America is depicted through life in charred, industrial Ohio, and in What Saves Us (1992) the speaker relies on religious epiphanies to rescue him from what he'll regret. Weigl's conversational language, as in previous books, comes unadorned: I didn't know what I didn't know. I didn't want a life of anything then, only a life. Weigl's line and stanzas vary: he uses couplets, tercets and quatrains, as well as undivided lines. He relies on internal and slant rhyme, but occasionally writes infelicitous lines: "She sang out loud about a cloud." His tone is generally ironic, as in "Cult of the Car": "somebody wanted a blow job / on a gorgeous freeway in America" but "it doesn't matter who / this near the millennium.