Commentary
Essay Poems is Donald Wellman’s most ambitious volume of poetry to date.
The verses absorb everything including several languages besides English
(Spanish, Latin, German, French). His poetry evokes the universe seen from
the all-encompassing point of view of Borges’ Aleph. The center slips away.
There is no sense of personal identity. But someone emerges, with a liquid
body. Information, quotations agglomerate and turn around in a dancing vortex
propelled by a horror vacui. Allusions dart in every direction as the richness
of the text overwhelms the reader. – ROBERTO ECHAVARREN
Wellman is a wanderer, a wonderer, and well of knowledge, too. Probing,
disturbing, disorienting, and melancholic, these are erudite and emotional
essay-poem-collages. They loop and spin the reader in multiple directions
from the mucilaginous body to fishing with handline and hook, or searching
for a whisk in a Chinese store, a storm of stars, the throes of love, the self is
felt, reflected, distorted, and imagined. – ROS ZIMMERMANN
These serial poems point the reader toward unexpected affinities between text
and text, event and consequence, thought and being. Wellman’s enormous erudition
penetrates into the essence of what matters in life and in the life of the
mind. In the hands of a lesser poet, such an ambitious sweep would be doomed
to fail: Wellman triumphs. – CHRISTOPHER SAWYER-LAUCANNO
Wellman’s methodical chora, offering a unique philosophical-spiritual and
literary approach, is a marvelously intelligent translation “of false / and fictionalized
confessions,” beautifully wrought and suffused with a rueful gaiety
that will break your heart. “A passageway to a parallel world,” everything
one might fear and desire: dick, Zyklon B, resemblances, contiguities, and
causations “between thought and prayer” can be found herein, one of the
most compelling books you will ever read. – ANDREW LEVY
A finely crafted, bawdy, beautiful, heartrending and hilarious testament to
the poetic vocation. Who would have suspected that the dick–not the Lacanian
phallus but the humble dick, pink and shriveled, “wrapped in folds of
uncertainty,” that “moldy wad… wound with red rubber bands”–could be the
anchoring point of an elegiac mode? Only a poet of Wellman’s craft and erudition,
that ring in every phrase and every line. – BILL LAVENDER
