Wild Iris Critics

Isabella Cho

grief = “dynamic transformation” “meditative empathy”

Ewa Chrusciel

suffering = “annihilation of the self” ; “romantic fusion with nature” ; “evening maturation”

Ira Sadoff

nature = “rhetorical wisdom”

Kateryna Kotsur

poetry addresses “unanswerable truths”

Cyril Wong Yit Mun

god switch: “detached father” —> “lamenting parent” ; speaks with “greatest finality”

Jonathan Cooper

god feels “divine frustration” ; not a “tame golden retriever” ; “parental tenderness”

Piotr Zazula

deity is “emotionally volatile”

Shana Hadi

Matins represents “fluid existential struggle of faith of human fallibility”

James Longenbach

humans undergo “partial change”

Youyou Xu

“self-criticism” of human naivety

Meghan O’Rourke

introspection: “dynamism of thought and perception”

Jane Hirshfield

“non-negotiability of the wild”

Tony Hoagland

“internal argument of a speaker in crisis”

Langdon Hammer

Gluck wrote to “address a reader” ; “craved a listener”

Linda Gregerson

Vespers = “concession to the newly contemplated incapacities”

Henry Hart

poetry generalizable: “pigeonholing”