Every list of Texas books should include a work of poetry as a sample of the kind of language the land can inspire. Christian Wiman’s long poem The Long Home contains the most beautiful, haunting language written on Texas.
Long poems are relative things — this one is about 40 pages. It’s the story of Josie, the poet’s grandmother, who came to Texas from Carolina when she was 10. The family followed her father’s dream of owning his own farm.
West Texas is inhospitable to farming, and this is the story of how the women in the family endured one hardship after another.
Here are a couple of samples of the language. The first is about the letters saved by the matriarch of the family:
She’d keep a letter from Carolina
A week or more, before she’d bring it out
One night when everyone was on the porch
And read into the evening’s scattered sounds,
Her voice at times so soft it seemed to change
Into a killdeer’s cry, carrying far
Across the fields and coming back as words
Again: details and conversations which,
Later, when I would read the letters myself,
Weren’t there.
One of Josie’s sisters-in-law was a beautiful soul for whom Texas was just too much. Josie noticed her beautiful, but haunted, eyes.
Opal’s eyes
Were all horizon. Looking in, you knew
That what you saw was your own vision’s limit,
And not the end of what was there.
One of the proverbs of the frontier was that Texas was a paradise for men and dogs and hell on women and horses. Here is a record of days in Texas — working a farm, sitting on porches as the sky darkens, seeing deer in the pasture, grieving lost children and husbands.
It’s a sad, beautiful poem that will give you much that can said about Texas in a single evening of reading.
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