As When Waking: (Phoenix Poets)

About the Book

An exploration of poetic form, centering on the alphabet as both its medium and constraint.

The poems of Daniel Schonning's debut collection range from personal examinations of childhood suffering and loss of faith to deep observations of images and objects to the foreclosure of a family home, a father estranged by addiction, mallards on a frozen pond, flowering bindweed, and a door to the underworld. With all its component pieces, As When Waking aims to apprentice itself to the medium of letters, inviting readers to listen and learn from the systems and symmetries of alphabets.

Schonning employs structural paradigms to explore themes of poetic lineage. Twenty-six of the poems in this collection are abecedarians, a form where the opening letter of each line advances through the alphabet, with the lines of the first poem proceeding alphabetically from A–Z, while those of the second poem move from B–A, and then C–B, all the way to Z–A. This structure is tied to Jewish mystic texts such as the Sefer Yetzirah, which probes the relationship between the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the world they inhabit.

Table of Contents:
Proem
Paean
One Poem About Poetry
Catalog
[Little Box: Caedmon and the Host]
Midwinter Elegy
Body Moving About a Frame
[Little Box: Honeybee]
Dog Star
The Beatitudes
[Little Box: Gilgamesh and Enkidu]
As When Waking
Ladder
A Perfect Form Unblinking
[Little Box: The Vulture and the Jackal]
The Living
A Vision
[Little Box: Juniper]
The Machine (I & II)
Scales
[Little Box: Coyote and the Quail]
Birdsong
Coda
Origin Story
[Little Box: Ezekiel and the Word]
The Material World
Catalog
Copper War Statues
[Little Box: Sundiata and Sogolon]
Catalog
Hagiographies
[Little Box: Purple Martins]
Four Koans
Prayer Is Better Than Sleep
[Little Box: Sappho and Orpheus]
Alphabet
Postlude

Acknowledgments
Notes on the Text

About the Author :
Daniel Schonning’s poetry has been published in Orion Magazine, Poetry Daily, POETRY Magazine, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York, where he teaches creative writing at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and serves as a poetry editor for Seneca Review.
 

Review :
“I have eagerly anticipated the arrival of these poems, and now here they are, for all of us, shimmering and satisfying. In As When Walking, Schonning offers us language at its most incandescent. Sweet sweet truths in poem after poem. Gentle and yet irrefutable. Page after page of wicked smart turns of phrase. What a book! What a poet!” “Alphabet as cosmology is an idea at least as old as Kabbalah, and here Schonning cycles through abecedarian combinations and permutations that spell the world as he knows it. A praise song to creation accrues through these pages made luminous by constraints that reveal a maker of deep tact and unwavering faith in language. Both elegant and gentle, and effortless in its virtuosity, As When Waking is a first book of rare formal mastery and metaphysical grace.” “In As When Waking, Schonning delves into English with great attention, discovering, even within syllables, a spirit of sound and a forecast of cadences that are entirely refreshing and undistorted by irony. Schonning is a poet of extraordinary, unguarded candor and deserves our trust.” “Part love letter to the alphabet, part alphabet’s love letter to us, Schonning’s miraculous debut is one where miracle is nothing more and nothing less than opening our eyes—as if for the first time—after what had seemed an endless sleep. With a mystic’s faith that word still conjures world, a musician’s ear, and a child’s sense of wonder, Schonning teaches us the one word we most need to say, a word so simple it’s easy to forget: yes. These abecedarians say yes, brightly.” “Schonning takes up a popular and time-honored poetic constraint: an English abecedarian. It is within the seeming simplicity and accessibility of the form that his innovation, improvisation, surprise, and risk find their most well-appointed playgrounds. Looping through the alphabet, Schonning deftly shows us the opportunities we let slip when we stop at z. There are amazements, wonders, and magics in this collection.”