Higginson Reviews

Beyond Graves Registry

Reviewed by William J. Higginson

Long before I moved to New Mexico ten years ago, I had read many of Keith Wilson’s stunning poems derived from his Korean War experience, collected in various volumes under the title Graves Registry. So it has been a great pleasure for me personally, since coming here, to read more of his work and hear him read on a few occasions, though we live nearly at extreme ends of the state.

As with many endeavors, early success—whether measured by sales and popularity or more properly by a poet’s criteria of craft and usefulness of the work—is no guarantee of later excellence. One thinks of the period of maudlin introspective maunderings issuing from Galway Kinnell after his earlier volumes with “The Bear,” the Fergus, and Avenue C poems, lately and thankfully followed by the perfections of his Imperfect Thirst. Kinnell and Wilson, of the same generation, an interesting set for comparison. Like Kinnell with the Avenue C poems, Wilson would later assemble a substantial collection under the title of his best-known work, Graves Registry. But rather than simply add new work in new directions, as did Kinnell, Wilson added substantially to that earlier Graves Registry corpus, expanding and deepening the vision of his first decade back from the war, and giving further voice to his dual love of the New Mexican land of his birth and of the sea that harbored his young adulthood:

Land swells and buckles beneath us, they are
the waves of earth. Beneath our unsteady feet . . .
                                  —from “A Mask for the Warriors”
                                   Graves Registry, 1992 edition

   . . . Outside the rivers
 dry up, the sky clouds, but not with rain.
 Thin birds circle the dying cow and what message
 is there in the pages for me as the years catch me up
 and the thunder of blood dims my ears?

                                        —from “Anastasio Murillo”