This week in my writing class we’re reading essays and two poems by Christian Wiman, plus a piece of criticism from The New Yorker about his collection My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer.

Wiman’s poem “After the Diagnosis” describes an apple sapling bent to the ground, observed by the poem’s speaker through “one clear pane” (as he suffers one clear pain). The image reminds me of a tree described by Imam Zaid Shakir, one of the scholars I profiled in my book Light without Fire: The Making of America’s First Muslim College.

Consider these lines, from Imam Zaid’s book Scattered Pictures:

 

 

Wiman’s writing, and the writing about him in The New Yorker, also reminds me of an Alec Wilkinson essay about Edward Hirsch’s elegy for his son, Gabriel.

Here is Hirsch in Gabriel, challenging God:

 

Illustration of Christian Wiman from The New Yorker: ALESSANDRO GOTTARDO