Christian Wiman has a gift for short books. His previous memoirs, My Bright Abyss and He Held Wondrous Light, come in trim and polished. So it may be that stretching him to 300 pages, as he does in his new book, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, is doing him a disservice. There are too many opportunities not to get to the bone. And as the title suggests, if you get that far, you may find there’s nothing there.
Wiman admits as much at the outset: “To write an introduction implies something to introduce, and I have no idea what this book will be. This is salvo, self-challenge, zero at the bone.”(3) He’s clear that the fight against despair has been both the substance and the spur of his art as a poet. But by placing the fight at center stage, he doesn’t assure himself that he’s got the right form to address it.
So here is a scrapbook, a glorious one, that dabbles in autobiography, poetry, biblical exegesis, and compendia of quotations from some of literature and spirituality’s greatest lights. Is it seamless? Far from it. But should you submit to the grim and magnificent ride? Absolutely.
Wiman has always resisted a straight-forward embrace of faith. There are just too many reasons not to get too close. The life-threatening cancer he’s lived with for years now. The dissolute father. The West Texas Christianity he grew up with.
But his poetry has always gotten him closer than his mind ever wanted to go. He refers to it as a calling, which, as he said in He Held Radical Light, one should always approach with hesitation. “The impeded stream is the one that sings,” he says there, quoting Wendell Berry. Here he likens the call to “that beak in your bowels”(5), “this restlessness, this void that you can never quite fill, this tooth that will not stop nibbling at your soul”(207), “this zombie zeal that will not die.”(14) Ouch.
It does seem that Wiman reaches for images of being consumed in describing the journey to and with God. Shades of the “Batter my heart” experience of John Donne:
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
—John Donne, ‘Batter My Heart, Three-Person’d God’
But also like Donne, he is looking for a kind of chastity that includes all of this struggle. “Spiritual innocence,” he cries, “is not beyond knowledge but inclusive of it, just as it is of joy and love, despair and doubt.” (14)
So we go on this expedition with him and there is something startling in each of the fifty entries. The strongest of them, to me, are the extended stories he tells of the miscarriage he and his wife experienced, the attempts to reconcile with his father and sister in a squalid motel, and the indignities of the cancer chair. He is masterful in creating scenes with an image and in mining every interaction for something far deeper than cliché.
At the same time, he’s ever the poetry professor, introducing you to sublime poets you’d take years to discover on your own. And if he sometimes wanders too long around a thought, all is forgiven when he manufactures a turn of phrase that sets your mind spinning.
This latest work is a fine daily companion for a fifty-day examen. Wiman will walk with you to visit the keenest and most long-running questions of your soul. And he will not abandon you. He will instead remind you:
Sometimes a season seems a gust of wind,
sometimes a lifetime gravitates to one noon’s green.
Some griefs are keepsakes from a place you’ve never been.
Some luck is love incompletely seen. (43)
—Christian Wiman, ‘(Some Luck is Love)’
Heartlands 
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