Moments of simple beauty– but episodes as well that felt as if I'd been dropped into a self-help manual. ( )

I read this book as a kind of research into the concept of the idea of dwelling and belonging. It was inspirational in that I felt there was a lot more to say about it, hence it encourage my own writing. ( )

David Whyte actually made/makes money taking poetry (Dante particularly) into corporations to help move leadership teams out of ruts. Crazy huh? Yes. But he did it and did it successfully. His focus was on the ability of some poetry to move people spiritually. I found this bit on youtube that gives you a taste of what he was doing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO0OjtThqyI

He has a peculiar, though effective, repetitive way of reading poetry that you get a taste of at 2:25 and 5:35 of that video.

Ok, so he found a way to make money reading the poetry of others and applying it to crises/needs in organizations. My impression is that he did these presentations and then made a recording of them and then wrote a book based on them but I could have the sequence wrong. The book "The Heart Aroused" is on amazon but I don't see that the tapes/cds are. I have no idea when he started writing poetry. Again from the bio on his website it appears that he started writing/publishing poetry first and then did the corporate bit if one goes by the publication of books about the corporate approach. But the publisher of all of his poetry is essentially his own promotional company, Many Rivers Press, which also handles his speaking engagements. The House of Belonging doesn't have a list of prior publication credits because it hasn't been through the usual editorial process of submission/acceptance in poetry journals. He self-publishes. Perhaps someone else revies/comments on his poetry, but I would say the poems in this book suffer from the lack of running through the literary guantlet to be honed/rejected. The result is a very uneven collection.

The beginning of the book strikes me as being written by someone who wants to be a guru more than a poet. The poems do more telling than showing and are painfully enjambed. From "At Home":

the sky
a broad roof
for the house
of contentment
where I wish
to
live forever
in the eternity
of my own
fleeting
and momentary
happiness.

It may be I've been too indoctrinated by current literary convention but I wanted to yell "concrete!" and in many cases "cut this!" Especially that last in the poem "The Winter of Listening," which has three pages of this:

Even with summer
so far off
I feel it grown in me
now and ready
to arrive in the world.

All those years
listening to those
who had
nothing to say.

And in my opinion could all be scrapped but the last page:

And
here
in the tumult
of the night
I hear the walnut
above the child's swing
swaying
its dark limbs
in the wind
and the rain now
come to
beat against my window
and somewhere
in this cold night
of wind and stars
the first whispered
opening of
those hidden
and invisible springs
that uncoil
in the still summer air
each yet
to be imagined
rose.

Yes, a rather cliched batch of imagery (and still that crazy enjambment) but still lovely and at least imagery.

To be honest, I was tempted to stop reading, but I didn't and I'm glad I didn't because things got better (except for the enjambment, which I got used to). I have to say his poem "Four Horses" now resides with other favorite horse poems ("The Names of Horses," "She Had Some Horses" and "The Blessing"). Here are a couple of stanzas:

I find myself wanting
to run down First Street
like an eight year old
saying, "Hey!
Come and look
at the new horses
in Fossek's field!"

And I find myself
wanting to ride
into the last hours
of this summer
bareback and
happy as the hooves
of the days
that drum toward me.

I consider his best poems in the book "Tienamen [spelled incorrectly in the book] (The Man in Front of the Tank)" and "Edward" the best poems in the book. The first is not what it would seem and the set up creates a brilliant contrast. The second is a wonderful poem about friendship and how it both changes and stays the same over large spaces of time and physical distance.

I'm going to keep this book for its successes but I wish he would find someone hard-nosed to edit his work. I'll leave you with a link to him reading one of his poems in this volume that does a fairly good job of wedding imagery and soul experience (note that it was read at a psychotherapy conference):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PK3GhnHOJc&feature=related ( )

I'm not someone who loves or really understands poetry at all, and I came to David Whyte through seeing him read (recite, really) live in about early 02, I think. The poems in this book have come to mean so much to me that I have portions of them tattooed on my body.

I think this is his best work, although I love certain of the poems in his other books. This one speaks to me most deeply. And permanently, lol. ( )