Charles of the Desert: A Life in Verse by William Woolfitt
Paraclete Press, 2016
In William Woolfitt’s second poetry collection, he extends his brief studies in portraiture undertaken in his first collection Beauty Strip (Texas Review Press, 2014)—micro-biographies of Billie Holiday, Muriel Rukeyser, and vernacular artist Bessie Harvey—into a full “life in verse” that details the complicated history of Charles de Foucauld, desert hermit and missionary. Like Stephanie Strickland’s The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil (University of Wisconsin Press, 1993) and Nickole Brown’s more recent Fanny Says (BOA Editions, 2015), Charles of the Desert is a biography-in-poems, a work that requires an attentive heart and mind willing to be steeped in another’s life such that the imagination of writer and subject blur: it’s a dual process of excavation and invention. The blur here is convincing and arresting, and Woolfitt’s receptive soul feels present in the rich tones of de Foucauld’s first-person.
Weaving together imagined scenes and fact, the volume strikes a balance between narrative arc and lyrical distillation. Woolfitt builds small windows into the experiences that formed the man who would come to write “The Prayer of Abandonment” and tends to the small gaps that would go overlooked in a more sweeping biographical narrative: a spontaneous desire to bring a blanket for the “poor eggshell man,” the hanging crucifix, a sweaty night at the Jesuit school when the priests tried to burn the “sin-inventing devils” out of young Charles and his peers, the making of rope from leaves and bark with “the first Tuareg to chance that I am kind.”
Woolfitt renders the harshness of the ascetic life in terrific detail—ink made “from charcoal/ and camel piss,” grass-seed porridge salvaged from anthills—but he manages to render the lushness of such a life as well, depicting the deep hunger in this extreme character who finds treasure in the Eternal he worships that makes the years of loneliness worth it. Such paradox shows up, too, in the violent wonder in basic religious acts: at a first communion, the cup is “reflecting the candle flame / pelting me with stars.” Woolfitt meets well the difficult task of depicting de Foucauld’s martyrdom in the final spare poem; as he is killed, the hermit watches the fluttering away, the destruction, of the pages of Tuareg poetry he has painstakingly translated: we are presented with a fearless gaze from a person unafraid of being nothing.
Woolfitt stunningly captures de Foucauld’s hospitality in Algeria to both slave and free, Muslim and Jew, Christian and nonbeliever, in “Changeling”:
Each of us is a changeling,
certain to shrink and curllike twists of burnt paper,
unless kindness bursts through
our lizard scales and mouse fur,bidding each to grow, unfurl,
roam the earth as an enlarged
and marvelous creature.
These are poems for the religious and nonreligious, for any reader seeking language that transforms history into lived moments, and any reader drawn to humans who transgress boundary and tribe, seeking universality.
Jessie van Eerden is author of the novels Glorybound and My Radio Radio, and the forthcoming essay collection The Long Weeping. Her essays have appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing, The Oxford American, and other publications. Jessie holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa and directs the low-residency MFA program at WV Wesleyan College.