Saving the Appearances

Liz Waldner

Saving the Appearances recounts a quest for wholeness, the Truth that abides in and reveals the heart. Seeking to discover “the true form of the edifice of the world,” a building both containing and accounting for—saving—the appearances encountered on the way, these poems evince the mystery of the act of seeing, the beauty of the natural world, and the power of the longing that engenders its contemplation.

“…[N]o contemporary poet shows more wild individuality, more gusto (“truth of character…in the highest degree in which the subject is capable”—Hazlitt) than Liz Waldner. She has become one of the most convincing and most inspiring of our poets.” —Stephen Burt, Slope

“Rarely does one find such vulnerability and sadness so luxuriantly, inventively dressed out, so playful, so cured.” —John Reider, Tinfish

Liz Waldner is author of Dark Would (The Missing Person), Etym(bi)ology, Self and Simulacra, and Homing Devices. A Point Is That Which Has No Part was winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the Academy of American Poets Laughlin Prize for 2000.

A sample poem from the book

Saving the Appearances

On the way I see

the trees are glazed.

I open my mouth and breathe

to show them my vapor.

I did it to speak

the language of ice

or the language of white,

I don't have to know.

On the path, the prints

of animal feet.

A metrics of animals

scanned by the snow.

Where being and being

seen coincide,

often the world

is cold.