As When Waking
An exploration of poetic form, centering on the alphabet as both its medium and constraint.
The poems of Daniel Schonning’s debut collection range from personal examinations of childhood suffering and loss of faith to deep observations of images and objects to the foreclosure of a family home, a father estranged by addiction, mallards on a frozen pond, flowering bindweed, and a door to the underworld. With all its component pieces, As When Waking aims to apprentice itself to the medium of letters, inviting readers to listen and learn from the systems and symmetries of alphabets.
The University of Chicago Press
Phoenix Poets Series
Schonning employs structural paradigms to explore themes of poetic lineage. Twenty-six of the poems in this collection are abecedarians, a form where the opening letter of each line advances through the alphabet, with the lines of the first poem proceeding alphabetically from A–Z, while those of the second poem move from B–A, and then C–B, all the way to Z–A. This structure is tied to Jewish mystic texts such as the Sefer Yetzirah, which probes the relationship between the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the world they inhabit.
Praise for As When Waking…
“Alphabet as cosmology is an idea at least as old as Kabballah, and here Schonning cycles through abecedarian combinations and permutations that spell the world as he knows it. Its luminosity produced by constraint, the praise song to creation that accrues through these pages reveals a maker of deep tact and unwavering faith in language. Effortless in its virtuosity, both elegant and gentle, As When Waking is a first book of rare formal mastery and metaphysical grace.”—Brian Teare, author of Poem Bitten by a Man
“I have eagerly anticipated the arrival of these poems, and now here they are, for all of us, shimmering and satisfying. In As When Walking, Schonning offers us language at its most incandescent. Sweet sweet truths in poem after poem. Gentle and yet irrefutable. Page after page of wicked smart turns of phrase. What a book! What a poet!”—Camille Dungy, author of America, A Love Story
“In As When Waking, the quality of attention delves into our English, discovering, even within syllables, a spirit of sound and a forecast of cadences entirely refreshing, undistorted by irony. Schonning is a poet of extraordinary, unguarded candor, and deserves our trust.”—Donald Revell, author of Canandaigua
“Part love letter to the alphabet, part alphabet’s love letter to us, Schonning’s miraculous debut is one where miracle is nothing more, nothing less, than opening one’s eyes—as if for the first time—from what had been our endless sleep. With a mystic’s faith that word still conjures world, a musician’s ear, and a child’s sense of wonder, these abecedarians teach us the one word we need most to say, a word so simple it’s easy to forget, which is to ‘say “Yes”—say “Yes,” brightly.’”—Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Variations on Dawn and Dusk
“Schonning takes up a popular and time-honored poetic constraint: an English abecedarian. It is within the seeming simplicity and accessibility of the form that his innovation, improvisation, surprise, and risk find their most well-appointed playgrounds. Looping through the alphabet, Schonning deftly showing us the opportunities we’ve let slip when we stop at Z. There are amazements, wonders, and magics in this collection.”—Douglas Kearney, Phoenix Poets contributing editor and author of Optic Subwoof