Spring Up Everlasting: Poems

In his third book of poetry, William Woolfitt reflects on experiences of hope and despair, on ecological crisis and violence and stubborn survival, on Lucille Clifton’s imperative to
bloom how you must
and on Gerard Manley Hopkins’ vision of a grandeur-charged world. Set in Appalachia, Costa Rica, Afghanistan, Newfoundland, Mali, and elsewhere, Spring Up Everlasting attempts to listen to and learn from the stories of people who have resisted the destruction and desecration of their environments, families, homes, and bodies. Farmers, glass-workers, an elk hunter, Mary of Bethany, and the jazz musician Charles Mingus are among the witnesses gathered here. In contemplating Pentecostal churches and endangered sea turtles, a drum concert in Segou and self-taught artists, polluted rivers and torture survivors, these poems turn to the possibility that we will be braced by the mysteries of God, that the spirit will move in our broken lives and the mess of our world, and spring up everlasting.