God of Nothingness
Mark Wunderlich
Reviewed by Caitlin Plante
Mark Wunderlich’s God of Nothingness is a folkloric investigation into death and its resounding implications on our humanity and significance.
Opening upon a poem about the various meanings of the speaker’s surname, the collection takes us through a generational tradition of grief and its echoes. He even suggests curse: “the wind speaks his strange name or worse— / voices recognition, an attribution, or a curse.” God of Nothingness’s speaker is a version of Wunderlich, existing in the plane with a “headstone, dateless, speckled with lichen”. Wunderlich is expansive, tremendous, and terrifying. He offers us a narrative that sunrises and sunsets on life’s most inevitable encounters.
Throughout the collection, Wunderlich takes us through elegies to both the long-dead and the recently passed, each raw and severely intimate. He writes to a lamb named Cuthbert, a cat, and even Lucie Brock-Broido. In “Elegy For A Hanged Man,” a poem dedicated to the poet’s nephew, he writes, “I know now that ghosts, indeed, exist / but they are not what you expect. / They are nothing but a mood you cannot shake— / the dust that dulls the edges of the mirror / to darken the bruise of the day.” He connects, not only to the pain of losing a loved one to suicide, but also to the depression that leads to this act, a haunting ache that lingers and dulls each day.
Wunderlich enters into archetypical tales as unvoiced characters. In his poem “The Beast of Bray Road” about an urban legend, Wunderlich speaks as the brother of the beast, a brother left behind: “I remained behind. Many seasons came and went, / our mother crumbled into an afterthought of dust, / my hidden world more hidden / as men forgot how to hunt. / I have seen the forest thicken, the sky warm / and change, birds arrive whose calls are foreign to my ear, / I do not know where my brother had gone / but I do know that he left me here / to prey upon myself alone.” In these lines, Wunderlich gives a disquieting portrait of grief: enduring, tedious, and utterly isolated.
This collection is endeared to the God of Nothingness, “who listens for a tremulous voice and comes rushing in / to sweep away the weak with icy, unmoving breath.” In light of this impending nothingness, Wunderlich asks us to consider, “does it matter that [we] lived, or that [we] died?”