The Burning World

The Burning World

Sherod Santos' brilliant new collection, The Burning World , shows us exactly why the New York Times Book Review has said, "Santos possesses an intensity akin to Rilke." "Not since W.S. Merwin's The Lice has an American poet written as prophetically as Santos has in The Burning World. His eloquent witness to the quickening evanescence of the Earth, along with so-called civilization, haunts his reader with the paradoxical vision of the proverbial blind prophet who "sees." Santos has commented in an interview that he "thinks of his books as "bracketed obsessions - bracketed by time or circumstance - and that writing each book [has been] an attempt to interrogate, elaborate, and examine each obsession." His "obsession" in The Burning World betrays a formidable ambition to "testify" beyond his personal griefs to grief for the world itself, along with his concomitant observations of just what's burning. After announcing ironically at the outset that there's "nothing much left to talk about," Santos has indeed succeeded in "talking" in a most timely and vatic way about the world afire to capture a visible specter of the eschaton." -Chard deNiord, On the Seawall