Becoming

Dylan Garcia-Wahl

Under Chimes

Under chimes of crystalline skies
the Northland fog
frosts my brandied walk.
Sentimentality so nears religion
in my every inhale.
The late bloom of a migrating dalliance
is the fall of chapters.
It is the arena within which
prayer rasps from the silent.
Watch crisply the splendor of apocalypse
found in these winds, these leaves.

Mon Dieu,
too few of your autumns
in my season.

The heart, the body, desire and myth. Dylan Garcia-Wahl carefully labors to sculpt insightful passages that lead to the deep labyrinths of being. There’s a voice here that knows the power of a word and the power of human pauses. With cunning nods towards Rilke and the old Greeks, the East, the creatures of faith and shadow, Dylan Garcia-Wahl’s Becoming lingers with a reader, worldly, sparse and nuanced.
- Bryan Thao Worra

The poetry of Dylan Garcia-Wahl is firmly rooted in a Rilkean tradition where philosophy coexists with religion, as far as that is possible. Though the idea “god” is a dead and uninteresting idea, it is a great testimony to Garcia-Wahl’s poetic fluency that the point of those poems here which refer to the Buddhist or Christian gods is not lost to us, but the poems, as with Rilke, are alive as no god ever was. This collection belongs to a classical tradition without losing anchorage in modern waters.
- David McLean

Garcia-Wahl’s poetry lulls a casual reader’s soul with its seeming lyrical Classicism, yet it also attacks the closer reader with its deft undermining of such, often by juxtaposition of an expected beat or word with a caesura or modifier that, in recall, forces a reader to reread, then readjust his preconceptions for something different, and better. This is true of all art that strives to be good or great.
- Dan Schneider