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Joy in the Morning alludes to Psalm 30:5: "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning." These poems ultimately point to the inherent rewards of continuation and survival, as the Scripture suggests, while they also pun on the words morning/mourning to reveal ways in which joy can be found even amid suffering. In the face of life's unavoidable losses, the sure joy Claude Wilkinson offers readers is this: nature's delicate details and memory's refining power. "What other choice have we / than to be made whole / with a coneflower's purple alms, / while it's yet too soon / to be comforted by / God's ineffable voice?" Tender, astonishing depictions—of an iridescent beetle, a jazz funeral, rural poverty transformed by a mother's love—carry the theme in lyrical form. Joy in the Morning are poems of strong emotion and exquisite artistry.
Idea of Beauty
In the end, all their sweetest dreams are Greek
to us imagining the dusky rooms
of khrusallid filled by visions of blooms
exquisitely plumped with nectar they’ll seek
after emerging still crumpled and weak,
of fluttering through the florid perfumes
of joe-pye, butterfly weed—what one assumes
they’ve thirsted for week after cloistered week.
How could anyone guess that once they’re done
warming, corymbs of candytuft wouldn’t be
alpha and omega fanning their lust, that
the twinkle of a lovelier notion
riddles those compound eyes? What’s heavenly
in rancid scraps, a rotting pomegranate?
“Idea of Beauty” published in Joy in the Morning: Poems by Claude Wilkinson. Copyright © 2004 by Claude Wilkinson. All rights reserved.
Claude Wilkinson was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1959. He received his bachelor's degree in education from the University of Mississippi in 1981 and his master's degree in English from the University of Memphis in 1992. He has taught English at Lane College, LeMoyne-Owen College, and the Christian Brothers University, and was visiting southern writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi from 2000 to 2001. He is currently an artist and writer and lives in Nesbit, Mississippi. Wilkinson is the author of two poetry collections, Joy in the Morning and Reading the Earth, winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. He is also the recipient of the Whiting Writer's Award and the Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in Poetry.
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