Let Your Heart Be Troubled

LET YOUR HEART BE TROUBLED is Mitcham's first collection of poems in twenty years. It takes as its epigraph Paul Valéry's description of language as "the god gone astray in the flesh." These poems engage a single life and many lives at once, moving toward what is here called soul, traveling a path laid down by a lexicon of plain words. This is a collection that should reward opening the book at random, but it is structured so that it may also be read as the scaffolding of a narrative. The history it begins with is American history; the soul at the end of its path is an American soul. The lexicon's journey is orderly, but the language does go astray: it changes tone; it offers a fluid music plus lines so thickly textured as to raise a racket; it revels in vernacular speech; it amuses itself; it plays at irony and keeps moving toward an end. The poems address family and the loss of family; faith and the loss of faith; race and human failure; the Christ-haunted South; the passing of time.