A Review of Call Out Coyote by Seth Wieck

Review by Sarah Ashbach

The Tongues of Men and of Angels

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Seth Wieck, Call Out Coyote. Wiseblood Books, 2026.

Review by Sarah Ashbach

Sometimes when I read poetry, the vision of the poet seems to have shrunk to an unlikely miniature of the real world. Have you ever experienced that? Of course, we will portray the things of this world differently, as we are all different people seeing with separate eyes from varying places, seeing what it is we look for. In other words, we each have a vision. But I am speaking now of those poets who see only by a certain slant of light, a particular shade or shadow that shrinks experience rather than enlarging or illuminating it. I speak of those poets killed by their own poetry.

Have you read any Kant lately? It’s the ghost of his thought that lurks in the mirror like Bloody Mary, and you don’t need to summon it. It’s there, telling you that if you are apart from the world and the way things really are with an unfathomable void between, perception reigns supreme. And so reality is what you make it. Nothing less, but certainly nothing more. No transcendence ruptures in on us, and a poet’s vision becomes as narrow as the space between his eyes.

Of course the ghost isn’t quite Kant, who was greatly concerned with how we as moral agents interacted with others, but it is how postmodern philosophy has styled him. Our perceptions, and what we make of them—our perceptions, and what we make of them—ad infinitum, like a reflection caught between two mirrors. It’s a damning place to be as a poet or as any artist because there’s no room for love to go out and meet the world. Caught between the glass, our vision shrinks and shrivels, and we say with Coleridge in his bower prison, “I have lost / Beauties and feelings.” But Coleridge sat at a window and looked out in love, and in love, wondered. Cut off from wonder, a poet dies.

In 1955, Elizabeth Jennings told us that love “Perceives without a mirror in the hands.” Poetry centered on the self confines itself, but love moves outward. Love forsakes itself for the other and feeds the mind and the heart on wonder, on beauty and existence that meet us together as we seek them. Wonder and word together make poetry.

It seems to me that there are only two kinds of poets. One centers and constrains the self—my perceptions, and what I make of them—and loves the self more than all else. Even this poet’s wonder is directed inward. The second understands how small each of us is. He loves the stars and loves that they spin their bright dance with or without his notice. He loves the earth that has gone on living and dying for eons, and of which he is a bit of passing dust. He loves people, not because they are extensions of himself, but because they are not.

Not all poets begin with a mirror in their hands. The mirror presents a temptation we must continually turn away from, yet I suspect that more and more poets have been turning away in recent years. We could discuss the usual suspects, Wendell Berry or Dana Gioia or Rhina Espaillat, but for now why don’t we turn to a newer voice? Seth Wieck’s Call Out Coyote, released by Wiseblood Books, withstands such scrutiny. His work is personal but not at all confined by a vision of himself. You get the sense, reading his book, that he looked into the mirror, then turned away and opened the door and went outside, where people and suffering and beauty wait together to make us whole again. It’s the kind of book that tells us to put the mirror down and look without it in our hands. To see, to love, and to wonder.

The book opens with a poem recounting presumably Wieck’s childhood or his son’s and how the world of dusty West Texas calls us to wonder:

Son slings the barbed-wire Father hands to him, 
ratchets the come-along, hearing the miles, miles 
of wire pop and sing East; the horizon lends 

no escape West, just empty miles, miles, 
and that day they’ll thrust a hundred posts, 
looping wire into that wire of horizon. Piles 

of dust, chucked and drawn-dust from the dust, 
bearing earthworm and turf. Each new aperture, 
another mouth swallowing all that’s passed. 

Father, performing his first function, names creatures 
for Son. They crawl, they fly, they creep into fable— 
on the wide world’s wounds a jagged suture.

The poems speaks intimately to us of a life many don’t remember anymore, intimately, but without self-reference or congratulation. Wieck presents us with a Father and a Son who might well be working side-by-side in Eden, even as Adam long ago named the animals. The Father names creatures for the Son, teaching him to approach the world in wonder, leaving the self behind to encounter the other, suturing over the wounds of suffering.

The poem offers a philosophy of life and an aesthetic education. The Father teaches the Son, and the poem between them teaches us the rites of attention and wonder. It’s education as James Matthew Wilson would have it: “Education is a form of initiation: a drawing of the self, into the presence of truth. […] [I]t is the movement of the whole of one’s being—the whole of the mind, the whole of the soul, the body itself included—in the direction of its final end and purpose.”[i] Here the Son is initiated in the ways of the Father, and we are initiated with him as we read, tracking a movement uniting the eastern and western horizons.

We can read one more image of self-giving from the lines. In the third line of the third tercet, each new hole in the ground is described as “another mouth swallowing all that’s passed.” Dust is swallowed here, “Piles/ of dust, chucked and drawn-dust from the dust.” The image harkens back to the ordeal by bitter water outlined in Numbers 5, whereby a woman accused of adultery drinks, out of an earthenware cup, holy water and dust from the floor of the tabernacle and is found either innocent or guilty by God. If she is guilty, she is cursed. Then in the New Testament the Son of God drinks the bitter cup for the unfaithful bride and takes the curse upon his own body. Though not a direct evocation of the biblical passages, still, Wieck is engaging with one of the most ancient images of self-giving and wound it into the third tercet. The poem tells us not to look within the self to find the worth of things, but to look outward and give outwardly, meeting life with a mouth ready to drink dust and hands ready to suture the earth.

Thus Wieck looks at the world not through a mirror’s reflection but with a vision and wide, seeking eyes. Sometimes, he looks with a magnifying glass. In another poem, “Stercus Sanctus,” he gazes at the dung beetle of all things and tells us of the holy work it does for the earth:

Gavel gather our Order of the Dung Beetle.
Convene the turd rollers who work the earth’s treadle.
Six-footed levers reciprocate their treasures. 
Cast out, we offer offal and waste. They measure 

these spheres composed of compost and rumen, seed germ,
chewed straw, rechewed and strewn clear of tails aloft. Firm
pellets upon which they dance and feed their young. 
Pasture pastors, low priests make holy our dung. 

No effervescent Byron, this Wieck. His poetic predecessor here and elsewhere is surely Gerard Manley Hopkins, who devotedly interrogated the things of this world and found mundane wonders like the “brindled cow” beautiful. Wieck looks under the cow.

Here is Hopkins’s poem for comparison:

Glory be to God for dappled things – 
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; 
      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 

All things counter, original, spare, strange; 
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 
                                Praise him.

Something of Hopkins’s compressed, dazzling language is felt in Wieck’s collection. It’s directly evident when you compare lines such as, “Glory be to God for dappled things,” and, “Gavel gather our Order of the Dung Beetle,” but Hopkins, whose love and language could both be called attention, lingers behind the whole book. Wieck teaches us to see that even in dusty West Texas, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

We’ve spoken of love for the world, but what of romantic love? Call Out Coyote, as a book of attention, love, and wonder, ought to include an homage to married love, and Wieck doesn’t disappoint. In fact he gives us what has become one of my favorite love poems to date:

An ancient cottonwood has never sprung
from the feathered kernels clotted in the leaves.
Any spun cottonseeds, spiraled and flung
on a clef of wind, have never borne trees
that measured longer than seventy years.
Or eighty, by reason of strength and rivers.
Stripped spotted cottons staccato the lower
arroyos beside whole note oak bowers
under whose shade conquistadors siesta’d;
whose branches are five-hundred winters tested.
But you and I, by vigilant husbandry,
might find ourselves intertwined sixty vernal
turns from now, with our sapwood pithed and dry,
our leafclatter in calando, then die.

Wait, wait, you say. You end it when we die?
             Well, it rhymed, I reply. Plus, we will die.
You spent all day with your pen in your journal
rhyming die?                               I also did a load of laundry.
Which I’m folding now!              Fine. You’ve addressed it.
Creasing a bedsheet lengthwise, you press it
between fingertips, shake it, folding lines over
themselves. With your eye-on-the-object look, you hover
on details I’d never see. Perfect squares
stacked in the linen closet. Lines in pairs,
shelves full for our kids. Layered like sediment,
these sheets we’ve shared: the oldest threadbare, the newest spun
from Egyptian cotton, a threadcount testament
of the present perfect moment when our love has begun.

This poem is both love poem and elegy, and my favorite sort of either; it revels in the mundane. The Modernist poets, in whose shadow we still write, often sneered at mundanity and ironicized over it. Wieck has written irony into this poem, but he laughs at poetry itself. Poets take poetry so seriously, when it’s only the sort of silliness we do because we’re like children, not gods, rhyming die in a journal all day instead of folding the laundry we’ve forgotten. We praise ourselves, romanticize the world, and write of “vigilant husbandry,” while someone else folds the sheets.

Alongside the mundane, Wieck mythologizes and includes poems of epic religious grandeur, though perhaps not in the way we would expect. “A Lectio Divina” and “Ulysses Arrives in Amarillo” should both be read in their entirety but are too long to quote here. He mythologizes, but put aside the mythologizing poets you’re thinking of, the Ginsberg/Blake school, even others like Yeats or Milton. Pound’s Cantos come to mind, Eliot following. Wieck takes the best of Modern style, the tight language and spiraling complexity, and tells a story frankly easier to follow than the Cantos.

“A Lectio Divina” narrates the miraculous healing of the blind man in John 9. Wieck reveals what it is the blind see and the deaf hear when “timelessness resound[s] in time” (“The Singing Bowl,” Malcolm Guite), and the grief of existence. The newly unblinded man who sees things as they are in all their strangeness and grief becomes Everyman—and a very different Everyman than Ginsberg gave us. Next, “Ulysses Arrives in Amarillo” recounts the meeting and conversations of Ulysses and a farmer Amos and the meal they share. Here, Ulysses makes the point which I have spent too long making myself:

Of course, no one kneels bedside and prays, 
Let me cross the sea and annihilate a race. 
No, but each of us mutters to the mirror
—through beards peaked with shaving foam—
Let me exert myself on the world today. 
To strive does not lend oneself to yield. 
Agamemnon is the supplicant in us all;
the mercenary worshipper of his own survival. 

At the end of the poem Ulysses, that great epic hero whom Dante put in hell, is blinded by a hawk, an old image of Christ’s divinity. Suddenly the end of one poem loops us back to the beginning of the other, and we see that for some, the only salvation left is that they would be so blinded that they might pay better attention to things as they are.

But why must it come to that? Why should we content ourselves with self-expression when there are wonders left unwritten all around us? There is still so much to see, still so much to love. When I think of an artist over his work, postmodern isolationism is far from my mind. I think of Adam naming the animals. I think of Christ spitting into the mud and smearing it into a man’s cloudy eyes. I think of Wieck’s wife, Katie, patiently folding cotton sheets again and again so that her husband might play with words. A song for yourself is so small. But a song for others, for everything—that is large, and contains multitudes.

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[i] Wilson, James Matthew. “Of Cicadas and Mayflies: Literary Education.” (Communio 52: Communio International Catholic Review, Summer 2025), 267, PDF.

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Sarah Ashbach is a writer and poet who lives near the shores of Lake Erie with her husband. She was recently awarded her MFA from the University of St. Thomas, Houston. Her work has appeared in such places as Trivium, The New Verse Review, Dappled Things, and Modern Age, and she was the 2024 recipient of the Frost Farm Poetry Prize. She also writes a Substack called Daffodowndilly where she explores the intersection of art and faith.