A Review of The Heft of Promise by Frederick Wilbur
Review by Mattie Quesenberry Smith
Frederick Wilbur, The Heft of Promise. Pine Row, 2025.
Review by Mattie Quesenberry Smith
Frederick Wilbur’s The Heft of Promise explores faith, doubt, and reason by recounting one man’s losses and setbacks, which he tries to endure throughout the labors of farm work, woodworking, and poesy. Many of these poems are meditations on submitting to the discipline of woodworking even though the art’s labor makes unruly clutter no one else understands—a host of tools, profuse wood shavings, deep scars marring his worn work bench. In the end, the poet experiences a watershed moment. He realizes that he will have to let go of his faith in the “dignity of labor” in the end. In “Asylum: Way of Being,” the poet says,
...My hand tools become mantle shelf antiques, valuable to collectors in pristine uselessness: my making made me.
As the poems progress here, the poet’s “latch-bolt / snugs to its keeper.” The poet realizes that a man’s faith solely rooted in Earth cannot sustain him, even though the real world is sometimes all he believes in. In this collection, one man’s story unfolds as he learns from his labor that parables exist there, waiting to emerge as the natural world reveals them through his making.
This collection of poems also explores the pitfalls today in pursuing truth and beauty through poetry rooted in rural, place-based romanticism. This is an age where expeditious consumerism and complex technologies threaten neo-romantic perspectives, well-divorced from Virginia’s rural landscapes, so Wilbur realizes it has become difficult to convince newcomers that homeplaces have enough value for one to invest the work in their husbandry and upkeep. Throughout life’s joys and lamentations, the speaker weighs his worldly blessings and eternal hopes dependent on his earthly possessions and discovers even homeplaces will be too heavy to remember until death. These poems unveil the poet’s slow embrace of simple poverty and the freedom it brings once the poet’s hope and faith are authentic and unfettered by all the substitute “blessings” the materially poor seek in coincidental “finds” throughout the world’s auction houses and salvage yards.
Even the poet’s promises become too heavy to bear, even “empty promises.” While hopeful, people plan and promise, but they are ignorant of their flaws, fragilities, and blind sides. Often, they do not understand the long-term endurance and sacrifices their promises make. Also, the poet shows that the world can “befuddle” our hopes. Sometimes, the world exposes the well-meaning messiness our shortsighted labor and industries engender, much like Wilbur’s hapless cardinal in “Dustwings,” which hits a storm-window and leaves traces from its wings’ prints in the window’s dust. Likewise, Wilbur explores the fact that real world interferences, distractions, and redirections ever thwart our promises, and the guilt of falling short of one’s promises to finish well-laid plans grows too heavy for the poet to bear, driving him to winnow what to keep from what to get rid of—what to get out of his dwellings, out of his memories. What will that engender, though?
In “Saturday, South of Amicus,” he describes an auction house where the auctioneer repeats four times, “Everything must go!” This poem explores the weight of how people try to make do with bargains as consolations for their poverty, picking up someone else’s weight,
The real find is a box of widgets and neglected tools, love-letter confessions redacted by silverfish, a child’s photograph orphaned from a family album. Hope is a part of life’s religion, but a counterfeit of paradise.
In his poem “Ladder Left Leaning,” he also explores what we make of generational blessings and memories dependent on the things we keep. These have a useful yet dangerous heft in places where angels fear to tread, such as when his angry grandfather’s claw hammer “dropped dead to earth / and dented it” under the “ladder left leaning” as “butterflies dared tease and tag under it.”
In his poem “Father’s Day,” useful things have been kept and mapped from a grandfather’s purposes, then handed down, changeless, to his grandson, the poet whose tool-dependent livelihood and messiness seems undervalued by his daughter until she sees the need to borrow her father’s tools to take apart useless exercise equipment taking up too much space in her basement,
His shop is as well-stocked as a family-owned hardware store, And like the owner’s, his mental map serves him well. He has earned a living here.
It is clear at one point the poet hopes for a daughter’s recognition for the hard work done with his grandfather’s ratchets and sockets, as the family has been blessed with many heavy tools handed down through the generations, so everyone can keep up the rural livelihood they share.
Although necessary things can be heavy, even heavier are the things we inherit, treasure, and keep, so we can quell loss and grief. We store these treasures on Earth to remember ourselves and our loved ones and to pass down to our beloved children whom we hope will treasure the stories our possessions possess. The poet catalogs and searches through his family’s antiques and artifacts—some priceless, some authentic, some handmade, and some holy with love—but he realizes trouble brews when one remembers and speculates too much about people and their things. Through dearth and plenty, through setbacks and blessings—we are afraid to let go remembering what we know of truth and beauty that is housed within family possessions stored on Earth. In “The Delight of Perhaps,” the poet acknowledges hoarding and its hopeful conjecture of sharing what remains from one person to another,
When bookmarks travel through biographies, they flag chapter pauses or favorite poems or, reading interrupted and resumed by another, they may be keepsakes connecting one life to the next.
However, life does not guarantee constructive ends because what we share with others falls out of our control anyway.
In “Crossing Rockfish River at Wood’s Mill,” Wilbur writes, “hope has no obligation to be realized.” Though he might see the “long view of agency / still part of round eternity,” the poet introduces the fact that unfulfilled hopes can press down from sky’s round ceiling, fall from unruly clouds where we often look for hope that never materializes in life, such as when the speaker plans what wisdom and possessions he will pass to his son. The son soon leaves the collection’s pages, “like promises for old age” the poet has taken for granted in “After the Funeral.”
“Cloudkeeping: Art’s Discipline” resembles Elizabeth Bishop’s poems “Sestina” and “Song for a Rainy Season,” where Bishop explores generational experiences and slices of life to show the importance of “small arts” for sharing heavy griefs. In Wilbur’s poem, the speaker describes a thirteen-year-old artist who struggles with temper and patience to learn the palette’s colors and “make the clouds behave.” Here, Wilbur shows that even clouds must sacrifice themselves on the cusp of rain’s heavy release,
You are the custodian of clouds, edit their diaries, know rain as their ultimate sacrifice, but wash your earthy hands with earthy spirits, the brushes are disappointed, but the palette is tired. You are thoroughly evaporated, struggling to make clouds behave.
Unrealized throughout life, we hold out for hope until it becomes so heavy and unclean that we must let it go, too, especially as the artist cannot communicate perfect beauty and truth, nor make anything “behave” in this world without yearning to be clean from the mess we make in the process.
In “My Carving Life,” Wilbur explores an intersection where man and bird, both trusting in an undescribed provision, strive through messy enterprises to pursue a “livelihood” and “serious art,” as if man and bird share the same hermeneutic circle framed by need and want,
Behind Albinoni’s oboe concerto on NPR, A woodpecker chisels to his own measure the rake board of my shop roof looking for carpenter bee grubs in their round wombs I brush walnut chips from the carving bench that is cross-hatched by implacable mistakes—
The speaker continues to say, “…we / work wood together” and at the end of this poem, the poet concludes there have been sacrifices:
…Someday my children will Understand our serious art and how We find it in the livelihood we pursue; my signature in blood soaks to the grain as the bird’s red disappears into the vicissitudes of forest nearby.
In the book’s last section, the poet resolves that promises and possessions are too heavy to carry from generation to generation. At first, these are too heavy to move from house to house. Then, these are too heavy to outlive the words we say about them to our children, words silverfish soon turn to lint. Finally, these are too heavy to remember within the traces of our remains—mankind’s delicate, woodworked architectures and well-appointed words, even commas on the page, all of these dissipate into dust, lint, and rust—even now by the forces of nature itself, lovely things decay beneath invisible forces just like the molds, fungi, and lichens set to undo the woods, erasing the “great trees” and the “trash trees” alike.
As life seems too heavy to bear, the speaker shuns faith and reifies faith throughout this three-chapter collection, trusting in work for the sake of work and art for the sake of art as one way to become himself. However, he shows that even heavenly promises have a heft of their own, and like a good claw hammer, we lift and bear heavenly promises alone, trusting in providence like the simple wren and industrious pileated woodpecker that inhabit these poems and their parables.
As the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Poet Laureate 2024-2026, Mattie Quesenberry Smith was awarded an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship for her civic project “Perseverance and Resilience: Serving Veterans through Poetry.” Smith is a first-year writing and rhetoric instructor at Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, VA, where she lives at the foot of House Mountain with her husband and family.
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i love this review.. and must get the book. thank you...