G.C. Waldrep's book-length poem, Testament, was recently praised in a new Ploughshares review, which calls the book "excellent."

The review says: "Waldrep writes for the ear as well as the eye, embracing musicality more freely than many current poets," and that the influencers of this poem, Lisa Robertson, Carla Harryman, and Alice Noley, are of the same vein, though not in the same manner. "In Waldrep’s poem, although references to gender, capitalism, and race are frequent (likewise for history, faith, and the Trillingesque "moral imagination"), questions outnumber answers.”

On the complexity of Waldrep’s style and scope, the review says: "The scope of the book is difficult to convey in a brief review, or I would try to unpack Waldrep’s exploration of sense and memory in the recurring image of the bee, the eye, and the flower; or attempt to summarize his inquiry into language in the third of the book’s five sections; or ask whether the references to ribs and flaming swords are intended to evoke Eden and the Fall, and whether that fall connects to the various references to Icarus. The most concise reference point that occurs to me, though—Notley, Robertson, and Harryman notwithstanding—is that Waldrep is the closest American poetry comes to Geoffrey Hill, in the music of his language, the range of his erudition, the integrity of his intellect, and the honesty of his doubt."

Click here to read the entire Ploughshares review.

Testament is available now at the BOA Bookstore.