Since poets live, move, and have their beings in words, it is not surprising that the titles and subtitles of Christian Wiman’s memoirs are carefully chosen. Wiman, who edited Poetry for a decade and now teaches at Yale Divinity School, recounted in his 2013 memoir, My Bright Abyss, how—in the words of Dostoyevsky’s devil in The Brothers Karamazov—he passed through “the great crucible of doubt” after a terminal cancer diagnosis. Blessed to live forward, he tries to understand life backward in this sequel, He Held Radical Light, which traces his development as a poet, student of poetry, and man of faith from college to the start of his professorship. Many others illuminate his search for this “radical light,” including contemporary poets like Seamus Heaney, Mary Oliver, Philip Larkin, and A. R. Ammons and the twentieth-century theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

If My Bright Abyss was an essay on the roles of art and faith in dying well, then He Held Radical Lightmay be an essay on the roles of art and faith in living well. Both titles allude to “the true light” from the Gospel of John, although Wiman emphasizes that this light at the root of all things (the etymological origin of “radical” is, after all, the Latin word for “root”) is usually perceived in darkness (as the word “abyss” implies)—the darkness of ignorance and unbelief. Curiously, there is no mention about the darkness of sin, which may be explained by his first memoir’s