Psalm to Whom(e)

In Psalm to Whom(e), the restless and astonishing Diane Glancy continues to break new ground with a hybrid collection of personal writings that considers the relationship between place and faith; the need for movement, stability, and inner exploration; and the search for home.

Psalm to Whom(e) centers on Kansas and rural Texas, places that usually see the underside of planes.  Glancy focuses on geography.  History. Origins.  Memory.  Faith.  Once in a while, in desperation, she offers a prayer to whom(e)ver is there. Glancy stretches and pulls the language to see behind the words: old Native thought patterns, for instance, or echoes of Gertrude Stein. She takes us with her into museums, churches, and national parks, shuttling freely between personal, cultural, and spiritual history, narration and poetic exploration.

Psalm to Whom(e) defines the world as a place on which to mark, as evidenced in the earliest pictographs.  Embedded in the markings on cave walls and rock facings are circles and spirals in which the impulses to move, to travel, to migrate, to explore one’s own inner wilderness and solitude are homed.

The “whom(e)” is in an essay, “Among My Friends Are Letters of the Alphabet.”  “As a loner I write a lot because I have to have something to do and the letters of the alphabet always are there.” The isolation of Covid may have driven her farther back into history, she says. Into the beginning of faith on the prairie.  Into her own believing on her grandfather’s farm and her own father’s work in the stockyards. “Sometimes I add letters to words.  As an ‘e’ as in ‘whome’ because then I see home, for which I always am looking.”