Christian Wiman: If there’s a poem that works for me, it’s showing me something of reality. It’s more than that, actually: it’s enabling me to participatein reality again. John Berger has a wonderful essay about looking at the paintings of Van Gogh when he’s in despair and saying that suddenly reality had been salvaged. That’s the word he uses. That’s often what I feel when I come across poetry that I love, that reality’s been salvaged for me. And reality does have to be salvaged for us, all of us, again and again. – New Criterion