Charles of the Desert

“Woolfitt’s Charles of the Desert is the ‘ragged song’ of Charles de Foucault, attuned to the ‘sweat beneath scratchy coverlets,’ ‘the hoe and the rake,’ and to how a life can be ‘all green wood’ that, in the work of years, leaps with the strange wildness of faith." —K. A. Hays, author of Dear Apocalypse and Early Creatures, Native Gods

“Woolfitt’s ‘pilgrim’s progress’ [offers] an achingly lovely canticle to God’s presence as it is both revealed and concealed in the harsh natural world of the North African desert.  Richly detailed, lovingly imagined, and exactingly thought through, [it] is a compelling work of art.” —Andrew Hudgins, author of A Clown at Midnight and Ecstatic in the Poison

“These poems—lush, accomplished lyrics gathered by a delicate narrative thread—present a profound and savory confusion.  Spoken in the voice of the book’s titular persona, Charles de Foucauld, the poems derive their particular life by the poet’s having ‘made a version of Charles in [his] own image.’  Albeit fictive, they present genuine exultation, vertiginous truth.” —Scott Cairns, author of Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems

“The Christian hermit and martyr Charles of the Desert (1858-1916) is a complex, puzzling character. William Kelley Woolfitt’s new book of poems Charles of the Desert develops a full portrait of this mystifying cleric from childhood in 1863 to his last day in Algeria’s Hoggar Mountains. The poems, written in first person, proceed on a timeline, zigzagging geographically from France to the Holy Land to Algeria.

For over a decade, Père Charles lived a stringent life in the Sahara, a life that would kill most of us. He lived and worked among the Tuaregs, who saw him at best as an eccentric, at worst as an enemy. In 1916, he was assassinated by rebels attempting to rob and kidnap him. He left to the world a four-volume dictionary of the Tuareg language, a new order—the Little Brothers and Little Sisters of Jesus—and a public fascination for his austere life among the Muslims, whom he hadn’t been able to convert.

How hard his life must have been. Yet by some firsthand accounts, he was ‘luminous,’ ‘peaceful,’ and ‘pure.’

Woolfitt’s formal poems are intriguing for the ways they develop Charles and those around him...[and] are marked by a physicality of diction, the blunt words juddering next to the softer expressions. 

The poems also unveil the many iterations of Charles, as he searches for an authentic identity: Charles the profligate, the soldier, the injured child, the peasant. We also encounter Charles the escapee, the refugee, and the wanderer, before he finally becomes the devoted priest.

Woolfitt’s collection evokes our holy connection to the astonishing and sometimes terrifying forces around us and beyond us.” —Rebecca A. Spears, Image Journal