Description
Where Saints Have Gone by Wesley D. Sims is a chapbook of poetry reflecting on memory, mortality, and the legacy of those who have passed. The poems are centered on a rural cemetery and the people—family, friends, and community members—who are buried there. These stories and images are based on a small, rural church and graveyard that has been a cornerstone of his family for five generations. Themes of faith, history, loss, and remembrance weave through the collection, honoring the lives of “saints” who lived with kindness, resilience, and devotion. The poems explore the impermanence of life, the weight of history, and the deep emotional ties between the living and the dead. Many pieces depict vivid scenes of gravesites, funerals, and ancestral bonds, while others contemplate the afterlife and the enduring presence of those who have passed. Through rich imagery and poignant storytelling, Sims crafts a meditation on love, grief, and spiritual reflection.
Praise for Where Saints Have Gone
In this collection, Wesley Sims sheds light on the end life with stories of people he has known who “dished potato salad and grace.” From the scoundrel “bruising the ground like a rotten apple” to the man whose “marker stands book-ended” by the two wives he had back-to-back, Wes brings to life the lives of those long gone. Here, a mother buries a veteran son while five soldiers from the Civil War now lie together in peace. A grave unmarked and unknown still contains someone who “deserves remembrance” and another poem talks about “Little Ones,” who are planted to “blossom in heaven.” In these poems, we hear the wisdom of those departed, hear the voice of family and friends waiting patiently by their stones to tell us how it was, where Wes likens them to “tall trees who cast long shadows,” from a “garden of enduring symbols.”
—Patricia Hope author of Lonely Way Back Home
In Where Saints Have Gone Wesley Sims remembers relatives, neighbors, friends, Civil War veterans, and even “One Unknown” resting in the little country cemetery, some for five generations. He recalls Irvin’s piano play, Lily’s singing, Gracie’s prayers among others whose lives were well-lived. In this serious endeavor he also injects humor in “Last Words” but turns to regrets in “Resurrection” and “Military Funeral” as a mother buries her son. He eulogizes five Civil War veterans in “War No More” and remembers all the children buried in “Little Ones.” With his fine craft Sims is able to let the reader enter those lives.
—Helga Kidder, author of Learning Curve
While we, like Sims, may think of a cemetery as a “quaint precinct of the dead,” the poems in Where Saints Have Gone embrace those who were endeared and embattled across the ages as held by memory. In this “garden of enduring symbols,” even a scoundrel may be found beneath the soil. Gravestones become “small gray launching pads used by saints for their spirits to blast off” as they leave the “comfort of consoling sod” for an ultimate resurrection, “their battlefields morphed to a silent mural of sky” for a peace we should all aspire to achieve.
—Claudia M. Stanek, author of Beneath Occluded Shine
