Jim Gustafson’s When we've come farther than we have to go is filled with uncertain wisdoms that are hard-won and offered to the reader with a generous diffidence, and often with humor. “Be ready,” he warns us, “for the certain moment/ when uncertainty arrives to change/ all you think is true.” The speaker of these poems is past platitude or sermon— “In the short days of certainty,” he tells us, “the earliest of years /I was confident in my preaching. Now I dig/my old sermons up like a hound digging a bone /in the garden// and wonder.” Though he is now well aware that “Fathoms deep/sharks pick their teeth” he remains among those “who seek to understand,” and thus “still cast our lines.” Despite a loss of faith in there being “another side” after this life, despite knowing, or perhaps, because he now knows ‘there is only this side,” in these poems Gustafson casts his lines still, finding in memory and in the here and now something like acceptance, something enduringly like hope.
~ Christine Gelineau, Appetite for the Divine