Evangeliaries

This a book review of Evangeliaries: Poems by Philip C. Kolin. The book can be purchased from Angelico Press.

Kolin, Philip C. Evangeliaries: Poems. Brooklyn, Angelico Press, 2025. 112 pgs. Paperback. ISBN-13: 979-8-89280-060-0

---

Philip C. Kolin has published numerous volumes of spiritual poetry, including his collections In the Custody of Words, Reading God’s Handwriting, Reaching Forever, and Benedict’s Daughter. His latest collection, Evangeliaries, continues Kolin’s longtime passion for exploring Scripture. The title of this newest collection refers to the collections of passages from the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Old Testament that would be read at Mass on a set group of Sundays and holy days. Throughout five themed sections, Kolin employs his characteristically imaginative and eloquent verse not only to revere that which is already held as sacred, but also to reveal where the sacred can be found in the profane. Food trucks, a Walmart parking lot, a women’s shelter. The light of God, Kolin tells us, can warm any corner of the earth.

The first section, Beginnings, focuses on the elemental forces of existence. In this case, the term “elemental” can be taken both literally – poems in this section explore the roles of fire, water, and “blessed dirt” in creation – and also figuratively. In the poem “Light,” for example, the first in this collection, Kolin writes:

“Let there be light.” And so begins
the cosmic geography of Genesis.
“Fiat lux.” All else is reflected light.
God’s light shone out to the deep dark,
A void lifeless and formless.
Then came the rest of creation. (7)

Citing the opening passage of the Old Testament, Kolin frames light as the most fundamental of all elements, the one that existed before all others, the force which God made “as essential as breathing” (7). The four classical elements are also represented in this section. In addition to earth, fire, and water, air is represented in its most spiritual and rarefied form in the poem “God’s Breath.” Here, Kolin describes how God “…blew life into the dust / that was Adam, implanting in him two praying palms / and a pipe organ in his chest” (8). However, God’s breath is used in equal parts to speak life to the faithful and death to the wicked:

Through whirlwinds, whispers, and
Tongues of fire, he breathed blessings,
But blasted those evildoers who trespassed
Against his sacred name. They returned to dust. (8)

Indeed, the elemental forces represented in this section imbue God’s wrath as much as his blessings. “Gehenna,” a historical valley once used for human sacrifice in times ancient even to the early Christians, later became “Jerusalem’s garbage dump / stenched with offal…” (19), and its name now serves as a metaphor for the place where wayward souls go to be punished, “…Christ’s burn pit for sinners’ souls” (19).

The next section, “Holy Books & Theological Virtues,” explores the philosophies and values that were foundational to the early Church and remain central to its identity today. Kolin begins the section with a poem honoring the Prophets, those “Eighteen messengers crying out for the Lord” (23). Other poems in this section exalt the wisdom of Biblical parables and the Psalms, which Kolin describes as “Sacred songs that praise, plead, and confess to God” (24). Kolin also insightfully pays homage to the most fundamental virtues held dear by Christianity: grace, faith, hope, and charity. This section concludes with the poem, “Charity,” in which the virtue is personified in the role of loving guardian:

She is a mother, patient and giving, overflowing
with children, breastfeeding one, rocking
another at her side, all the while helping several others climb
the folds of her robe to reach her bountiful heart. (29)

“Metaphors & Keys,” focuses on the symbols that have become most central to the Christian experience. Here, Kolin describes how the holy Communion bread “…brings a transfiguration. / In every particle Christ enters, putting on / the flesh that covers us as spirit becomes / substance…” (34). In the poem “Sheep,” Kolin characterizes the flock of humanity as “God’s people thirsting for direction / and defense, survival and salvation” (35). “The Wisdom of Birds” is a particularly imagistic poem that casts its avian subjects as a collective of moral exemplars:

A sand dove nested
in a pomegranate tree

her high-pitched coos
instructing her brood.

A cardinal swooping
down snatching

infernal wasps
while policing the skies

A band of sparrows
chirping Matins

consoling the late
autumn air. (38)

“Oremus,” the title of the fourth section, means “let us pray” in Latin. The longest section in the collection, it focuses on the act of prayer and those who pray. One poem takes as its subject the prophetess Anna, who we are told in an epigraph from the Gospel of Luke “…gave thanks to God and spoke about the child to all who were awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem” (50). Another examines St. Thérèse of Liseux, who died of tuberculosis at age twenty-four years, and yet another eulogizes Mother Teresa, who “…never abandoned anyone to the shadows / but gathered flocks of outcasts for the light—” (73). This section is also where Kolin does much of his work of unearthing the holy in the most unexpected corners. “In a Walmart Parking Lot” narrates the story of a homeless woman wandering the aisles of cars begging for money:

The hostile silence of most shoppers
snarl pass her, thorns in their wallets.
This is not a landscape of charity.
Worse still are plaintiffs against her poverty
whose words stone her into further humiliation
caught in the act of seeking solace.

But rejection turns out to be
the other side of kindness when
a roundup customer reaches
into his conscience and gives her
a Hamiltonian feast at McDonald’s.

Too few Walmart shoppers will ever receive
the Almoner’s blessing. (72)

The title of the final section, “Life’s Last Country” serves as a metaphor for aging and death, which it takes as its subject matter. As one might expect, the poems in this section strike a somber tone, and they will resonate with those who have known loss. Having lost my own father during the pandemic, the poem “Your Last COVID Words” was particularly meaningful to me. Here, the loved ones of a dying patient struggle to hear “how much in just a few cracked syllabus / we mean to you. Bequeathing to us your memory” (84). The poem “An Old Man Reflects on Job” also calls to mind my father’s struggles with infirmity at the end of his life. Kolin’s narrator reflects on the fact that he “…is living a strange math. / A new year adds days to the calendar / but only subtracts them from mine” (82). He catalogs his “abundance of wrinkled leaves; / my friends are ghosts; my career ended; my memory cannot be trusted” (82). The poem ends with the reflection that “My thoughts are riddled with sores; it hurts to think about a future. Blowflies stalk me” (82). But the collection ends on a more celebratory note, with the poem “We Are Awaited,” in which a divine train carries our departing souls to heaven. During this voyage, memories flash before our eyes:

Visions of houses I once lived in douse
my eyes, and a hand of fire writes my dates.

Then a conductor appears on the train
wearing a high hat, his mouth

filled with stones. His words
contain only vowels;

not a single consonant blurts out.
The train chuffs on until I lose

the weight of memory and my body
becomes soothing light. (93)

This poem serves as a fitting end to a collection that so carefully and creatively explores faith in its many aspects, both earthly and heavenly. Evangeliaries is a worthy addition to Philip Kolin’s body of work about Scripture and faith and to the long tradition of religious poetry. Believer and doubter alike will walk away from Kolin’s words with a renewed interest about the mysteries of existence and our own place within them.