“This antique discipline, tenderly severe:”

James Matthew Wilson
Word on Fire, 2024; 128pp., $24.95 (hardcover)

A Review of Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds

From the center of his poem “The Garden,” which appears early in James Matthew Wilson’s excellent Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds, the poet lowers his eye “from brilliant things” to bear poetic witness to the fecundating violence of nature:

    I clip them back, uncovering carrot fronds
Sprayed from their bald tops crowning in the soil.
I see dark melons spill their seedy guts.

The violent underlife discovered in the crops surprises the gardener who, from the “ordered bed of cedar ties” he built “and then planted with an amateur’s / Stupidity, a dozen kinds of seeds.” His attempts to organize and tame nature have not gone the way he had hoped; and the experience is quietly revelatory, striking the poet to the quick in its quotidian immediacy:

    Oh yes, we lower our eyes from brilliant things,
When they stand glowering in their airy strangeness,
And think that little order that we made
Will shelter us—will do for all we need.

The poet, questing for safety and order, realizes that nature’s rhythm, because it is ordered to God, “is rooted in a broader spread profusion / Than any easy measure we may make / And which we don’t defy or much improve / But stand, uncomprehending part, within.” The implicit theological anthropology rendered here is beautiful, efficient, and indelible. More, it also invokes a direct scriptural analogue: “For ‘In him we live and move and have our being,’” writes St. Luke in the Acts of the Apostles, “as even some of your poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’” This allusion encourages a proper metaphysical disposition in the speaker and endows the poem with a conceptual, ontological syntax. Wilson, who resides in twenty-first century Michigan and not the Rome of 75 A.D., shares a kinship with the ancient guild of poets he summons and stands with them as an “uncomprehending part, within.” Indeed, “The Garden” does well to capture this central theological mystery and distill it in verse for all of us. We humans quest for some kind of coherence—some kind of order—but forget too quickly (if we ever knew it at all) that we dwell in God and that God dwells in us. 

Wilson is philosophically devoted to an ordered aesthetics and is a seasoned practitioner of formalist, metered poetry. His analogically fired meditations on order and disorder in “The Garden” form the keystone to Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds, a collection of forty-nine poems published last year. The collection is organized in a structure of four parts, a kind of exitus-reditus, procession-and-return trajectory that works very well for the poems he makes. Winding through the text, we see the outline of his thematic itinerary come to light—moving from home and place to vocation and action to contingency and reply and then to the return, a farewell that couples with the hard faith needed to continue on the pilgrim path—all themes woven through and within and then back again.

Wilson’s is a poetry at once natural, theological, spiritual, and social. Regular readers will recognize in the collection his favored topics: wonder and awe at the order of creation; the dynamic relationship between faith and doubt; the collisions of grace and nature; and the complexities of sin, depravity, and redemption, to name a few. There are poems in the collection about the passing of time (“Cracks,” “The Fishing Camp,” “At Season’s End”); poems about prayer and liturgy (“To an Unborn Child,” “Incense,” “Elizabeth to Her Cousin”); and poems about poetry (“Ambition,” “In the Fullness of Rhyme,” “High Seriousness”). 

In the title poem, St. Thomas Aquinas is imagined by the poet to be working in an ordinary moment, his famously sharp mind “withdrawn / From his mouth’s taste of buttered loaves.” The poem tracks Aquinas’s lament about the venality and fallibility of creatures. The roll call of forbidden birds falls into verse to become the spine of the poem—birds that show promise initially but then fail in their role to inspire and edify: 

    When Noah let the raven out to fly
It never did return to signify 
Such men whose souls are blackened by foul lust
Or who, unkind, won’t pay back trust with trust.

Gulls float rather than fly and hoopoes prefer to dwell on piles of dung rather than in more comely environs. These unfortunate states and conditions point to a kind of willfulness in creatures to opt for lassitude or cheap pleasure as opposed to the good they could and should do. Aquinas’s observations press outward and then fully inward as the poem unfolds, disturbing the Angelic Doctor to the center of his soul. Aquinas sees painful human analogies in the birds, the “myriad things that whistle arcane truth”—of weakness and our “earthly sorrows,” of sin and our “sickly past.” The poem concludes with the saint forlorn but faithful, “on his broken knees to pray / For such a world that had so much to say.”

Wilson’s poems are always humane and implicitly hopeful—even if they are occasionally dark and didactic. In his public and critical work Wilson tends to favor and emphasize a late modern form of Neoplatonism—that is, an intellectual habitus that promotes the self-conscious assent to the beauty of form and to the form of all beauty, which is (who is) Christ. His poetry, however—while it is from the “new formalist” (or “old formalist,” in my book) school—reveals a more raw and more realist sense of life than what he often writes about and exalts in his essays and public lectures. 

This is to say that Wilson’s poetry, compared to his prose, is more heavily marked by the hardscrabble, wounding aspects of existence. With one eye squinting, it seems Wilson’s poems as often plunge headlong into worlds marked by damaged human shapes and forms and the decadences of nature as much as they might sing of the stabilizing integrity of form, the permanence of which will “outlast death.” Of course, there are poems in the collection like “Vanished Fire” that yearn for and discern the ideal form as “A brilliance, distant, foreign, and yet clear;” but then there are poems like “Farewell to Berwyn” where the poet locks the door at night “to keep the darkness out.”

As a reader, I find these tensions refreshing and view them as distinctly Catholic. A healthy coincidence of opposites dwells in Wilson’s vision just as it does in the best of Catholic thought, practice, and art. Wilson is also “catholic” in his interests in that other, less religious sense as well. He is a poet, an essayist, a social/cultural critic, an administrator who co-founded an MFA program, an amateur wine buff, and a hapless Chicago Cubs fan. His range of interlocutors is catholic as well, and Wilson incorporates so many into Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds that the reader begins to lose count. A.E. Stallings, Ernst Younger, Dante, Richard Wilbur, Josef Pieper, St. Phillip Neri, Philip Larkin, Russell Kirk, and a host of others combine to help order the collection, provide a compelling cartography of ideas, and expand the scope of Wilson’s vision. These “conversations” and allusions truly enrich the collection.

One such allusion begins Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds in the form of its lead epigraph—and reference to it will also conclude this review. Wilson selects a stanza from Adrienne Rich’s superb 1951 poem, “At a Bach Concert,” to frame the collection:

    Form is the ultimate gift that love can offer—
The vital union of necessity
With all that we desire, all that we suffer.

This exhortation not only serves as Wilson’s thematic throughline but also becomes a shorthand identity statement for his formalist poetics. As Adrienne Rich also knew well, “A too-compassionate art is half an art,” which is the next line of “At a Bach Concert;” and Wilson, now into his maturity as a thinker and poet, knows this too.