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Some Permanent Things

James Matthew Wilson

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Aug 03, 2024 Werner rated it liked it

Shelves: poetry

Note, May 14. 2025: I just did a slight grammatical edit of the first sentence here.

Born (in 1975) and raised in northern Indiana, an area that figures in some of his verse, contemporary American poet James Matthew Wilson received a PhD. from Notre Dame Univ., and now teaches English-language literature and creative writing at the Univ. of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. A practicing Roman Catholic, his faith informs his prose nonfiction and poetic writing (he's the author of fifteen books, beside Note, May 14. 2025: I just did a slight grammatical edit of the first sentence here.

Born (in 1975) and raised in northern Indiana, an area that figures in some of his verse, contemporary American poet James Matthew Wilson received a PhD. from Notre Dame Univ., and now teaches English-language literature and creative writing at the Univ. of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. A practicing Roman Catholic, his faith informs his prose nonfiction and poetic writing (he's the author of fifteen books, besides articles) and social thought; and he consciously writes from a perspective shaped by classical philosophical conservatism. He's also part of a Western literary tradition that values truth, goodness and beauty, and finds the latter in traditional poetic forms. In these respects, he's very similar to his fellow contemporary Christian poet Donald T. Williams, whose collected poetry got five stars from me in 2022, except that Williams is an evangelical Protestant. Wilson's poetry, however, tends to be much less accessible; and its subject matter is not necessarily recognizably religious. Those factors led me to bail on my first reading of this collection (the only one of his that the BU library where I work has) after reading no more than a half dozen of the 46 poems here, and without making the fair intellectual effort to understand his work that any writer should be accorded. More favorable estimates of his poetry by other people led me to conclude that he deserved better from me. I'm glad that I did make the effort, because although I haven't become an avid fanboy of his verse, I did get enough from it to give it an overall rating of three stars (rounded up from two and 1/2). Some poems might have received five by themselves, while others didn't speak to me at all.

In the poem “To the Reader,” Wilson clearly sets forth the intention to express meaning in his work that actually can be understood, and declares that this is why he writes in “words in rows,” reflecting a world that “makes perfect sense to me,” rather than resorting to the solipsistic incoherence of much modern poetry. So he's not trying to be obscure on principle. But the reference in that same poem to Baudelaire points up part of the unintentional obscurity problem that bedevils this book. Part of the challenge inherent in Wilson's poetry is that, while both he and Williams are academics who teach literature, and both write for a relatively educated readership, the latter writes for a more generally educated one, while Wilson writes instinctively for other literature majors. Hence, he's writing for people who don't just vaguely know that Baudelaire is a prominent French poet, but rather have read his work or at least know what ideas and presuppositions inform it, rather than being as clueless about it as I am. There are a lot of similar passages here that depend on literary or classical references which go completely over my head, despite my having two master's degrees and spending most of my adult life in academia. (Occasional untranslated French or Latin phrases don't help.) And while it's often characteristic of poetry to express ideas in metaphors or connections that aren't spelled out, and that the reader has to work through to perceive, the work here might bathe your brain in sweat and call for an energy drink, even though I don't doubt that an actual meaning is there. (Two of Wilson's nonfiction books are studies of T. S. Eliot; and based on what I've read of Eliot's poetry in literature textbooks, he was a significant influence on Wilson in this respect.) This is a kind of poetry that's probably not best read while pedaling on a stationary bike (as I do most of my reading), but perhaps sitting at a desk with several reference books and access to Google; and despite the mere 141-page length, this is not really a quick read. Much poetry is pleasurable to read, and that includes two other books of 21st-century poetry that I've read. But a lot of this book is not, at least to me, and I'd be lying if I said that it was.

Before commenting on the individual poems, a word is in order about the form. While not all of it is rhymed (some poems are), they all clearly have meter. That said, I can't comment on the meter, or say what type is used in a particular poem. To do that, I'd have to sit down and count the syllables in each line, and correlate these with their accents. I don't normally do that in reading a poem, and I didn't with any of these. My pleasure in poetry reading is in just appreciating the flow and poetic quality of the lines, not in counting accented syllables; that sort of analysis, for me, interferes with the enjoyment more than it enhances it. So for that sort of treatment, you'll have to turn to a different reviewer!

Many of the poems here are autobiographical; that is, they arise from particular experiences or relationships in the author's life, or are directly descriptive of remembered scenes in particular places where he lived, such as “The Mishawaka Cruisers” or “A View from the Studebaker's Servant's Quarters,” referring to the former Studebaker mansion in South Bend. It's clear that the “Hilary” referred to in a few poems is the poet's wife, and that “Livia Grace,” referenced in some poems, is their firstborn child. (On the other hand, the eponymous “Balloon Man,” who narrates that poem, is not the poet; this is a dramatic monologue, of the sort Robert Browning did so well, with a perhaps wholly fictional narrator whose words nevertheless convey a message –in this case, about the way our society treats the poor and marginalized.) A reader can actually learn a fair amount about Wilson's family history and life history from these; but that's secondary to particular points being made. “At Father Mac's Wake” (which has the superscription ”Saint Thomas Aquinas Church, 1987”) is the first poem here with explicitly religious content, though superimposed over the memory of the poet's 12-year-old self, dragged to the wake of their parish priest by his parents when he'd rather have been elsewhere, scratching his bike key into the wood of a pew in resentful vandalism and silently denying belief in God, even though his rebellion is destined for ultimate “defeat.” “Not Yet, Not Yet” (the title recalls Augustine's reference, in his Confessions, to his pre-conversion prayers to God to give him the grace of chastity –but just “not yet”) is a poem in confessional mode, recalling his own youthful sexual sins with the recognition that they were wrong, and not worth the harm they did. The four “verse letters” (to his father, his mother, and to his brothers Jason and John) are the longest poems in the book, each running for several pages. “Verse Letter to My Father,” written in 2001, is probably my favorite poem here, and certainly one of the most powerful. Other favorites would include “A Prayer for Livia Grace” (which as a dad myself, I could very much relate to) and “From the Trinity Capital,” which is to me one of the more thought-provoking.

Wilson is unquestionably a serious poet; and he commands respect in Catholic and conservative academic and intellectual circles, represented in journals like First Things and Modern Age (he serves the latter as its poetry editor). Barring a massive tidal change in the makeup of the cultural elite of the modern West (and of the political and economic elite that ultimately maintains them), he has no more chance of “mainstream” recognition as an important writer than Solzhenitsyn had in his own country during the heyday of the Soviet Union. But even if such a tidal change happened (after all, the Soviet Union no longer exists, though when I was growing up we all imagined -and the Left fondly dreamed-- that it would stand forever!), it's not likely, IMO, that he'll ever be a poet warmly embraced by the average reader. ...more

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