Throughout the twentieth century, scorn for everyday modern life was largely the province of the political left. Whether channeled through Old Left’s condemnation of the conventional family, Left Bank Parisian contempt for “bourgeois values,” or New Left denunciation of “squares,” modern everyday life always registered as suffocating, oppressive, and ultimately boring. Curiously, in the twenty-first century, strands of the New Right have likewise turned their critical gaze on bourgeois everydayness, with various personalities such as Bronze Age Pervert or “BAP”, Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel and others, advocating instead for a life of pirate-like adventure and Napoleonic greatness. However, such quick dismissals of everyday human life often come from pride, and they, moreover, miss the glory and beauty to be found in everyday human life.
With Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds, University of St. Thomas English Professor James Matthew Wilson crafts a moving vision of everyday life in twenty-first century America. Wilson’s erudite poems deal with a range of topics such as the death of the Roman orator Cicero and scholastic muses on the symbolic character of certain birds (hence the title of the poetry collection). However, many of the poems are squarely placed in the often unpleasant but nonetheless redeemable twenty-first century in which we live.
In “Farewell to Berwyn,” Wilson mediates on a cross-country move. The poem is filled with the detritus and accoutrements of postmodern life that so many people looking for authenticity (whether of a traditionalist or radical variety) scorn. His speaker thinks of the “plastic dumpsters” outside the house and the “emptied boxes” from the move. However, his speaker then turns to the “clarity of the stars,” mediating on how their lifespan dwarfs that of humans. Such reflection ends with the (all too common) worry on whether the speaker’s move was truly worth it (his children seem to think it is not). This mixture of philosophical musings and “dad thoughts” amidst the seeming ugliness and artificiality of contemporary postmodern life is one of Wilson’s strong suits.
However, Wilson’s work largely avoids the solipsist and sometimes even cruel musing of many contemporary poets. Wilson’s poems contain a deeply Christian but realistic empathy for others. “Elegy for a Tow Truck Driver” tells of a towman who is drawn away from his son’s baseball game by calls for towing and lockpicking. The tow truck driver is a gruff character who is too harsh in his encouragement of his son’s baseball playing. The roughhewed towman is abandoned by his wife, and his community hears “by rumor” that he has lost something else. The tow truck driver then seems to take his own life, and the speaker ruminates on the life of “rage and cold” that the tow truck driver lived. This life nonetheless “judged in someone’s heart a thing of worth,” and the speaker ends with a rumination on how he feels a pain at the tow truck driver’s departure from this world.
There is a brilliant complexity in this poem. The tow truck driver is not a horrific monster as he would be in some 1990s feminist poems, nor is he merely an object of curious contempt as he would be in a more aloof poem. Rather, in the poem, there is a mixture of both realism and compassion that is found in the best of Christian poetry.
Wilson’s realism takes a brutal turn in “From The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk.” This poem, echoing Robert Browning’s “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” provides a troubling portrait of a nun living in a deeply corrupted and evil convent. Like other contemporary Catholic writers such as Joshua Hren and Katy Carl, Wilson’s art is soberly and brutally aware of the reality of corruption within the Catholic Church.
While more simplistic (and dishonest) Christian writers have attempted to place evil “out there” in the secular world or in other religions, Wilson provides a troubling vision of a nun not only subject to abuse by corrupt priests, but who is manipulated by a perverse (Gnostic?) version of Catholicism. The nun is threatened by her abusers and is manipulated by religious art in which nuns and priests are depicted as saints who ipso facto merit heaven while underneath is unimaginable corruption. “From The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk” is an intense work that represents a maturity in Catholic consciousness that shuns the illusory (not entirely) world of Going My Way? Catholicism.
Wilson’s work is not all doom and gloom, however. Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds contains deep reflections on the goodness and beauty of God with poems such as “The Love of God,” “By That Heart Known,” and “Elizabeth to Her Cousin.” “Elizabeth to Her Cousin,” which appears to contain resonances of W.B. Yeats’s Marian poem, “The Mother of God,” celebrates the meeting of the Virgin Mary with St. Elizabeth. The earthy poem is revels in the gardening imagery that is present throughout the collection. Mary’s virgin birth to Christ will “uproot sin form the earth.” The poem, also, like Yeats’s “The Mother of God” includes reflections on the awesomeness of a woman bearing God in her womb; Mary’s womb “contains the brilliant rays / That from a living flame shall waken / This world.” Again, we see Wilson’s ability to incarnate deep musings and experiences in earthy, everyday life.
“The Love of God” is neither the first nor the last poem in the book but it provides the metaphysical grounding for the whole collection. It is a simple but strong poem that contains profound and comforting reflections that undergird and balance the harsher poems in the collection. The poem begins, “The love of God is earlier than man, / Present to us before we were to it.” It suggests that the tedium and melancholy of postmodern life, and the “remembrance of things past” in these reflections on childhood mistakes and the foolishness of college days are ultimately part of a wider plot. Even the suicide of the towman or the horrors of Maria Monk will, like the characters in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and A Hidden Life, form a wider human story that is a part of a providential divine plan, a plan that is ultimately guided by God’s love.
One of the more unsettling common refrains about the 2020s is that there is no future. In this view, the timeline of technology will inevitably lead to civilizational collapse or some form of AI domination, ranging from the benignly comfortable (Wall-E) to the apocalyptically violent (Terminator). Love and relationships have been destroyed by social media use. People are losing their faith or embracing wild cultic internet-based religions. There is no culture other than postmodern, increasingly AI-crafted, fantasy pastiches and parodies. However, in Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds, James Matthew Wilson shows that the seeds of a rebirth of civilization are to be planted and nurtured in the soil of everyday life.
Image Credit: Imao Keinen, “Keinen kachō gafu 景年花鳥畫譜” (1891) via Wikimedia Commons
