Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds is a collection of poems about the dread of life in a fallen world – lightened, sometimes, and in its darkness witnessing of light, but most often dreadful.

I had a good time with this book.

The poems are heavy, but I think in mostly helpful ways. Paul J. Pastor's Bower Lodge collection came to mind as I read – where Bower Lodge is fascinated by processes of decay that are actually/also renewal in disguise, Saint Thomas dwells on how the things that we think of as renewal are actually subject to decay and ultimate failure, whether nature or memory or childhood. When the light breaks through, it's because a little bit of Heaven has made itself known.

The other reference I thought of as I read was Malcolm Guite. Like much of Guite's work, Saint Thomas embraces structure and rhyme, finding delightful turns within the bounds of traditional forms.

I'm glad I read this – it has helped me put words to some of the dread I have found haunt adulthood, and that's helpful.

An excerpt:
—
Such is the strangeness of most beauty’s birth.
Amid the battered armor on the field,
Some victor paints a crest upon his shield
And vows to treat the weak as things of worth.

A fixed stare on the crumbling deep of blackest earth
Will find concealed within that sight
The thought of everlasting light.
The open wound shows how it may be healed.

from "Vanished Fire"

Thanks to the publisher for the NetGalley ARC.

Poetry collections are among my most frequently purchased and often-read books, so it is noteworthy that I was caught off guard by the discovery of a serious devotion to meter and rhyme in most of the poems included in this volume. While not already familiar with the poet, my understanding is that Wilson has published other books of verse and is well-respected as a writer of Catholic poetry. I'm glad I started reading this book without that knowledge, because it was fun to suspect this might be the case and satisfying to learn my suspicions were confirmed. I've had a lot of exposure to biblical scripture and have a familiarity with the themes and characters of Bible stories, so the poems with scriptural allusions were recognizable and accessible in a way that might not have been the case had I been less prepared. That said, most of the poems in the book focused on non-biblical themes, and were just as thoughtful and satisfactory as the more spiritually-oriented offerings.

I've already admitted my surprise at discovering the frequent use of a rhyme scheme in most of these poems, as that particular poetic seems to have fallen victim to more modernist sensibilities related to freedom from constraint in contemporary verse. To be fair, it's almost rather refreshing to appreciate the effort necessary to craft a poem with strict meter and rhyme in a new book. Several times I found myself reading these poems out loud in an effort to discover the prescribed flow and music of the stanzas as I moved through the book. It was also particularly amusing to see the poet's (defense?) of rhyme in a very clever entry entitled "The Fullness of Rhyme," which includes these lines:

"Some say that it's okay to slant,
While other poets swear one can't.
The former conjure some excuse
For every assonant abuse,
The latter, rather, want good order:
A well-kept path and guarded border.
While one can't write by guide or chart,
The artist gives the law to art."

One might think that even Miss Dickinson herself might appreciate the allusion to her preferred style with such clever phrasing.
I'll be interested in reading more my Mr. Wilson and would be willing to recommend this book to poetry-loving friends.

This was a bit of a miss for me. The poetry style and topics didn't grab me, and I struggled to get motivated to read it. At one point I was moving between devices and got a bit lost on where I was and reread a few of the poems, but I didn't even realize for the first 2 as they were not memorable to me. I did finish, but that was mostly because I forced myself to sit down and power through it.

I'm not into poetry. I've known that for a while now. It's very hard for me to find a poetry book that makes me truly enjoy it.

This book wasn't bad, but I guess it just didn't work for me the way I hoped it would.

There were parts of the poems that I thought were really beautiful and profound-- but some of the poems felt a little wordy for me. I always think of the Wislawa Symborska quote "Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words, / then labor heavily so that they may seem light.' And for much of this, I could feel the labor.

An engaging tour de force of faith, life and everything in between. James Matthew Wilson is a masterful formalist poet adeptly balancing rhyme and meter in his work.