A Review of Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds by James Matthew Wilson

By Steven Knepper

James Matthew Wilson, Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds. Word on Fire, 2024.

Review by Steven Knepper

Over the past two decades, James Matthew Wilson has been an unflinching advocate for poetry written in meter and traditional form. This is evident from his early criticism, much of which was first published at Garrick Davis and Ernest Hilbert’s Contemporary Poetry Review, through his trenchant 2015 study The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking (the appendix of which remains the best concise guide to versification on offer), to his recent efforts to bring the critical essays of J. V. Cunningham back into print. Along with Joshua Hren, Wilson founded an MFA program at the University of St. Thomas in Houston in 2021 that has already cultivated a new generation of excellent poets. Several of them have published in New Verse Review.

Wilson is also, of course, an accomplished poet. In his fourth full-length collection Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds, Wilson’s poetry explicitly advances the aesthetic, philosophical, and theological arguments for traditional verse craft that he has long offered in his prose. Wilson has always been a philosophical poet, but this is his most philosophical collection to date.

In particular, Wilson takes aims at the too-easy modern dismissal of poetic figuration, of its symbolic readings of the world, as mere fancy or aesthetic drapery. He challenges the reductive assumption that the only real truth on offer is at the reductive level of how things work "scientifically.” One fundamental problem with this assumption is that human language simply is figurative language, and that we cannot help but make sense of things via metaphor and analogy and image. This is how we navigate ourselves, others, and the world. It is how we probe the truth. Indeed, our senses at times make such connections pre-reflexively. A couple of poems in the collection probe the links, for instance, between smell, memory, and imagination. After some well-executed anecdotes in verse, the poem “Incense on the Air” ends,

          My parish priest once gave a homily
          In which he claimed what stays in memory
          The longest is a smell; it does not fade
          But outlasts windowed scenes or words we've prayed.
          It teaches eye and ear that, though they claim
          Preeminence in what we learn and name,
          The highest and the lowest things may find
          More sensuous ways to enter in our mind,
          And shape the soul by means we would disdain
          As sharing less of reason than of pain.
          Thus, incense on the air gives passing sense
          An intimation of its permanence,
          And leads us by instinctive power to rise
          Like smoke into the gilded vault of skies.      

These lines spell out the power of smell to stir memory, to evoke the “highest and the lowest things,” even to grant a certain transcendence, to raise one higher in body and mind.

Another fundamental problem with the reductive assumption is that the best symbolic interpretations of the world are not arbitrary. They are afforded by, at times even anchored in, the given. Take the ancient connection between light and mental illumination. Anyone who has stumbled around in darkness realizes that the connection here is not arbitrary. Here is Wilson’s poem “Sunlight”:

          On asking the philosophers,
              What is the sun?, we get in answer,
          "An angel perched"; "a heap of furze

         Some god has set ablaze"; "a burning 
            Iron that melts from sword to plow
         To spearhead with the seasons' turning."

        And some wise soul guffaws at them
          Or, condescending, calls it "poetry"
        To disbelieve but not condemn.

       Thus does the minute judge the hour,
           Dismissing that primordial truth
       That only speaks with figural power.

This truth is primordial in that it has deep roots in human myth, but it is also primordial in that it emerges within the rich qualitative experience of the world that is perennially available to anyone. This experience is the departure point of both philosophy and poetry.

At an even deeper level, the world is always disclosing both the beauty and fullness of being on the one hand and a nihilating absence on the other. We see the promise of fullness and development in the beautiful blue egg in the bird’s nest. We see finitude in the nest’s second egg, cracked open and empty. We can try to understand the metaphysics in various ways (the balance of yin and yang, the “pasteboard mask” with perhaps “naught beyond,” the goodness of creation and the parasitic scourge of death), but the metaphysical questions are unavoidable, and they are also unavoidably bound up with the poetic image and imagination. They are unavoidable, that is, if we see and think. As Wilson puts it in the closing lines of “First Light,” “It’s so conventional to prize / Wakeful attention, we’ve grown blind / To how it wounds our naked eyes.” In Wilson’s poetic metaphysics, the form of a well-wrought poem participates in the fullness of being, but an honest poem must also allow itself to be “wounded” in how it grapples honestly with the fallen world.

These concerns run throughout Wilson’s collection. They are there in the title poem, which is surely one of his best poems to date. It imagines an aging St. Thomas Aquinas dictating a section of the Summa to his trio of scribes. Thomas offers a spiritual interpretation of the list of unclean birds in Leviticus. The interpretation itself, adapted from the Summa into aphoristic heroic couplets by Wilson, is virtuoso but also reflects a premodern sensibility that many—including many Christian believers—find strange or implausible today:

              He spoke: the long-beaked ibis feeds on snakes
          To represent the man whom nothing slakes.
          Feasting upon dead bodies' opened gore,
          The vulture stands for all who thrive through war.

The rest of the collection aims to help the reader recover the plausibility of such a sensibility—not in a flattening way that simply sees these birds as bad (scripture more fundamentally affirms them as “very good,” after all), but as testifying to the complex ways in which we are always engaged in “reading” reality, in being “read” by reality in turn. In this regard, the closing lines of the title poem fittingly convey the central concerns of the collection as a whole:

              He paused then, at the thought of earthly sorrows,
         Our sickly past, incarnadine tomorrows,
         The myriad things that whistle arcane truth
         To please old minds and to instruct raw youth,
         And bore down on his broken knees to pray
         For such a world that had so much to say.           

Poetry is, in some sense, always a response to what the world says first.

At times, Wilson could have lingered with the sensual image before turning to the symbolic reading of it. I think especially of a poem like “Lilacs,” which could have used a few more lines on the lilac bush before turning to philosophical reflection. The sustained description of “The Garden” is more satisfying in this regard, while a lyric like “Snowfall” is powerful in how it weaves imagery and theological interpretations throughout its four stanzas. I missed the midwestern gothic of Wilson’s first two collections, hinted at here in the fine poem “M.A.C.,” but I appreciated the new rural poems about Michigan fishing and hunting camps. There is much more that could be said of the collection. The poems of family life offer a warmer voice. “James' Book,” about helping a young son write an Indiana Jones-esque adventure novel, is a poem that made me smile and to which I will often return. The long narrative “The Great State of Alaska” and the formally intricate “Vanished Fire” could receive essays of their own. This ambitious collection will further establish Wilson’s reputation as one of the most important writers in and on form today.

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If you’d like to read sample poems from Wilson’s collection, here are links to a few in their original publication venues:

“Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds” in First Things

“The Death of Cicero” in America

“The Weakness of Men” in The North American Anglican

“Vanished Fire” in Plough Quarterly

“Farewell to Berwyn” in The New Criterion