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Some Permanent Things
For this second edition, Wilson has completely revised the poems to attain a more classical perfection and restored their original published ordering as four sequences, beginning with "The Violent and the Fallen," "Four Verse Letters," and "La Rochefoucauld's Ghost," and culminating in the new poems collected as "The Christmas Preface."
“Wilson's poems display a rare degree of skill and ambition, but he is never content with mere virtuosity, always reaching for spiritual and emotional intensity. —Dana Gioia
“This is James Matthew Wilson’s first full-length book of poems, and a singularly powerful announcement it is . . . philosophy, metaphysics, theology, the American political scene viewed through the complex lenses of the classics, with allusions ranging from the ancients to the moderns . . . all woven into a complex music which has anchored itself in the long tradition of meter and rhyme. . . He is a word painter . . . with the eye of someone for whom the essential being of things—the quiddity, the inscape—leads again and again into a deeper mystery. Here is a serious poet, not yet forty, who is, I can only hope, at the beginning of a long and illustrious journey in the best and most profound tradition of Dante, Hopkins, David Jones, Auden, Eliot, and Franz Wright.”—Paul Mariani “In James Matthew Wilson’s newest collection of poems he continues to show his command of major themes of many ranges of contemporary experience in a style that is unusually complex, but always exact, profound and deeply insightful. In this new book, his best poems, those concerning matters of the soul, place him among the finest poets writing today.” —Helen Pinkerton Trimpi
“Wilson's poems display a rare degree of skill and ambition, but he is never content with mere virtuosity, always reaching for spiritual and emotional intensity. —Dana Gioia
“This is James Matthew Wilson’s first full-length book of poems, and a singularly powerful announcement it is . . . philosophy, metaphysics, theology, the American political scene viewed through the complex lenses of the classics, with allusions ranging from the ancients to the moderns . . . all woven into a complex music which has anchored itself in the long tradition of meter and rhyme. . . He is a word painter . . . with the eye of someone for whom the essential being of things—the quiddity, the inscape—leads again and again into a deeper mystery. Here is a serious poet, not yet forty, who is, I can only hope, at the beginning of a long and illustrious journey in the best and most profound tradition of Dante, Hopkins, David Jones, Auden, Eliot, and Franz Wright.”—Paul Mariani “In James Matthew Wilson’s newest collection of poems he continues to show his command of major themes of many ranges of contemporary experience in a style that is unusually complex, but always exact, profound and deeply insightful. In this new book, his best poems, those concerning matters of the soul, place him among the finest poets writing today.” —Helen Pinkerton Trimpi
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161 pages, Paperback
First published September 11, 2014
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About the author
James Matthew Wilson
20 books50 followersJames Matthew Wilson is Professor of Humanities and the Founding Director of the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing , at the University of Saint Thomas, Houston. An award-winning scholar of philosophical-theology and literature, he has authored dozens of essays, articles, and reviews on all manner of subjects secular and divine, and especially on those where we see the two in their intrinsic relation, as truth, goodness, beauty, and being disclose themselves in art and culture, in the political and intellectual life, in our quest for self knowledge and the contemplation of God. His scholarly work especially focuses on the meeting of aesthetic and ontological form, where the craftsmanship of art-work discloses the truth about being.
Wilson is a poet and critic of contemporary poetry, whose work appears regularly in such magazines and journals as First Things, The Wall Street Journal, The Hudson Review, Modern Age, The New Criterion, Dappled Things, Measure, The Weekly Standard, Front Porch Republic, The Raintown Review, National Review, and The American Conservative.
He has published ten books, including six books and chapbooks of poetry. Among his volumes are: The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition (CUA, 2017); the major critical study, The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking (Wiseblood, 2015); and a monograph, The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry (both Wiseblood Books, 2014). His most recent books are The Strangeness of the Good (Angelico, 2020) and the poetic sequence, The River of the Immaculate Conception (Wiseblood, 2019).
Wilson serves as Poetry Editor of Modern Age magazine, series editor of Colosseum Books, of the Franciscan University at Steubenville Press, and as director of the Colosseum Institute for writers. He also serves on the boards of several learned journals and societies.
Twice, Wilson has been awarded the Lionel Basney Award by the Conference for Christianity and Literature; he has been a runner up for both the Foley Prize for Poetry by America magazine and the Jacques Maritain Essay Prize by Dappled Things magazine. The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture awarded him the 2017 Hiett Prize in the Humanities, the largest award of its kind. Wilson's The Strangeness of the Good won the Catholic Media Awards prize for poetry in 2021.
Wilson was educated at the University of Michigan (B.A.), the University of Massachusetts (M.A.), and the University of Notre Dame (M.F.A., Ph.D.), where he subsequently held a Sorin Research Fellowship. Wilson joined the University of Saint Thomas, Houston, in 2021, when he co-founded the Master of Fine Arts program.
Wilson is a poet and critic of contemporary poetry, whose work appears regularly in such magazines and journals as First Things, The Wall Street Journal, The Hudson Review, Modern Age, The New Criterion, Dappled Things, Measure, The Weekly Standard, Front Porch Republic, The Raintown Review, National Review, and The American Conservative.
He has published ten books, including six books and chapbooks of poetry. Among his volumes are: The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition (CUA, 2017); the major critical study, The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking (Wiseblood, 2015); and a monograph, The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry (both Wiseblood Books, 2014). His most recent books are The Strangeness of the Good (Angelico, 2020) and the poetic sequence, The River of the Immaculate Conception (Wiseblood, 2019).
Wilson serves as Poetry Editor of Modern Age magazine, series editor of Colosseum Books, of the Franciscan University at Steubenville Press, and as director of the Colosseum Institute for writers. He also serves on the boards of several learned journals and societies.
Twice, Wilson has been awarded the Lionel Basney Award by the Conference for Christianity and Literature; he has been a runner up for both the Foley Prize for Poetry by America magazine and the Jacques Maritain Essay Prize by Dappled Things magazine. The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture awarded him the 2017 Hiett Prize in the Humanities, the largest award of its kind. Wilson's The Strangeness of the Good won the Catholic Media Awards prize for poetry in 2021.
Wilson was educated at the University of Michigan (B.A.), the University of Massachusetts (M.A.), and the University of Notre Dame (M.F.A., Ph.D.), where he subsequently held a Sorin Research Fellowship. Wilson joined the University of Saint Thomas, Houston, in 2021, when he co-founded the Master of Fine Arts program.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 14, 2025
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.
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.
February 6, 2025
Some good poems in here, but I found the majority forgettable and frustrating. I read a revised edition, and apparently a majority of the poems have been changed from their original publication, which tbh I have some issues with on principle. I have no idea how major the revisions were.
Jane Matthew Wilson is vocally pro-rhyme and anti-free verse. He is an advocate for the ancient forms and a return to restraint. I am a big fan of these things but not for their own sake. I think many of the poems here suffer from an overwrought formalism; and I think this may have been edited into them at a later date, but that's just a hunch.
That said, Wilson does do some great work with forms here, and is at his best when working within the more complex ones, whose names I can never remember. I think there's a pantoum in here.
One final note, this collection seems young on the whole. The last group of Christmas poems are more mature and are honestly more palatable than the rest of the book.
Jane Matthew Wilson is vocally pro-rhyme and anti-free verse. He is an advocate for the ancient forms and a return to restraint. I am a big fan of these things but not for their own sake. I think many of the poems here suffer from an overwrought formalism; and I think this may have been edited into them at a later date, but that's just a hunch.
That said, Wilson does do some great work with forms here, and is at his best when working within the more complex ones, whose names I can never remember. I think there's a pantoum in here.
One final note, this collection seems young on the whole. The last group of Christmas poems are more mature and are honestly more palatable than the rest of the book.
October 5, 2022
This chapbook varies in quality, but the highs are high. Wilson is at his worst when playing the Lake Poet, inspired by the writings of various Catholic mystics and substituting the Holy Virgin for numinous Nature. He's better as a young man caught between his received traditions and the empty promises of the world. Better still are the keen-eyed yet humane observations of a sympathetic classicist exiled in Trump country. But Wilson is best as a family man, subject to temptation but stabilized by the consolation of permanent things: wife, daughter, and a sense of place.
December 31, 2020
Worth reading just for the following: "A Prayer for Livia Grace," "Old Man in a Cafe," "Their Time Up at State College," and the first part of "Verse Letter to John."
On the whole, a good collection of poems with some standout lines... I enjoyed the ones about his personal life and family the most. I am not well enough educated in the Classics and European authors (Baudelaire, etc.) to understand all of Wilson's allusions which probably let me down some while reading this work.
On the whole, a good collection of poems with some standout lines... I enjoyed the ones about his personal life and family the most. I am not well enough educated in the Classics and European authors (Baudelaire, etc.) to understand all of Wilson's allusions which probably let me down some while reading this work.
May 7, 2016
One of my favourite contemporary poets, whom I discovered first in issues of First Things magazine. Wilson fuses traditional forms and meters and rhymes with innovative and often surprisingly sharp subjects. There's a lot of careful craft and wordplay to notice throughout. My favourites were the long verse-letter poems, which read at times like philosophy, like memoir, and occasionally jeremiad.
January 30, 2023
Jan 2023. Evenings. Finished, some poems quite striking, worth rereading someday.
January 2, 2019
"How does one stir/A dull eye to the poignancy and gift/Of all the things that are but need not be?"
April 1, 2019
This is the first book of contemporary poetry that I have read and I was pleasantly surprised. I enjoyed reading them aloud and there are several that I will come back to again.
Recommended.
Recommended.
July 29, 2019
Beautiful poetry.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews