Hanging God

The Hanging God by James Matthew Wilson, 81 pages

In 2017, James Matthew Wilson released The Vision of the Soul, a magnificent argument for imagination and beauty as portals to truth.  It is difficult to read this collection of poetry, published a year later, outside of the light or shadow of the earlier work.

     It pleases, rather,

     In wakefulness

     To praise and bless

     What grows and gives

     To thoughtless matter

     Its purposes.

In The Hanging God he confirms that he is an artist rather than an ideologue.  The poems collected here, on subjects ranging from friends' weddings to vicious lovers to the Way of the Cross, have the freedom to be beautiful without being forced to prove some abstract point.

     For our ideas are fading things,

     Wants change with what the weather brings,

          But this stamped weight of being remains.

Of course, in so doing, he makes his case, and offers considerable pleasure besides.

     Chastening us that though our time seems dire,

     Much has endured through beating rains and fire,

     And good can still be made in this dark season.