Touches of Glory
Claude Wilkinson’s latest collection seamlessly weaves together nature, art, myth, and personal history into reflections on this life and the one to come.
Review by Tessa Carman
Claude Wilkinson’s fifth poetry collection takes its title from the spiritual “One of These Days,” sung by the Georgia Sea Island Singers: “We shall be soon done with the crosses / We shall soon be done with the troubles of the world.”
And indeed, Soon Done with the Crosses is especially concerned with looking back upon a life, and keeping vigil(ant) while looking ahead toward the next. These poems reckon with the griefs, sorrows, and strangeness of this life while attending to the touches of glory that shine through the checkered legacy of one’s country, one’s parents, and oneself. As the collection’s second epigraph, from the spiritual “Do Lord,” says, “I’ve got a home in Glory Land that outshines the sun / Way beyond the Blue.”
The touches of glory we meet in this life are always mixed with touches of corruption, physical and otherwise. But even—or especially—in such poems as “Rib Cage of a Deer,” “Carcass of a Vole,” “Torso of Pan,” and “Shell of a Terrapin,” Wilkinson treats of each scene of death and decay with a respect and perception that enables the scene to become an occasion for revelation: A deer’s rib cage, plucked so clean that it’s bright-bleached, becomes entwined in “rife green / circuits of vine,” its “dry bones” finding new life in a surrealist adaptation of Ezekiel’s vision; belated pity is shown to the meddlesome terrapin, “the enemy, the enmity / back then, Lucifers let loose among // forbidden fruit, our Eden of tomatoes” (I’ll leave the last line for the reader to discover).
Wilkinson’s voice is wry and wise, humorous and tender, ruminative but never ponderous.
The Garden” transposes the curse of being removed from Eden to the speaker’s father and grandfather, toiling in sweat over the thorny ground. “Sea Horses” features the eponymous creatures and the speaker’s mother’s delight in them, but also the son’s keen regret:
My remembering
is to do with
not being a better son
while in quiet times between us,
as when I was trying
to equal her meticulousness
thinning the scarlet of cannas
and violet of hydrangeas…
“Feet Striking Zion” remembers a now-past grandmother awakening out of memory loss briefly while listening to Mahalia Jackson singing, “Move on Up a Little Higher,” wherein the great gospel singer sings, “Soon one morning / I’m gonna lay down my cross… / Soon as my feet strike Zion, / Lay down my heavy burden, / Put on my robe in glory.” A pair of poems directly concern a “Bluesman” and “Blueswoman.” Several poems concern small scenes of great tragedy, such as “Anathema” (it will likely break your heart).
There is another kind of cross here as well: the meeting, and tension, of earthly and heavenly reality, and of crossing from one to another. This world is gravid with thoughts of the next world, and, albeit often riddled with guilt and doubt, they cast their shadow upon our doings on this earth. The final poem, “Vigil,” evokes Hopper’s painting Nighthawks, sketching a scene of staying awake while sick loved ones lie sleeping, a vigil awaiting the coming, or rather leaving, of friends for the next world.
Wilkinson explores this vertical/horizontal tension also through a series of bird poems. The opening poem, “Birds That Alight on Faith,” offers a prayer that also introduces the collection’s motifs. It begins:
Help me also to believe in
the leanest saplings and twigs,
in something as flimsy
as a honeysuckle bloom,
as Theseus did, in my imagining, when
he tackled the Minotaur, or Icarus
when he flew momentarily
into the face of the sun.
Here the speaker asks for the faith of birds, who can discern and trust without seeing to the end, just as Theseus could enter the labyrinth despite not seeing the way out—and, perhaps surprisingly, like the ill-fated Icarus. But in Wilkinson’s refiguring, the last two lines of this stanza emphasize, first, that Icarus indeed “flew momentarily”—he did fly, he did trust in his father’s invention—and instead of the next lines noting his death in the water, we end with that moment of illumination: “he flew… / into the face of the sun.” Is it a tragedy after all, if he was able to meet face-to-face that greatest of this-worldly lights?
“Birds That Serve as Still Lifes” describes a scene of death: but the horizontal scene of dead birds also points to the vertical:
Was it some avian part of the angel
which Jacob wrestled for,
something divine in birds that’s
always been our deepest desire?
Wilkinson’s voice is wry and wise, humorous and tender, ruminative but never ponderous. “You’d think artists would be more attuned / to suffering,” says the speaker in “Postcard from Patmos.”
His is a voice the reader trusts, for he respects the reader’s ability to receive the poem.
Wilkinson is a master of the finely observed scene, euphoniously crafted. His poems—where Greco-Roman myth and biblical allusions are considered alongside the music of Jimi Hendrix and Nina Simone, paintings from Pedro Américo and Frans Snyders and William Holman Hunt, photographs by Miguel Gandert, a 15th-century French manuscript, and the account of the martyrdom of St. Perpetua—combine a tender yet unsentimental compassion with a tough, perceptive honesty—qualities rooted in the poet’s essential reverence for his art, his subjects, and for their Creator. His is a voice the reader trusts, for he respects the reader’s ability to receive the poem.
In his book The Art of Living, German philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand establishes reverence as the primal virtue. I thought of Claude Wilkinson’s work as I read Hildebrand’s description of the reverent man, which, I believe, serves well also as a description of the great artist:
The man possessing reverence… does not fill the world with his own ego, but leaves to being the space that it needs in order to unfold itself. He understands the dignity and nobility of being as such, the value which it already possesses in its opposition to mere nothingness. Thus there is a value inherent in every stone, in a drop of water, in a blade of grass, precisely as being, as an entity that possesses its own being, which is such and not otherwise….
Because of this autonomy, being is never a mere means for the reverent man and his accidental egoistic aims. It is never merely something that he can use, but he takes it seriously in itself; he leaves it the necessary space for its proper unfolding. Confronted with being, the reverent man remains silent in order to give it an opportunity to speak.
Tessa Carman writes from Mount Rainier, Maryland. She also interviewed Claude Wilkinson for Fare Forward in August 2021, and the transcript of that interview can be found here.
Soon Done with the Crosses was published by Cascade Books on July 12, 2023; it is a part of the Poiema Poetry Series. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a copy for our reviewer, and you can purchase your own copy here.
