With the Waves
A poet-priest who loves the sea knows how to balance the regular rhythm of death and life with its wild turns.
Review by Peter Lilly
Matthew White’s debut poetry collection is a deep and inspiring mixture of themes, forms, and feelings that engages and searches the reader with heavy depth and humor in equal measure, beautifully balanced and delicately tuned.
Propelled into Wonder is bookended by and punctuated with calming and reflective poetry inspired by the poet’s connection with and love for the sea. Merely by the way the poems have been placed within the collection, White communicates both the constancy of the tide and wildness of the waves. Passages like the following from “Lulworth Cove” allow the lens of the sea to give a tangible physical experience to some of the tensions of struggles and joys that appear throughout the collection:
I walked the road to Lulworth Cove
upon that cold November morn.
A former charm possessed me there
as my feet dueled with pebbles
Themes of death and life permeate every section of the book in a breathing balance. The balance between death and life that each section reaches is not stable, which would have detracted from the collective power of the poems. What White has achieved is rather the balance of crashing and receding waves, both in beauty and the sensation of danger. The poems swing, on an invisible yet sure axis, from the intense darkness of loss to the utter joy of life in intimate community. From each extreme the reader can yet feel the undercurrent of the other side, giving a depth of context to both lows and highs. This is so powerful because it mimics how, in our real-time messy lives, we experience joy and grief.
The collection is dedicated to the poet’s father, who passed away in 2021. The poems where White honors his father and mourns his loss are remarkable. He effectively communicates both the emptiness of loss and the fullness of thankfulness for a life so well-lived. It is a rare work that can impart the multi-faceted feeling of what C.S. Lewis famously called “joy,” yet passages like this from the poem “My Father’s Pen” manage to do so, simply and without pretense.
And now my father’s pens to me bequeathed!
The ink that flows flaunting such ache in me.
Does inspiration dwell with the bereaved?
Are words the love that cannot come to be?
However, it is not only in reflecting on his own personal bereavement that White communicates deeply about grief and loss. In the poem “This Place” he observes how the acute sorrow of others can interrupt our own struggles with tragic circumstances. He skillfully and honestly brings this compassionate empathy (aware that nothing he says can make things better) before God in the beautifully simple and challenging line “Emmanuel, you had better be with them!” This technique of playing with well-known turns of phrase, is one that White uses to great effect throughout the book, enabling the reader to enter into the emotion of the poems. I was often stopped in my tracks to contemplate the impact of the stories behind the poems.
Implicit in these poems is the difficult tension in which all disciples exist: of living in helpless abandon to the life and grace of Christ, and living lives of active discipleship and emulation of his example.
The very next poem is a profoundly uplifting expression of the wonder at approaching parenthood with the expected birth of a second child. This demonstrates the resonant balance and swing between death and life that the collection as a whole also achieves. In the poem “Soon There Will Be Two,” the poet uses rhyme and repetition to great effect to create a kind of parent’s lullaby.
Soon there will be two.
Two sparks of life to life renew,
two lots of cheek to not subdue,
two stunning smiles to now pursue,
soon there will be two.
The themes of death and life come together in some of the theological poems, specifically as the poet reflects on scripture and the person of Christ. This demonstrates a profound theological understanding that penetrates through to the poet’s emotional life and vocational practice as a priest in the Anglican Church:
of tender heart and furrowed scars
with bloodied brow and holy crown.
As dumbstruck as I am renewed
by lavished love from high above
and such unfathomable Christ.
The above passage from the poem “Unfathomable” welcomes the reader into the poet’s own confrontation with Christ. Implicit in these poems is the difficult tension in which all disciples exist: of living in helpless abandon to the life and grace of Christ, and living lives of active discipleship and emulation of his example. The poems offer an oasis of thankful wonder in the existential wilderness of our time.
The collection also includes many poems exploring the themes of priesthood and the church. Showing White’s intense wrestling with his vocation as a priest, these are, importantly, poems of both protest and embrace. What White does so well here is not to reject everything about the institutional church, but to refocus everything through the lens of Christ and the sufferings and struggles of actual people. The standout poem that needs to be highlighted is “Priestly Manifesto,” which in this reviewer’s opinion should be taught at every seminary. It visits many of the characteristics and tasks of a pastor or priest and reframes them, refusing to compromise with institutional structures and modernist concerns of numerical growth and style over soul-care. Some of these reframing stanzas clarify what should be meant by certain buzzwords:
If, by welcome, you mean
purge prejudice and
accommodate all,
And some stanzas turn certain tropes completely upside down in a beautifully challenging way:
If, by stand, you mean
lay down and
prefer the other,
This ending washes like a wave of relief over any reader who has experienced the brokenness of institutional churches, or deep personal doubt.
As a collected work the book is very well collated, wisely divided into sections due to their emotional relevance rather than strict themes. At certain intervals throughout the book White uses short, punchy poems to give the reader pause to step back to feel the impact of these hard-hitting poems, and how they relate to the collection as a whole. Some are hard-hitting like the slamming lid of a casket:
I never thought my dad would die.
But maybe nothing prepares you
for the present tense waving goodbye. (from “A Tense Journey”)
Some are hard-hitting like the punchline of a good joke:
When Jesus said,
“Let the little children come to me,”
he hadn’t met
my progenies when they turned three. (“Little Children”)
And some are playful and profound in equal measure:
And now these three remain:
control, despair and cynicism.
But the greatest of these
is cynicism. Sin is schism. (“Three”)
There are also a couple of poems of his own form where his use of a repeated trope is followed by a final turn to shake the reader from the expected movement of the poem and the expected movement of our lives. For example, this beautifully vulnerable ending to “The Apostates’ Creed,” where White has spent the majority of the poem positively exclaiming his beliefs:
But regarding this vocation
with its many expectations
and this broken institution
with its sullied reputation
and my fragile constitution,
I have my doubts.
This ending washes like a wave of relief over any reader who has experienced the brokenness of institutional churches, or deep personal doubt.
The hand-drawn illustrations that accompany the poems give the reader further opportunity to stop, inspiring deeper and different directions of reflection. Their simplicity and soft edges perfectly partner with the poems, and the fact that they were drawn by the poet’s wife, for whom he has written many of the poems, is another embodiment of the rich themes of collaborative creativity arising from intimate connection.
Propelled Into Wonder is vibrant and varied, a daring and honest first collection from a poet-priest who has much to give in both of these symbiotic vocations. Anyone who reads this book will be encouraged, challenged, exposed, and comforted, and, I expect, these gifts will reach further and deeper with each consecutive reading.
Peter Lilly is a Best of the Net–nominated poet who grew up in Gloucestershire in the UK. After studying theology and working with the homeless in London, he moved to the South of France in 2014. He lives in a rural village with his wife Silje and son Gabriel, where he concentrates on writing, community development, and English teaching. He is the author of the collections An Array of Vapour (TSL Publications, 2023), and A Handful of Prayers (Wipf & Stock, 2024).
Propelled Into Wonder: Poems of a Priest was released by Wipf & Stock on September 22, 2024. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of an advance copy to our reviewer. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here.
