Things of the Earth
Paul Pastor’s second collection of poetry pays just attention to the seen—in order to reveal, in due course, the unseen.
Review by Sally Thomas
To write a poetry of faith is to write a poetry of paradox. Faith itself, after all, is a paradox: the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. It deals in light, which we perceive because it shineth in darkness, which comprehended it not. It speaks in a simultaneity of tenses—past, present, and future. It is life arrived at through the awful door of death. It is letting go, because in letting go we find what it was we wanted all along to hold close.
All this paradox—which, though it looks like a series of paradoxes, in the end is only one great paradox—lies at the heart of Paul Pastor’s poetry, which enacts a further resonance of the same paradox. To write about all the unseen things we hope for requires that we write about all the seen things that, in one way or other, figure our transcendent hope and are its mother tongue in this life. Pastor’s art is to provide those seen things with their own mother tongue, a poetic language in which they can exist, and we can apprehend them for what they are. And what they are is more, always, than what they are.
It’s fitting, then, that the poems of his second collection, The Locust Years, should concern themselves minutely with this earth. Often the things of this earth are themselves minute: the mole, the snail, the wild currant, the song of the hermit thrush, the fleck of mica. If God is “the God of little things” who “spits garnets in our mud”—as “Annus Mirabilis,” one particularly striking poem in this collection, suggests—then the task of these poems is to mark those “glints” and to recognize the larger, more mysterious glory at their source.
The poet’s particular task is to render those glints and that consequent recognition into language—and not just any language. To paraphrase Dana Gioia, in his excellent Art of Poetry YouTube series, the poet’s language is a “special way” of speaking and writing that invites and rewards a “special kind” of attention. Poetry “exists within our common speech,” Gioia says. At the same time, it marks out a territory apart from that common speech, in order to say, Pay attention! Something is happening here.
In an era whose poetry so often adopts the same voice—the sort of voice that begins, I need you to understand…—Pastor’s poems declare their territory in a voice that in its biblical cadences often seems inherited from Whitman, as in “Annus Mirabilis,” with its psalm-like repetitions and rephrasings: “It was the year of changes; of pyrite in the stream, and mica; / the year that it has been since we can remember.” The question that opens the poem’s second section particularly recalls Whitman, though also the speaker of Psalm 43:5: “Where now is your wisdom, my soul?”
Once again, paradoxically, the restraint of a strict form does not limit, but creates possibilities—a figure for the life of faith itself.
One striking hallmark of Pastor’s body of work is that nobody else today seems to be asking his soul where its wisdom is. If these poems aspire toward prophecy, it’s an aspiration earned (again, paradoxically) by the self-knowledge that leads to humility. That is the secret to the pliability of the voice throughout this book. It can command and assert, as in “American Isolate:” “First, note the pattern of all growing things. / …Next. Speculate upon the lacking thing.” In the collection’s title poem, it imparts paternal wisdom, beginning, “My son, there is no fairness in the years, / No paid deserving. Nothing but the gift….” But it also observes with utter receptivity the miracles of the natural world, and also the miracle of one loved woman, as in “Two Stanzas (for Emily),” which concludes
Yes, and I saw you
barefoot in our garden,
everlasting in gray denim,
fussing with hellebores,
wordless, prayerful,
unaware of being
counted with the flowers.
Even the least formal poems in this collection retain what Eliot famously called “the ghost of a simple meter.” A reader might mistake the above poem, for example, for free verse, when in fact until the final trimeter line it’s all in accentual dimeter. Pastor’s facility and lightness of touch in imposing traditional forms, apparent in many of the poems in The Locust Years, does not diminish or restrict the prophetic vigor of the written voice, but amplifies it.
To my mind, the most superficially simple poems, those in epigrammatic couplets, tercets, and quatrains, are among the most potent and effective in the entire collection. “What May Not Be Accepted,” for example, about a cat’s killing a bird, reduces this event to something much less and much more than it is. All the detail of the cat stalking and springing on the bird is pruned away. Any impulse to indulge in dramatizing the scene is denied. There’s no blood. What’s left is stark: “Beautiful fall, beautiful spring. / How lately did those feathers sing.” Those two lines, which close the poem, are freighted with meaning. The fall and the spring may signify, simultaneously, the passage of seasons and the actions of the bird and the cat, all “beautiful,” in a universe whose oppositions, as St. Paul notes in his Epistle to the Colossians, are held together in Christ. And that last line, in which the animate creature has been reduced to silent feathers, in its spare four iambs speaks the tragic (though again, “beautiful”) transience of all creation.
Similarly, “Damascus Road,” on the conversion of St. Paul, derives its effectiveness in retelling a familiar narrative by way of its formal restraint. Its rhymed triplets give it, again, almost the feel of a child’s poem, full of linguistic play. Had the poet not needed a rhyme, he might never have come up with such a line as “Christ dumped ball bearings on my roller rink,” which has the triple virtue of being absolutely apt, sonically satisfying, and, in its anachronistic goofiness, unexpectedly funny. The last line of each tercet speaks to the impossibility of saying what it is that has happened to St. Paul—what the moment was as an immediate experience, what it meant as an event, what it has done to him in the aftermath. Those third lines, with their rather dithering feel, are, again unexpectedly, the windup to the poem’s last line, a masterclass in the earned ending: “I cannot think now, but I think of you.”
This poem, with its final echo of Donne’s “nor ever chaste, except you ravish me,” suggests another paradox of effective Christian poetry. It retells the old story, losing nothing of its truth, changing none of its salient details. Yet the double Paul—St. Paul as channeled through the voice of Paul Pastor—tells it so startlingly that even as a remembrance it feels new. Other rhymed and metered poems in the collection, meanwhile, point to the way that the poetic tradition itself, alive as our faith tradition is alive, maintains its forms but always pays them forward, to be inhabited by wholly new poems that both remake and reinforce their place in the tradition.
A form such as the Shakespearean sonnet, carefully observed, remains what it always is: fourteen pentameter lines rhymed ababcdcdefefgg. Yet “Haunting,” a Shakespearean sonnet, contains in its brief self the whole life of a wooded place, ever changing in light and shadow and wind, yet “a haven, should my prayers prove false.” Aside from the satisfying closure of the couplet rhymes—“galls/false”—the set boundaries of the form, its firm structure, allow for the rippling, dappling motion of the natural world in its mutability, and for the human sense of rootedness even in that shifting world, for which the poem’s speaker gives thanks. Once again, paradoxically, the restraint of a strict form does not limit, but creates possibilities—a figure for the life of faith itself.
At the boundary line of Pastor’s imaginative cosmos, the created order in all its minutiae, the topical gives way to the eternal, which is strangely manifest in all that is, at every moment, passing away. If this world sprang into being in the pages of Pastor’s debut collection, Bower Lodge, it is enlarged in The Locust Years through the poet’s openness to, and facility in, working in traditional forms. On every page, something is happening: the poet’s act of attention to both the paradoxical world of possibility around him and the paradoxical world of possibility that is poetic language itself, to all of which these poems of faith bear witness.
Sally Thomas is the author of two poetry collections, Motherland and the forthcoming Among the Living, as well as a novel and a collection of short stories. She is also co-editor of the anthology Christian Poetry in America Since 1940, which received the 2023 Book Award in Culture and the Arts from Christianity Today. Her poetry, fiction, essays and reviews have appeared in First Things, National Review, the New Yorker, Plough Quarterly, Public Discourse, Religion and Liberty, and other journals. She is a founder of and regular contributor to the Substack poetry newsletter Poems Ancient and Modern.
The Locust Years: Poems was published by Wiseblood Press on May 27, 2025. Fare Forward appreciates the provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here.
