And Yet
The Hours challenges us to embrace the darkness in pursuit of the divine.
Review by Elizabeth Harlan-Ferlo
Sitting down to write this piece in the bustling cafe, I set my phone to “focus” and put in noise-cancelling earbuds. I have always written best in busy environments, but the last few years have taken constant stimulus to a whole new level, which, in addition to parenting two children and working full time, makes life a constant juggle. Many organizing techniques offer to help us control the onslaught of our experiences: bullet journals, Google calendars, focus options on our phones. One of the oldest of these “focus technologies” is the monastic Divine Office, a schedule of prayers still used in monastic communities today. This is the frame that Matthew J. Andrews uses to organize The Hours, his latest book of poems. The Divine Office is both comfort and constraint and thus can stand in for the experience of faith in a broken world. I don’t often pray the Divine Office, but, like Andrews, I yearn for an organizing principle to face the continuing demands and disappointments of a world that feels out of our control.
The collection is divided into four sections, each named for one part of the Office. The first, Vigils, is a service said in the middle-darkness of the night, when it is technically morning but still day has not yet arrived. One of the things I appreciate about this book as a whole, and this section in particular, is Andrews’s distaste for sentimentality in the experience of faith. The deflating claim in the opening poem’s title, “There is No Such Thing as Moonlight,” sets the tone for the rest of the collection. Andrews is not going to offer a whimsical and delicate reflection on the cycle of prayer. Right out of the gate, we are confronted with a directness that initiates grief and destabilizes our perceptions. A few pages later, in “Hermeneutical Spiral,” Andrews dissolves what comfort we might hold onto in the darkness of the wee hours. “I turn my worn Bible upside down // in the bathtub, let it fill with ink,” he writes. When the letters of the Bible run together and “swirl in a tightening pillar,” they not only obfuscate meaning but personify a kind of death: “bleeding, dark; the drain, darker still.”
The Hours not only grapples with the darkness of faith but invites and sometimes even revels in it. Andrews’s descriptions of experiencing the holy are fraught. He speaks as a poet well-acquainted not only with Christian theology and practice, but with the greed and collapse of the systems and organizations that surround us, and with their—and our—persistent destruction of the natural world. In company with the divine, creation resists any urge by the speaker of the poems to find respite there. “Grey sky [denies] us guidance / of the sun,” Andrews writes in “On the Bosphorus.”
It’s clear from these poems that the presence of God cannot be controlled, or even counted on. “Unfinished Psalms From the Private Notebook of King David,” in the voice of the biblical figure, alternates between reproach and request—a pattern familiar to any reader of the Psalms. “This thorn in my side– / is this your weapon? / This woman in my eye– / is this your accuser?” Poems titled “Apollyon” (the Angel of Destruction) and “Wormwood” follow. We are still in the middle of the night. “We don’t deserve to be saved,” claims Andrews in his own “Psalm.”
Andrews is determined to find the holy even if the holy turns out to also be broken.
And yet, the poems persist in a relentless desire to connect with the divine despite the darkness; the momentum of the Divine Office keeps the narrator’s prayer life going. The book’s second section, Lauds, opens out slightly, like morning, into a day that feels like one may be able to contend with whatever it might bring. It begins with an image of Akeldama—the “field of blood” associated with the death of Judas Iscariot—and conveys a kind of strange consolation and resurrection.
skin of green, moist
breath of grasses, fluttering
heartbeat of insect wings…
But the next poem, “Sinner,” a companion poem to “I’m Not Sure I Have Ever Prayed,” shows that when the speaker attempts to connect with the natural world he describes, he is sidelined by distraction and despair. In both of these poems, the speaker confesses failings of attention to the world around him, in effect denying God’s presence. He describes “the petitions and praises that hover untethered / in my mind like leaves in the wind” and laments, “I have walked blindly / past endless fields of wildflowers.” Even when he is able to open himself to the natural world, it confronts him with destruction more than peace. In “Birdsongs,” arguably the most violent poem about the subject ever written, the second stanza evokes a child recognizing its mother’s call. But the fourth stanza soon dispenses with any sentimentality, describing birdsong as “an atom / bomb in the sky,” a “flagellation of words, auditory stigmata.” In Andrews’s Divine Office, that which satisfies also tortures. That which contains dignity and life-force also presages destruction and blight.
Sext, the noonday office and third section, explores generational history and familial relationship via personal poems. Andrews begins the section by embellishing scripture with the poem “Imagine Jesus Lives a Long Life,” which portrays the dialogue between the devil and Jesus as a life-long one, not just confined to the desert temptation. “Give a man enough time, old friend,” says Jesus, “and he can learn to endure almost anything.” Andrews goes on to interrogate relationships both in his immediate family and the family of Christianity. “I shave my face / with Abraham’s knife,” he writes in “Father’s Day.”
The last section, Vespers, returns to the dark, combining the horrors of the world with the personal disgust that can come from spiritual self-examination. The speaker of “Coram Deo” lines up his heresies on the bar as glasses. “The God of Broken Things,” opens with, “In the beginning, there was garbage.” And in “Whole and Entire,” a catalog of Christ images insists on the presence of the incarnate human experience: “… the multiplicitous body of Christ / fractures: … / bloodied, slumped, wordless… / shuffling, hands folded, mouths agape– / pilgrim parts….” Indeed, what keeps Andrews’s collection from nihilism is the overlay of the body and physical experience (sometimes aggressive, sometimes pleasurable) with the underlying sense of despair. Flashes of sensation cut through physical images to create a disjointed yet intense experience.
The Hours speaks to those who feel exhausted by the world and by their own determination to believe in the face of its disasters. It proclaims that the body can be redeemed even in its disgustingness, even in the mess and confusion of intimate encounter. Andrews is determined to find the holy even if the holy turns out to also be broken. By using the structure of the Divine Office, in which the cycle of prayer feels like drudgery but also creates a capacity for wonder, he expresses this tenacity. The whole collection could have been named after the refrain and ending of the opening poem: “And Yet.” Is the “and yet” a reminder that horrors continue to mount, or is it an invitation to hope for Divine connection? The answer is yes.
Elizabeth Harlan-Ferlo is the author of Incarnation, Again. She serves as Canon for Spirituality Education and Arts at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, Oregon.
The Hours by Matthew J. Andrews was published by Solum Literary Press on April 22, 2025. Fare Forward appreciates the provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy here.
