The Hanging God a Best Book of 2018, Twice Over, and Vision of the Soul for the Hat Trick

What is the purpose of an author's site but to spread word about the author's work? And so, I'm happy to share two tidbits of good words here, as we approach the Christmas Season.

Novelist Glynn Young, in his annual "Books I'm not recommending for Christmas" list, writes:

It was a good year for poetry. Highlights for me included The Chance for Home by Mark Burrows, The Fall of Gondolin by J.R. R. Tolkien, Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation by Marjorie Maddox, and The Bell and the Blackbird by David Whyte. 

The collection that left me rather stunned, however, and gets my “best of 2018” nod is The Hanging God by James Matthew Wilson. I reviewed it this Tuesday at Tweetspeak Poetry. This sums up the review: “I’ve been impressed by many poetry collections, but only a tiny handful have left me feeling undone. The Hanging God is one of them.”

And Catholic World Report editor-in-chief, Carl E. Olson, writes with equal generosity in that magazine's annual review of the best books of the year:

Last year, I wrote that “James Matthew Wilson seems to write a brilliant book each year.” On cue, his collection of poems, The Hanging God, arrived a few weeks ago. Wilson is remarkable poet on several counts, but the two that stand out to me are his theological brilliance (reminding me at times of T.S. Eliot) and his ability to employ, without any sense of manipulation, a variety of voices and perspectives. Put another way, his poems are deeply rooted in the messiness of life while drawing upon and pointing to the mysterious edges of eternity. A book to be slowly savored.

​Not too slowly, I hope.  It was wonderful news to hear that already this book, such an agony in some ways to compose, is finding its mark in the hearts and minds of good readers.  Thank you. (As always, you can click on the icons to be taken to the original web pages.)

John Davidson, in The Federalist, also recommends my study of conservative thought, metaphysics, and aesthetics, The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition as a Best Book of 2018:

Why is western civilization in a state of decay? A recent volume by James Matthew Wilson aims to answer that question and propose a remedy. Wilson is a poet, professor of religion and literature at Villanova University, and the poetry editor at Modern Age magazine, and his book, “The Vision of the Soul,” is an attempt to establish firm philosophical ground for a robust modern conservatism that can serve as an alternative to the ascendant liberal order.
Unlike other recent books with more or less the same purpose, Wilson is at pains to make clear that by “conservatism” he does not mean the conservative movement or conservative politics, much less something as ephemeral as the Republican Party. A crucial part of his thesis is that conservatism is fundamentally a literary movement, not a political one, and that if we’re going to recover a sense of true conservatism in our liberal age, we need to get serious about things like beauty and goodness. For starters, we at least need to get over the notion that conservatism is primarily a set of political principles derived from the writings of John Locke.
For Wilson, the point of conservatism isn’t merely to oppose liberalism or slow the march of scientific rationalism, the point is to apprehend and preserve a vision of the Good. He delves into the Christian Platonist tradition and the writings of Pseudo-Dionysus, among many others, to argue that authentic conservatism must be revived through art, and not just any art but beautiful art that has the power to reveal a higher reality and elevate us to a vision of the divine. Reasserting the importance of the fine arts in particular is crucial, writes Wilson, “not because of its isolation from society or politics, but because it attunes us, awakens and habituates us, to the perception of the ordered whole of reality.”
The point of the fine arts, or any art, should be to manifest beauty, which “reveals not simply our creaturely yearning for God, but our existential participation in him.” If the Enlightenment ushered in a rationalistic era “that knows nothing of the heart’s much less of the intellect’s higher aspirations,” Wilson believes we’re only going to find our way out of it by awakening those higher aspirations through the cultivation and the apprehension of beauty in every part of our lives. His book is dense and can at times be recondite and abstract, but his argument is one every conservative should take to heart.