BY PAVI AGRAWAL
There is a particular species of English religious poet whose work one encounters, from time to time, in the pages of The Tablet or the quieter corners of the literary press. He is learned, sincere, metrically competent, and possessed of a devotional earnestness that can feel, to the less devout reader, rather like being cornered at a drinks party by a man who wishes to discuss the hypostatic union.
Christopher Villiers fits this description rather neatly. Versing the Mystery is a substantial collection, three parts, 150 odd poems, that attempts nothing less than a poetic re narration of the Judaeo Christian imagination, from Adam to Pentecost, with detours through classical mythology, medieval monasticism, and the more plaintive corners of the poet’s own romantic disappointments.
One must begin with praise, and there is genuine praise to offer. Villiers commands the sonnet form with an ease that many contemporary poets, having abandoned formal verse for the safer shores of free lyric, have simply never troubled to acquire. His tetrameters scan; his rhymes satisfy. When he writes, in ‘Moses,’ of a God ‘who is consuming me entire,’ or in ‘The Road to Spring,’ of an ‘icy graveyard’ that is ‘in fact a womb,’ he achieves a genuine compression of theological insight into imagistic economy. The best poems in the first section, ’Rahab,’ ‘Samson,’ the genuinely moving ‘David and Absalom,’ manage the difficult trick of inhabiting biblical voices without collapsing into pastiche. One believes in Villiers’s Rahab, her ‘prostitute’s cunning’ and her ‘discharge fee,’ in a way that one does not always believe in his Jesus, who can feel, across fifty odd sonnets, a bit systematically admired.
The trouble, and it is a trouble that grows rather than recedes across the collection’s 200 pages, is that Villiers has mistaken coverage for depth. The ‘Sonnets from the Spirit’ section runs to some fifty seven poems, each taking a biblical or Gospel figure as its speaker. This is a lot of first person monologue. By the time one reaches ‘A Post Temptation Analysis’ (the Devil, apparently, speaks in the demotic register of a disappointed talent agent), the sense of formal ingenuity wearing thin is difficult to suppress. Not every figure needs a sonnet. Not every sonnet needs to end with a clinching couplet that states, rather than discovers, its moral. Villiers is at his best when he allows his speakers complexity, ambiguity, even self-contradiction, the Herod who knows he is ‘scum’ but cannot see another way, the Pilate whose hand washing ‘failed,’ the Judas who is not a villain but a disappointed revolutionary. At his worst, he produces devotional postcards: ‘It is finished, our debt to death is paid’ sort of thing, which is true but not, as poetry, especially interesting.
The second section, ‘Petals of Vision,’ is a curious beast. Here Villiers relaxes into shorter forms, haiku like fragments, quatrains, the occasional jeu d’esprit about unicorns and talking hares. These poems are, to put it gently, uneven. ‘Seagull’ is a five stanza monologue from a hungry gull that reads like a sketch for a children’s cartoon. ‘A Party Political Broadcast’ imagines an ‘parliament of owls’ standing for election; it is whimsical in a way that suggests Villiers has been reading too much Edward Lear and not enough of, well, anyone else. But there are genuine pleasures here too. ‘Butterfly Collection’ is a quietly devastating meditation on preservation and death. ‘Where Once Children Laughed’ earns its solemnity. And the shorter nature poems, ’By the Pond,’ ‘A Seal,’ ‘White Bones of Water,’ show Villiers capable of something he too rarely attempts elsewhere: reticence. The best line in the entire collection may be the final couplet of ‘A Seal’: ‘But there still swims deep the shore’s vision rare, / In my mind’s eye still hunts that seal’s sharp stare.’ That is genuinely fine.
The third section, ‘Another Odyssey,’ is the most ambitious and, perhaps, the most successful. Here Villiers turns to classical and late antique figures: the Minotaur (‘I did not ask to be a Minotaur’), Calypso, Medusa, a surprisingly tender Hades, and then a long sequence moving through early church history, Byzantium, the Crusades, right up to the fall of Constantinople. The range of learning on display is considerable. More importantly, Villiers allows himself a kind of moral complexity that the biblical sonnets sometimes foreclose. His Prometheus regrets giving fire to humanity, having glimpsed ‘death camp ovens.’ His Constantine is tormented by the murder of his son. His Julian the Apostate is observed with a dry wit that suggests Villiers might, in another life, have made a rather good satirist. The poem ‘Alexamenos Worships His God,’ written from the perspective of an early Christian in the Roman catacombs, is as fine a short poem as I have read this year: ‘A God for women and for broken men / The butts of philosophical disdain.’
What, then, is one to make of Versing the Mystery? It is, undeniably, the work of a genuine poet, though a poet still learning to trust his own instincts. Villiers is most alive when he is most specific, most attentive to the grit and particularity of his speakers’ lives, and least alive when he reaches for the universal and the uplifting. He needs an editor who will tell him that fifty seven biblical sonnets are too many, that the whimsical animal poems belong in a drawer, and that his penchant for the dramatic monologue is real but requires sharper pruning. One finishes the collection admiring the reach, the learning, the formal competence, and the unmistakable sincerity, and also feeling, acutely, that a book half this length would have been twice as good.
But perhaps that is ungenerous. We live in an age when most poetry is either confessional sludge or academic morse code. Villiers is attempting something genuinely unfashionable: a Christian poetics that takes both its faith and its forms seriously, that believes poetry can still speak to the largest questions, and that does not apologise for its ambitions. For that alone, he deserves a respectful hearing. I suspect Versing the Mystery will find its natural readers among those who still believe that the sonnet is a vessel large enough to hold the divine, and that a poem about Rahab the prostitute might still teach us something about grace. I am not sure I am entirely among them. But I am grateful for the attempt, and I will remember the seal.
Four stars. Read the first and third sections; skip the hares.
Christopher Villiers’s Versing the Mystery (Dare Valley Press, 2022) is available here.