Joshua Hren is the founder of Wiseblood Books, a small but exceptional publishing house which has issued forth some excellent books over the past few years, including poetry collections by J.C. Scharl and James Matthew Wilson. Some of Wiseblood’s praiseworthy publishing decisions must be down to Hren’s own eye for writerly detail: he is himself an author and poet, with a new novel, Blue Walls Falling Down, out this month from Angelico Press. But Hren’s novel is by no means his first literary endeavour: in 2022, Little Gidding Press published a collection of his poetry titled Last Things, First Things, and Other Lost Causes, a chapbook which is the subject of this review.
Hren’s 2022 collection is a slim volume compassing just over two dozen poems, of which only three exceed a page in length. The poems themselves present in a surprising variety of styles of expression, occasionally cleaving close to traditional forms like the sonnet, whilst at other times charting more experimental waters. Likewise, the subjects of the poems are highly varied, ranging from Aeneas to the martyr-priest Jacques Hamel. Nevertheless, there is a strong Christian current that runs through the volume, engaging with each poem and tying them into a cohesive whole.
As is often the way with chapbooks, the quality is not precisely even: for example, the opening poem in the volume, “The Lesser Angels of Our Nature,” struggles successfully to marry the sincerity of its subject to the execution of its form. But even with these minor reservations, the quality of the selections is commendable, with some poems demonstrating not only the promising poetic capabilities of the author, but also a grasp of narrative syncretism most necessary for exceptional prose works—an auspicious sign for those interested in Hren’s new novel.
With these considerations in mind, this review will address two poems which best display both the voice of the author and his control of thematic expression across differing poetic forms. These are “How to Shoulder What Remains” and “Out of Egypt.” Before embarking on that undertaking, this reviewer should like to add that “Æneas at Washington State,” the longest work in the collection, is worthy of a review on its own merits. Subdivided into seven brief, but unequal, sections, it unites the volume in a most admirable way, and is richly deserving of attention. Unfortunately, it lies beyond the scope of this review to be included herein.
“How to Shoulder What Remains”
The three poems under review all involve Homeric work. The first and last both involve Aeneas, a character mentioned in Homer’s Iliad, where his role is comparatively minor. Later, in the Æneid, Virgil developed the story of Aeneas into a Roman founding myth, casting him as the ancestor of Romulus and Remus. The Æneid also provides the epigraph for “How to Shoulder What Remains,” noting that “Æneas, more than any, secretly / Mourned for them all.”
The poem is presented as an exhortation addressed to “pious Aeneas,” a descriptive term selectively used by Virgil to highlight Aeneas’ divine origins and his conduct in performing the gods’ will. In so doing, Virgil provides, through Aeneas and his descendants, a divine foundation for Rome. As such, the speaker, who addresses Aeneas as “my brother,” might at first appear to be a Roman, if not an actual contemporary of Aeneas himself.
However, the poem’s reference to John the Baptist (“beheaded / Like the Baptist Herod hated”) precludes the speaker being a contemporary of the “Archaic hero, my brother.” Although there is still the possibility that the speaker could be a later Roman, living in the Imperial age, the speaker’s enquiry of “Why do you haunt us” (along with the descriptive use of “archaic”) suggests not a hortatory address to a living person, but rather a speech as to a quasi-historical literary figure, as if to ask, ‘Why do you haunt us, King Arthur?’ The use of “brother” then becomes aspirational as much as to signify the desire for shared qualities and beliefs.
It is this desire to become more like Aeneas that the speaker discovers as the poem progresses. His titular question, “…how to, so beleaguered, / Shoulder well what can be salvaged / of our patrimony’s body,” is followed by a catalogue of depredations originating from without but also from within: not only has “caustic Pyrrhus” transgressed into the “inner sanctum,” but “our Fathers” have seen fit to “lock the churches,” seemingly abandoning those who would have recourse to them (Pilate’s “looming litigation” is parenthetically to blame).
The speaker pleads to the idea of Aeneas in terms which connect the world of the Æneid to the world of the Gospels, revealing them as the speaker’s dual inspiration. But in the poem, his hunger for guidance is unfulfilled; his thirst for moral clarity is unslaked. Asking Aeneas, “When to flee and when to build, / How to hate all war but make it / When the holy laws are breaking?” yields no answer; nor indeed is there any word of Aeneas in the poem. He is mute—a literary ghost. But the answer for the speaker is always waiting there in his own words and on his own lips: the Gospels, to whom the speaker looks for the substance of his plaint, are also where he must turn for an answer.
“Out of Egypt”
The title of the second poem immediately connects it to the Biblical happenings: the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt, and the return of Jesus out of Egypt, where he had been taken to avoid Herod’s massacre of the innocents. The latter is described in Matthew 2:13-15, which is quoted as one of the two epigraphs that precede this poem. The other epigraph is from the fourth book of The Odyssey, describing the sorrow-quenching drug with which Helen of Troy adulterates the wine given to King Menelaus and his men when Telemachus visits Sparta. Those events take place after the Trojan war, and both Euripides and Herodotus offered accounts that Helen remained in Egypt, never going to Troy during the war. If this is taken to be so, then she, too, has come “out of Egypt.”
These intersections are at the heart of Hren’s approach in Last Things. Scarcely a poem in the volume seems disconnected from the others (perhaps from all of the others); and, although they are fine poems per se, they have heightened significance when their sharing of essential topoi is uncovered. In circumstances such as that in “Out of Egypt,” it is particularly impressive that the author draws upon multiple Greek traditions, in addition to two different Biblical events, providing a sort of Pythagorean symmetry, with every event touching other events in the world of the poem—a world which is both our own and also the world of Greek legend.
The poem begins with Helen, “After they called her a whore at Troy.” The war being over, “Helen brought medicine out of Egypt”: a cure for heartache which prevented the imbiber from crying or sorrow on the day it was taken. But for the speaker, these sorrows are not mere emotions: they are the present embodiment of the past that is always with us. Hence her drug is a “Clever heartease that unwove the past,” not delivered with ill-intent, but rather because “Almost a kindness Helen considered it, / Erasing blue memories before tears could taint / The sea dark wine.” The subject of discussion with Telemachus is the Trojan War and the deeds done there—deeds of high renown, but tinged always with the sorrow of what was lost to return Helen to the side of Menelaus.
But the speaker does not leave the reader to ponder the ethics of Helen’s merciful pharmakon, shifting instead to address the reader with “Homer’s malignant hint: / Say you ingested a sip.” Then comes the hypothetical woes to which the reader would be insensate. A mother’s murder would seem no occasion for grief, nor would other horrible scenes:
Like Herod’s slaughter of the holy innocents,
And, wholly at ease with their infantile screams,
You’d applaud the lyrist for inventing such a tyrant.
See how suffering becomes entertainment.
Modern analogues immediately suggest themselves: Herod’s slaughter of the holy innocents, and the dry-eyed reception of an appreciative audience, summon up the damnable evil of abortion which plagues our own time—and, in another reflexive Biblical echo, connects to Old Testament references prohibiting child sacrifice to Moloch. Moreover, in a poetic choice perfectly aligned with the purpose of the passage, the exceptionally well-crafted homophonic shift of “holy innocents” to “wholly at ease” juxtaposes newborn blamelessness with a complicit indifference to evil. Then, in the final line quoted above, these troubling considerations are multiplied by the realisation that, for human beings, the suffering of others too often becomes little more than a diverting amusement. True crime podcasts and movies about tragic disasters now fill a void once occupied by blood in the sand, just as the ‘like and subscribe’ has replaced the deafening roar of the colosseum’s crowd.
It is indeed a Roman sacrifice to which the poem turns in its closing lines, “the chalice of blood” and “the cup we remember”—Christ the crucified, whose death brings life. The closing stanza meditates upon the Holy Family in Egypt and, in the final lines, contrasts Mary the Blessed Virgin with Helen whom they called a whore: “Mary’s is the medicine pained Helen craved / The draught of mercy called out of Egypt.” Here, the speaker confirms that Helen’s medicine can only staunch, but never heal, the deep sorrow of the wounded soul. She remains “pained” and, despite possessing a pharmakon, there was something more that she “craved.” It is only “The Virgin whose breastmilk feeds Christ’s future brothers / In the chalice of blood,” that can truly heal. Mary’s milk, which nourishes the infant Christ and becomes his own blood, in turn nourishes Christians when they partake of it in the eucharist. Helen can only temporarily numb the wounds and sorrows of her patients; her medicine is an anæsthetic. But “Out of Egypt” proclaims a new medicine: Christ, whose touch can truly heal.
