Litany with Wings by Tyler Chadwick
Reviewed by Isaac James Richards
BCC Press, 2022
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Eight of the poems in Tyler Chadwick’s recent collection Litany with Wings were published in Psaltery & Lyre, but his content ranges far beyond belief and doubt. The poems are framed with Catholic liturgy—as prayers, psalms, rosaries, litanies, collects—but they roam from the Garden of Eden to the desert of Utah, with New Zealand in between. The five sections scaffold the collection beautifully, exploring, roughly and respectively: (1) nature, (2) Adam and Eve, (3) the quotidian, (4) Polynesian culture, and (5) the divine feminine.
I. “The Gods’ Backcountry”
In the lead section, Chadwick’s poems are awash in “the ramble and catch of tumbleweed” and “roads supple as a / cricket’s chirr.” He watches the sunrise in St. George and elsewhere during a late winter. One of my favorite poems, though, is “Upon hearing Elder B– bear witness that ‘Satan is real’ to a Mormon congregation the second Sunday of 2011.” Despite the Mormon-esque setting of this poem, its rugged western language is a prime example of Chadwick’s ability to push the borders of the secular and the sacred. Here, God (or Satan?) is “fishing the Snake, waves lapping at his waders like a / dog left alone all day” but also “insatiate as the current running his lures” that
he tied for his boys before their Hells Canyon run an
aeon ago, the winter his second
went serial, slit his upbringing anus to jaw like the
limit of steelhead they took that trip:
gore, shit, scales, and the perfect planes of omega-rich
meat chafing his pathology
grown obsessive as his knife’s even slice anus to jaw—
and repeat—and repeat—and
again—his pathology grown vulpine as the legion that
whispered with the gore
from his brother’s side when the impatient blade
thought crucifixion too slow…
The poem ends with God shooing Adam and Eve “with buckshot from Eden’s bowels” and then sending “cherubim / to cover the corpse.” Here, and elsewhere, Christianity’s origin myths get a contemporary revamping, as they do in the next section.
II. “Eden’s Half-light”
Birds, snakes, figs, and love-making feature prominently. Adam and Eve, sure, but also “hands modest / to sex and breast, flesh fallow, come-hither, fecund” imagery of marriage and intimacy. In many of Chadwick’s ekphrastic poems, “the earth rolls toward the sun like a lover turning / to spoon with the promise of verdure and apocalypse.” Between sheets and gentle breezes, readers looking for perennial reinventions of Edenic imagery will find much to enjoy in Litany with Wings.
III. “Secondhand Gods”
This section contains poems like “I once found religion at the dollar store,” and “Collect for a Family Friend Killed in a Sabbath Morning House Fire.” We get six more ekphrastic poems inspired by the artwork of J. Kirk Richards—a frequently appearing muse—and other artists like Casey Jex Smith and Andres Serrano. However, to say that these poems or the book as a whole is primarily a poetic commentary on the work of Richards and others would miss Chadwick’s deeper exploration of the relationship between word and image, the abstract and the concrete. In these poems, art and language are both one and in tension.
IV. “Cloudfire (as Koru and Elegy): Poems to a Former Self, Two Years Abroad”
This section poetizes Chadwick’s encounters with the Māori culture of the indigenous Polynesian people of mainland New Zealand—encounters had during his two-year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Chadwick provides a helpful glossary of Māori words and their pronunciation in notes at the end of the book. Of frequent invocation is “koru,” which refers to a spiral shape in the likeness of a new silver fern frond, unfurling. This coiled word/image, and others from Māori tradition, provide depth and variety to Chadwick’s already impressive repertoire.
V. “Goddess in Repose: Psalter for the Eternal Mother”
In this final section, Chadwick returns to the subject of his anthology Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry, which he co-edited with Martin Pulido and Dayna Patterson. Here’s a sample:
I think the sky may be a woman— See how
she spoons into cumulus— How she vessels
the death-rush of Eurus like uterus vessels
flesh, fleshes soul, flushes placenta crimson
and supple as solitude—How she slips into
azure, ritual, heraldry ancient as Eden’s backdrop,
heaven breaking at her breast, shearing
her vestments sheer as cirrostratus at dusk—
By contrasting these lines of beauty and love to the grotesque fish-gutting of the first section, one can see Chadwick’s versatility and dexterity. This collection is a tour de force of heaven and earth, the ancient and the now.
All told, I was delighted by Chadwick’s ability to surprise me with abstraction after metaphor; instead of rising from image to idea, Chadwick spirals between them, ripening his connections. Notice how “hymn wooing the feral dove until the wilderness / raptured with verbs” transitions from the intangible (hymns wooing) to the material (feral doves in the wilderness), and then back to the immaterial (rapturing verbs). Thanks to this formula, his poems are like “milk rich from meaning’s / simmer and slow burn” but with “the flame / set low so not to sear the soul.” He also has a particular excellence when it comes to ending his poems—always careful to “subdue the blue / with a careful strain of red.” Time after time, his dynamic interplay between word and image was like “flesh and nectar rising to greet / their dissolution on your tongue.” If poetry makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar, then Chadwick’s poems turn art to words and words to art, make the sacred profane and the profane sacred, spiraling between tantalizing extremes at every turn of the page and break of the line. Put best, these delicately crafted poems are like “a whiff of poppies” that “comes subtle as prophecy / teasing the edges of knowing.”
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Isaac James Richards is a graduate student and first-year writing instructor in the BYU English Department. He has won four poetry contest awards, with his most recent poems forthcoming in Amethyst Review, BYU Studies Quarterly, Constellations, Irreantum, Trampoline, Volney Road Review, and elsewhere. He is also a reader for Fourth Genre and a contributing editor at Wayfare. He can be reached via his personal website: https://www.isaacrichards.com/
Image description: Cover of Litany with Wings by Tyler Chadwick. Two large black wings against a deep red background of circles.
Psaltery & Lyre 