The Violent and the Fallen by James Matthew Wilson

The Violent and the Fallen is a young man’s book—but one with a difference. These are powerful poems by an author who has completely mastered the tradition. Wilson’s poems display a rare degree of skill and ambition, but he is never content with mere virtuosity, always reaching for spiritual and emotional intensity.

–Dana Gioia

James Matthew Wilson‘s poems are those of a searching, philosophical, and subtle mind treating themes of the inner and outer life of our contemporary world. Understanding our human nature as inevitably “violent and abyssal,” as St. Augustine wrote of infants at their mothers’ breasts, he affirms that we must negotiate successfully between “discipline and desire” to build a satisfactory life.

–Helen Pinkerton Trimpi

By turns wry, tender, and deeply reverent, Wilson’s poems are engaged with the contemporary world. He addresses its serious existential aspects as well as ephemeral features, which he approaches with sympathetic understanding, even as he questions them. Whether rigorously traditional—blank verse, strictly rhymed couplets and quatrains, Shakespearean sonnets, a sestina—or slightly loosened, his lines suit his purpose of making verbal art depict the human condition.

–Catharine Savage Brosman

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]