Jeremiah Webster

A beautiful collection. Using language that is both precise and poignant, these poems are a meditation on life in the modern world: technology and its subtle erosions, our ability (or perhaps our inability) to encounter the sacred in a culture of disenchantment, and how we seek hope despite great suffering. The meditative quality of this collection—its underlying music—is almost reminiscent of a liturgical chorus, or a prayer. In "Scop Wanted," Webster writes, "Suppose the genius / of language / is reverberation," and I think that's the genius of this collection as a whole: even the poems that wrestle with the brutality of the world carry reverberations of something greater than that brutality. There are echoes of grace and wonder here.

For instance, there is the refrain of "Credo": "I build my home / as the world falls apart... I study my books / as the world falls apart... I sing second life / as the world falls apart." And in the final poem, "Ilium," after revealing a deep weariness of the world ("I am tired of the modern dispensation: / syphilis and vodka, / self-esteem and caffeine, / of amphetamines that rattle my neighbor's soul"), we are left with this reverberation of magnificent hope:

"And though each generation
carries the promise of apocalypse

let us sing hymns
saints cannot teach,

stoke fire from fallen branches
a little while longer."… (mere)

These poems meditate on questions that I think most of us have asked ourselves in the last seven years (if not even longer). How do we live in a world that both delights and grieves us daily? How does hope persist through the many fractures and brutalities—mass shootings, political tribalism, a deadly pandemic, the myriad and mundane ways we dehumanize each other—and what does it look like to “Get on with it. / Even if you choose / to stand”?

The cluster of poems that most resonated with me—“Trump Tongue™,” “Evangelical,” “Gospel,” and the titular “Notes for a Postlude”—grapple with the disorienting and painful experience of being an American Christian and seeing so many fellow Christians (and loved ones) embrace Christian Nationalism. This is the very experience that significantly damaged my relationship to the church for years, and it was gratifying to see the honesty and vulnerability with which Webster meditates on it. But I also love these poems because they don’t simply wag a finger in a posture of moral superiority (which would be very easy and tempting to do). Instead, they interrogate the very bedrock on which Christian Nationalism builds: an utterly disenchanted view of Christ, one poisoned by a beggared collective imagination. A collective imagination that dethrones God’s grace and imposes in its place a man-made idol, a “pale American Christ” for whom “power is the currency / of heaven’s beatitude” and who insists that we “revise the angel’s herald / from ‘all people’ to ‘our people’.” The language in these poems cuts with scalpel precision, revealing the terminal tumor, and asks us to interrogate ourselves—our own predilections for the idol—as it does so. I felt these lines from "Trump Tongue™" in my very bones: "As flames consume the house / friends and relatives envy-post / how the light looks like / success."

My mind also keeps circling around this passage from “Gospel,” I think because it exemplifies the heart of this disenchantment:

“Is the world content with a world
where the bones of nymphs, gnomes
preserved in enviable revelry, are never found,
where leviathan has no dominion,
where flowers are only caught,
crushed in the machinery,
where Leda receives no recompense,
where Frodo is left for dead?”

When our collective imagination becomes so limited—when wonder is replaced by cynicism, grace by conceited displays of power—how can we possibly end up anywhere other than here? And how do we authentically encounter God in the midst of this? These poems offer no easy answers, but I’m grateful for their meditation on these questions.… (mere)

Now this book has real meat to it. I think I’ll be chewing over it for some time. The prose is lyrical—it’s very apparent that Webster is a poet—and full of arresting scenes and images and characters. (I think the character of The Failed Artist, gently cradling the bleeding fawn, will live in my imagination for a long time to come.)

The novel casts a vision of hell as humanity left to its own devices. Hell is the natural conclusion—the inevitable end point—of human will to power. This is vividly portrayed throughout Joe’s journey: as he encounters hell’s diabolically egalitarian version of “justice” (the abacus scene will haunt me), hell’s mockery of truth, and hell’s utter incapacity to accommodate beauty. As aptly stated in the novel, “We either reside in the source of all life or find ourselves diminished in hells of our own making.” Joe, still decidedly committed to the hell of his own making, must tour hell’s vision of the good, the true, and the beautiful, and the resulting journey is both haunting and, ultimately, hopeful.

It's the subtle undercurrent of hope—how even in the midst of hell, Heaven’s perfume lingers—that makes this novel stunning. Even while we slog through the muck of hell with Joe Muggeridge, the novel subtly but continually points our attention back to what is divine: grace, mercy, unselfish love. In the very act of portraying a world impoverished of same, the novel throws them—their absolute necessity to us—into greater relief. “Hell is perfectly rational,” says the demon character Morte Magari, “It’s Heaven that strains credulity.” The novel’s denouement and the end of Joe’s journey satisfyingly echoes the truth of that.

Even on the road to hell, redemptive love can still be encountered.… (mere)

Follow the Devil / Follow the Light is the story of a walk through hell. Joe Muggeridge comes home to his Seattle apartment, only to find a demon waiting for him. The demon, Morte Magari, pressures/lures Joe into hell to see his deceased sister Nora. What follows is a journey where Joe encounters the sins and illusions of our modern society, both played out in hell and reflected in his own life. What he is slow to notice, however, is how the grace and power of God also pervades the adventure.

I enjoyed the book. It reminded me of some of C.S. Lewis' stuff and, of course, Dante's Inferno. While Follow the Devil / Follow the Light isn't quite as good as those classics, I did appreciated a vision of hell that illustrated our current era and culture. I saw myself in more than one of Joe Muggeridge's failings, but also had that constant reminder of heavenly love and forgiveness.
--J.… (mere)