Some Permanent Things

For this second edition, Wilson has completely revised the poems to attain a more classical perfection and restored their original published ordering as four sequences, beginning with "The Violent and the Fallen," "Four Verse Letters," and "La Rochefoucauld's Ghost," and culminating in the new poems collected as "The Christmas Preface." ADVANCE PRAISE FOR SOME PERMANENT THINGS“This is James Matthew Wilson’s first full-length book of poems, and a singularly powerful announcement it is . . . philosophy, metaphysics, theology, the American political scene viewed through the complex lenses of the classics, with allusions ranging from the ancients to the moderns . . . all woven into a complex music which has anchored itself in the long tradition of meter and rhyme. . . He is a word painter . . . with the eye of someone for whom the essential being of things—the quiddity, the inscape—leads again and again into a deeper mystery. Here is a serious poet, not yet forty, who is, I can only hope, at the beginning of a long and illustrious journey in the best and most profound tradition of Dante, Hopkins, David Jones, Auden, Eliot, and Franz Wright.”—Paul Mariani“In James Matthew Wilson’s newest collection of poems he continues to show his command of major themes of many ranges of contemporary experience in a style that is unusually complex, but always exact, profound and deeply insightful. In this new book, his best poems, those concerning matters of the soul, place him among the finest poets writing today.” —Helen Pinkerton Trimpi “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