The Vanishing Song (Jay Hulme) - A Review

 THE VANISHING SONG. By Jay Hulme. Norwich, UK: Canterbury Press, 2023. Xiv + 82 pages.

The spiritual life often takes on poetic form. After all, many religious texts are written in poetic form. Our hymns and songs of faith, of course, take on poetic form. They remind us of how important creativity is to religious life, at least religious life that is living and breathing. These creative elements of religious life mirror God’s creative acts. We sometimes try to make God safe by assuming that God’s creative days are in the past, but that is wrong-headed. That God continues to create, suggests that we too are invited to join with/partner with God in acts of creation.  As I make this claim, I must confess that I'm more comfortable with prose than poetry. This is true even though I love the Psalms and the hymns of the church. When confronted with poetry, as a book reviewer, I find that prose is easier to describe and if necessary, critique. Poetry like all things creative, we tend to respond differently. Some people are simply more attuned to poetry than others. That said, since a publisher sent me this collection of poems by Jay Hulme, titled The Vanishing Song, I shall offer my thoughts so that you might check out the book for yourselves.

The Vanishing Song is a collection of poems written by Jay Hulme, who is a transgender poet, performer, and speaker. Prior to writing this book, he authored several other collections of poetry, including Backwater Sermons, (Canterbury Press, 2021). In this collection, at least, Hulme draws on the lives of saints, among other inspirations to produce poetry intended to take us into the wilderness of faith.

Hulme writes in the introduction to this collection, about how he conceives of faith and how that emerges in his poetry. He writes:

I think faith could be like a forest, vast and interconnected, full of wonder, and of danger - because without danger there cannot be all this beauty. But we have become so scared of the things we cannot control, of the wolves and the snakes and the strange scuttling things in the undergrowth, that we spend our lives pruning our own bonsai trees of prayer. Beautiful, but controllable, truncated and contained (p. xiii).

In this collection, Hulme seeks to bring out dimensions of faith that are beyond our control, pointing us to people and concepts that call forth a sense of spiritual adventure. As he writes of the saints he sought out in writing these poems, "They did not seek to contain or control the wildness but lived it out in its entirety" (p. xiii). That is what we find in this collection.

                By my count, there are sixty-four poems in this collection. Some are shorter and some are longer than others, but each one expresses that sense of spiritual wildness that Hulme speaks of in the introduction. Besides the poems, Hulme has provided us with a set of biographies of the saints whose lives he draws upon, including St. Guinefort, a dog who was killed by its enraged master who thought it might have killed his infant child, only to find that the dog, named Guinefort, had killed a snake that tried to attack the baby. In his grief, the dog’s master created a shrine for Guinefort, which became the focus of a local cult, that continues to this day, centuries later. Several poems focus on the life and legacy of St. Robert of Knaresborough (1160-1218), who lived as a hermit in a cave outside the English town of Knaresborough. Though never consecrated as a saint, he is venerated as one and was known for his wisdom. Other poems draw from more well known figures including Julian of Norwich, Joan of Arc, and Hildegard of Bingen. 

                To give a sense of Hulme's poetry, I will first offer his poem: "The Madness of St Robert of Knaresborough."

Robert went mad in the way of saints;

beautiful and holy and wild as anything.

He grew into the cave, hands scratching

at the earth; for weeks he watched the river.

When knights and kings came with riches

he told them things they never wanted to hear.

Centuries later he still speaks to strangers,

pilgrims to a past they cannot comprehend.

If they list, Robert offers them madness

in whichever form they choose. One man chose

murder. Buried the body in the cave. A sacrifice,

perhaps. An atrocity instead of a prayer.

More choose to go made like him. A consecrated

insanity. A heart crawling among the trees,

fingers splayed across the stone, grafting

themselves into the rock. They call out to

God in rushing words --- they sound like the

echoing water, as it carves away at the cliff. (p. 3).

Here is another, shorter, poem, titled “A Congregation of None.”

When the churches are alone

They say their own prayers

To God. If you’re patient

You might hear them speak,

In the spider-rustle and mould-song,

Or the cracking of wood as it

swells and contracts with the sun” (p. 38)

                With these two examples, I invite you to consider this book, including its invitation to enter the wilderness of faith. The message here is not to be afraid of things we cannot control. It takes faith, like that of the saints, whose lives Jay Hulme embraces in The Vanishing Song.