Fires of Heaven
Fires of Heaven by James B. Nicola, Shanti Arts LLC, $14.95
On Saturdays I would confess,/ and Sundays, never miss a mass./ Now my mortal sins seem less./ The venial, I let pass.
There is often an assumption that people of faith do not struggle with their beliefs, that they have wholeheartedly bought into an ideology to cast away their doubt and blindly assuage their pain. As someone who came upon my own spiritual beliefs rather late in life, I find the opposite to be true. I struggle far more as a believer than I did as an agnostic. In his latest book, Fires of Heaven, James B. Nicola investigates the myriad struggles of the religious life.
The cover of the book is a painting by William Blake, the poet and artist who has deeply touched me with his own spiritual work. Perhaps this is why I often thought of Blake while reading Fires of Heaven but there are many Blakean rhymes here that seem simple at first glance but are filled with layers of meaning, “will coal then be denied/ and warmth withheld for all you’ve prayed/ it’s rations based on—sin?/ Has your allegiance been mislaid?” The majority of the poems in this book are formal and Nicola is an able craftsman of sonnets and villanelles; he can also create fine metered lines, like these of iambic pentameter, “when Scripture’s poetry, a truth is wrung,/ because the meaning’s not the melody’s/ harangue, twisted, dripped dry. It’s the unsung/ the unsaid, teeming with ambiguities.” This is a pretty collection.
Like Blake, Nicola abhors religious hypocrisy. Whether he’s describing “the altar boys who can’t appear,/ the brothers’ bruises you won’t see,/ the screams you’ll never hear” or a preacher who “can’t hold his booze,” he honestly details acts and attitudes that so many churches have spent centuries covering up. Sometimes Nicola goes even further to question religious orthodoxy and authority itself, “those ancient histories/ got written down at last. Then edited,/ editorialized, translated,/ redacted, deleted, parts selected.”
Fires of Heaven is far from an angry polemic against the church, however. This collection is filled with moving poems about the many stages of a religious life. Nicola charts these stages from childhood, “it wasn’t until age six/ I learned about the garden and the apple” to the struggles of an adult, “these stars leave me unsatisfied:/ I keep on scanning for a spark/ of such a brighter quality/ to serve as beacon, flare, and guide.” The poet wrestles with enormous theological questions throughout the book. He does so with a unique perspective that feels fresh on the page, like these lines on the nature of reality, “since fish, with neither foot nor hand/ nor wing, can only swim,/ must the sea worm that sees from below call/ them birds” and these lines describing his faith, “the kind of faith that I’m/ talking about/ is not the kind that you/ can talk about.”
After reading Fires of Heaven, I have the impression that Nicola’s own faith is inspired by his love of art of all kinds, especially religious architecture. Indeed, it is the relationship between art and faith that has given the world so many of its greatest works, and Nicola draws upon that well in this book. For Nicola, cathedrals are “humble and grand. The feeling: when they’re shut,/ they’re open, when the builders get them right./ The cosmic rainbow filtered from without/ to half man-made, half beatific light.” It is these moments of humility, awe, and vulnerability that connect writer and reader as we explore the mysteries of the divine together.
Benjamin Schmitt
An author of three books, most recently Soundtrack to a Fleeting Masculinity, Benjamin’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Sojourners, Antioch Review, The Good Men Project, Hobart, Columbia Review,and elsewhere. A co-founder of Pacifica Writers’ Workshop, he has also written articles for The Seattle Times and At The Inkwell. He lives in Seattle with his wife and children.