Kitchen Hymns by Pádraig Ó Tuama

Port Townsend, Washington. Copper Canyon Press. 2025. 104 pages.

Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Kitchen Hymns is a beautiful meditation on the power of faith even in the absence of belief (or is it the other way around?). Arranged in four parts, this book of wonderful poems varies from autobiographical pieces and epistolary prose poems to a series of conversations imagined between gods of ancient mythology and contemporary religion. It must be noted that this is not a tendentious work that requires the reader to share the author’s background or beliefs. Many of the poems stand on their own and speak to universal experiences. The variety of styles in Kitchen Hymns is also a pleasure (see WLT, May 2024, 24).

Ó Tuama gathers freely from his inspirations but remains fresh and open in their use; for example, “[Though I’ve Lost God],” a poem of five tercets and a quatrain, is like a ghost of a villanelle. The repetitions suggest rather than fulfill the traditional pattern. The prose poem “PB2G” (Praise Be to God) is a letter, the writer a conflicted fan who approves of the artist’s work but disapproves of the artist’s sexuality. Though prose poems forego other forms’ pleasures, her character is wonderfully rendered: she writes to the author, “Your book had me in tears half the time, the other half I didn’t understand, but that’s because I’m no good at poems, the nuns told us poems were full of notions, and whatever else I don’t have, it’s notions I have least of all.” At the opposite end of the spectrum, the poem “[It’ll hurt he said]” is explosively erotic, lines scattered over the page.

Several poems within Kitchen Hymns comprise a dialogue between Jesus and Persephone. Ó Tuama richly imagines them both “powerful and powerless,” as stated in the opening to “In a Garden by a Gate.” As both gods and children of gods, they are each called upon to serve and to obey, to give and to receive. In this imagining, Persephone welcomes a confused and broken Jesus to hell. They converse, become lovers, compare their roles, burdens, and resurrections. The skillful recasting of these figures, resonating with the biographical poems, reminds one of American poet Louise Glück’s renditions of Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus in Meadowlands. In these poems, Ó Tuama puts these figures into a fresh light, depicting them as persons rather than icons, which returns to them some of their majesty: for me, the most compelling part of the Gospels has always been the Agony in the Garden, not miracles or parables.

Interspersed in the later poems are examples that are immediately, materially striking. The poems are composed of white text on a black field, and all the lines seem to have fallen to the bottom of the page. Traditional line breaks are replaced with slashes or lacunae. These poems lack titles within the manuscript, but they are listed separately in the table of contents (Ordo Missæ, as Ó Tuama styles it). Each poem is titled with its first line or phrase coupled with a preface (e.g., “[hellpsalm: not everything that’s lost is lost]”). “Hellpsalm” accurately captures both their physical style and their content. Each may be read as an independent work, but they also function well as responses to the poems around them, especially where they occur among the underworld dialogues between Jesus and Persephone.

If a book of poems presents a puzzle, then a key to Kitchen Hymns lies in poems such as “Eat This Bread.” Following “The Long-Tailed Tit,” “Eat This Bread” describes a chick signaling for food from its parent. Although the language is lyrical throughout, the majority of the poem is flatly accurate of the way most birds’ offspring seem to beg incessantly for food. Only a few lines in the body of the poem indulge in analogy: the chick is a “ball of air and / emptiness. . . . // [it is] are unceasing. A baby. A bomb. / . . . all hunger, no flight or song.” The poem ends with the speaker’s harsh and unreserved contempt for the chick’s necessary, instinctual behavior if it is to survive. Readers will come to see themselves as no different to the birds.

The interconnectedness of life is a foundation beneath Kitchen Hymns’s more rational, tenuous, negotiated sense of faith. In the section “Do You Believe in God?” each poem begins with the section’s title as the first line, and the title is provided by the next line. In “[I turn to you],” Ó Tuama states plainly, “I turn to you, / not because I trust you, / or believe in you, but because I need a direction for my need.” In “[Before it became my blood],” Ó Tuama describes bread as a cycle, from growth through consumption through corruption and back to the basic stuff of life. Though the poem’s images are graphic and visceral, utterly lacking in religious terms, a connection to sacrament is unavoidably implied. Of the base materials of soda bread, Ó Tuama writes, “It was whatever makes up life— / the stuff of rot, earth, us.” The fact that these transmutations are mundane fails to rob them of their significance; on the contrary, the poem reveals a permanent, faithful connection between ourselves and the earth.

Beyond whatever analogies are plainly made, poems invite us to compare, to replace “you” with “I” or “we.” It can be disturbing to realize we all have instinctual behaviors grounded in never-ending need, but we are all like the baby birds, shamelessly needy. We are also partially divine, with the capacity—and expectation—to give and forgive. Kitchen Hymns examines how to live with these hungers, how to remain a loving being in a world both devoured and devouring.

Greg Brown
Mercyhurst University