Joshua Hren explores beginnings, endings, and the hard things of life and culture
Sometimes you don’t need a flood of news or events or ideas to remind you that bad things exist in this world. Sometimes just a few drops will do.
The chapbook Last Things, First Things, and Other Lost Causes by Joshua Hren is short, including only 26 poems. And I have to say that when I started reading the collection, I didn’t know what I was getting into. I should have paid closer attention to the title. But I had read his short story collection, In the Wine Press — dark stories, to be sure, but well written and each offering some hope.
The poems in the chapbook smacked me upside the head. The words that come to mind include disquieting, disturbing, and troubling. The poems are about the state of the culture, the state of the world, and the state of the individual. It’s a small collection about the need for humanity’s redemption.
The titles and lines connect to many familiar works and writers. The first poem is “The Lesser Angels of Our Nature,” a backward reference to “the better angels of our nature” from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address. “In Secular Saeculorum” is a riff on the New Testament phrase “in saecula saeculorum,” an expression of eternity. “Gehenna” is about the child sacrifices to the god Molech. “Vegetables” concerns the end of life of someone no longer able to take physical care of themselves. “The Banality of Evil” is inspired by the writer Hannah Arendt, who made the phrase famous when she tried to describe the Nazi Holocaust.
As soon as I began reading this poem, my thoughts went immediately to the Civil War and Allen Tate’s poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead.”
Bloodshed
There is a blood no man can shed,
It animates the union dead
And bids them fall upon their swords
Beside the civil enemies,
Who’ve beat them to their knees, at peace
With lost first causes finally spied
Along the wine-dark water’s shore
Where sanguine bodies wash up, rise
Against old judgments now dispensed.
Again I say, again, let’s spend
Our shortened days caked with that sand
Like ashes scattered cross this land.
But Hren is not necessarily writing about the Civil War here, even if a few poems later he includes a direct reference to Allen Tate in “Aeneas at Washington State,” the longest poem in the chapbook (and the Civil War has often been called “American Iliad”). Instead, “Bloodshed” seems more contemporary, almost a cultural commentary.
Joshua Hren
Hren is the founder and editor of Wiseblood Books and the co-founder of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. He’s published two short story collections, This Our Exile and In the Wine Press; the novel Infinite Regress and the forthcoming novel Blue Walls Falling Down; Middle Earth and the Return of the Common Good: J.R.R. Tolkien and Political Philosophy; Contemplative Realism; and How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic. More Than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature is set to be published in 2026. He lives with his family in Wisconsin.
Last Things, First Things, and Other Lost Causes isn’t an easy collection to read. But as short as it is, it is an important one. As the title indicates, it’s about beginnings, endings, and loss. And it’s an appropriate collection for the times we live in.
Photo by Bui Linh Ngan, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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Katie Brewster says
Glynn,
This sounds like a much needed book for our time. Many thanks for reviewing and sharing it. Going at the top of my “must read” list. Gratefully,
Katie
Glynn says
Katie, thanks for the note. Hren has also been doing some interesting things as publisher of Wiseblood Books.