Sacrilegion
L. Lamar Wilson
Carolina Wren Press
ISBN: 978-0-932112-93-4

Reviewer: George Wallace


          “Will we ever know how beautiful we are?”  The question is more than rhetorical; it is central to the poetic inquiry of L. Lamar Wilson, as explored in his strikingly honest collection Sacrilegion.

          The line comes from “Black & Comely,” a gemlike poem situated midway in the collection, just before the book’s “centerfold poem” “Legion: Human Immunodeficiency Virus.” Whether intentional or not, the placement is strategically satisfying; the question operates as a thematic fulcrum for the entire collection, as Sacrilegion entices its reader to confront the intense human conditions to which Wilson has been borne witness—racism, homophobia, sensual corruption, HIV, physical disability. In addition, however, the collection also offers this bold proposition: there is a seductive beauty underlying these same conditions.

          Wilson draws from a broad palette—from Rilke to Aretha, Porgy and Bess to the New York Times, Lot’s daughters to Chief Osceola’s wife—as he gives voice to his quest. Phlebotomists stand shoulder to shoulder with women in green polka dot muumuus. Marvin Gaye collides with Moses, parting the Red Sea with his staff.

          By turns, the poems offer sensuality, anger, seductiveness, confused tenderness, outrage, and defiant pride. Sometimes they comprise a precise sequencing or blend of these, crafted by a poet whose expressive range is broad and whose ability to identify shifts in emotional points of view is pronounced.

          Consider “Drive-by,” a poem which begins with a sardonic statement: “the latest irony of my existence/ since my brachial plexus snapped….” But as Wilson relates his archetypal racial profiling story, the narrator in the poem, threatened to his “sable soul,” is transformed into a cauldron: “I want to die, no,/ kill a little each time you hover,/ searching for the next one of us to put away.”

          This malleability of emotional point of view within a poem is refreshingly non-didactic and rings as congruent with the multidimensionality of personalities and situations in the real world. The reader is convinced that this poem is no mere polemic, no straw dog bashing, but a riveting act of social and personal witness.

          Wilson possesses a marked ability to imbue wry understatement to the treatment of hot-button topics. “Legion: HIV,” the book’s “centerfold poem,” is a deft reminder that the act of sleeping with another person is in itself perilous, compounded as the experience is by the serological presence of that person’s previous partners as well as those partners’ partners, etc. 

          The epigrammatic heart of this concrete poem is stark, direct and linguistically seductive:

When you are alone & cannot be stilled,
I will never leave: my hands, your hands:
your blood’s taint coursing; your high-
yellow heart’s flesh hunger for bodies bruised
blue; who can hide what yours cannot

          A poem about a deadly sexually transmitted disease, presented as a centerfold! If that isn’t irony enough, Wilson’s adroit use of Devil & Daniel Webster rhetoric—unfolding like a child’s riddle even as it turns playful inevitability into a message that leaves you in a cold sweat—cats its reader full-body into the absurdist void: “When I’m with you, I’m only with you./ When I’m with her/ I’m only with her/ & you. When you’re with him, I’m only with you & him & her & him & him & her &….”

          Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. The author’s deadpan tone is as chilling as it is matter of fact.

          As is the case with any memorable poetry collection, subject and craft go hand in hand in Sacrilegion. Religion is a key motif. There is an enticing ambivalence regarding the place of Christianity in Wilson’s cultural inheritance, with a decided suggestion that if the truth be known; i.e., the proposition that King Solomon declared himself to be “Black and Comely,” the author too possesses a demonstrated connectedness to the wisdom and beauty of biblical antiquity.

          There is plenty of relational beauty and pain to share. A lover gazes at his sleeping mate in “Ratiocination,” acutely aware of the deadly gravity of passion:

…This must be how mercury feels

deep inside the heart of this red & brown clay
beneath us: deadly when we taste its ruddy gray, slick-
hot as that planet closest to the sun, hidden

from Earthly view by that star that burns
all flesh it touches & eludes us all.

          And the recurrence of family relationships as a theme serves as both a stabilizer to the variegated contents and a launching point for Wilson’s resolute search for the key to rediscovering our intrinsic beauty. “My nephew waltzes besides his father,/ the man who was the boy who made Faggot!/ a reason not to flinch,” he relates in “Dreamboys,” among the more poignant moments in the book. Wilson then considers the father with an analytically cold but compassionate eye:

                                  …Teeth clenched,

he smiles at his dreamboy & nods in disbelief.
Harrumphs. Lashes flittering, he offers me
the only penance he can: a sheepish grin.

          Here again, the poet displays his talent for shifting point of view, a tactic which consistently keeps the reader engaged and moving forward. He concludes:

My nephew sees beyond the veil shrouding
his father’s eyes. Realizes this isn’t

how brown boys win favor. Searches
my eyes for answers. Mirrors
a sadness no song can shake.

          In poem after memorable poem, Sacrilegion enunciates the terrible sadness of existence, gaining its measure and delivering to readers with a power that is borne of the author’s conviction that if he can “tell it” just right, he may be able to shake it.

          Can a man make songs to shake the sadness no song can shake? Is this how we come to know how beautiful we are?

          “I’ll die thrashing/ telling any body all my secrets,” writes Wilson in the seminal poem “I Can’t Help It.”

          Just so. In Sacrilegion, L. Lamar Wilson makes sure that these secrets—“horrors and beauties hidden in the shadows,” as Evie Shockley so aptly puts it—are hidden in plain view.

          Not just revealed but exposed in a transformative light.