“A God we can understand is a God less than ourselves.” I usually share this quote from Flannery O’Connor with my students to introduce the mystery we will try to discuss as we read from people like Dante and St. Augustine. I think it’s also a way to introduce Pádraig Ó Tuama’s latest collection of poetry, “Kitchen Hymns” (Copper Canyon Press, 2025, $17). Having read the poems in this book, I think Ó Tuama would agree with O’Connor.
Ó Tuama was raised in a Catholic family in County Cork, Ireland. This heritage has formed him as a person and as a poet. His poetry has been featured in Harvard Review, RTÉ’s Poem of the Week, Poetry Ireland, New England Review, The Kenyon Review and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, among many others. He has written several other books of poetry and prose and is the staff poet for the On Being podcast with Krista Tippett where he hosts “PoetryUnbound.” From 2014 to 2019, he was also the leader of the Corrymeela Community, Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation organization. According to the bio on his website, Ó Tuama’s writing across genres focuses on “language, power, conflict and religion.” He is also openly gay and this features in his work, including in “Kitchen Hymns.”
In the collection, the first drafts of which were part of the creative component of a Ph.D. at the University of Glasgow, Ó Tuama includes several epigraphs before different sections. The first one is from Paul Valéry: “God made everything from nothing. But the nothing persists.” The “nothing” that persists — God’s seeming absence — is like an ocean wave that keeps crashing on the shore throughout the book. In a way, it is also the lynchpin that holds the poems together.
The table of contents is telling, too. It is retitled, “Ordo Missæ,” referring to the lectionary for the Ordinary Form of the Mass. The collection, then, is a Mass in a sense. It begins with a section called “Kitchen Hymns” and then moves to a section called “Do You Believe in God?” which contains several response-poems. These professions, confessions and confusions of faith are followed by more “Kitchen Hymns” and then by a section with a descent into hell, which is the longest section and includes “hellpsalms” that are printed on black paper with white text. The final section has more “Kitchen Hymns” and ends with “Rite of Baptism,” “The Second Coming,” and an untitled poem.
The ‘nothing’ that persists — God’s seeming absence — is like an ocean wave that keeps crashing on the shore throughout the book. In a way, it is also the lynchpin that holds the poems together.
In the very first poem, the speaker asks most of nature — the grasses, the sun, the tree, the field mouse — if they believe and what matters, and “It said nothing.” This opening poem echoes Genesis, but perhaps in reverse. Instead of God creating out of the void, the poem’s speaker looks at God’s creation and finds a void. This “nothing” carries multiple meanings, though, which Ó Tuama subtly weaves like threads coming together to design a pattern in one color. The poem that follows the first, for example, takes place at Ash Wednesday Mass and a character (Mother Brendan, who shows up in several poems) says to the poem’s speaker: “Nothing made you come here. / Nothing stops you going.” The wisdom and humor — and truth — of these lines demonstrate the complex and gentle wrestling with faith that Ó Tuama engages in his poems.
Many of the poems are dialogues that (what seems to be) the same speaker has with others. In one of the response-poems to “Do You Believe in God?” a female character asks if the speaker lifts up his heart when he mutters “the responses underneath [his] breath.” He replies that he does, “but I don’t know to who.” The woman’s response again shows Ó Tuama’s wisdom and humor: “Whom, she said. Let’s get started on the soup.” Big questions about God and faith occur like this, alongside kitchen conversations with friends and family.
The poems here also offer the background and texture with which Ó Tuama grew up as a child in Ireland where, as one poem says, the Mass was another of the “plain facts” of life like “toast, or tea, or beatings.” Although a number of poems allude to pain like this and admit doubt or engage existential questions — there are poems named after works by Heidegger and Lacan — I wouldn’t call them confessional poems. Much of the detail surrounding painful events is kept private, including a few that allude to the author’s sexual orientation. One of the other response-poems skims the surface of the speaker’s loss of faith, which seems to have coincided with this, and claims, “I found nothing and nothing / never felt so good” but then explains, “I return sometimes […] / I like the smells, the psalms, the bells for prayer.”
The following response-poem addresses God directly and begins, “I turn to you, / not because I trust you, / or believe in you, / but because I need a direction for my need.” Every line ends with the word “you” and then the next line seems to offer a way to understand this incomprehensible God: “nothing; you—my favorite emptiness,” “my ache made manifest in address” and “shape of my desire.” Towards the end of this section, another response-poem begins, “Though I’ve lost God, God is / the only language that I speak.” The language and honesty in this poem are beautiful. It is simple, nearly void of adjectives, with short lines that are like the quiet pulsing of a heart sunk in grief.
At times, this poem and some of the others remind me of Christian Wiman’s poetry in the way they move with a faith in God that is built on questions and strain against the inadequacy of language to capture any of it. God is “a word / to bear all I could not bear. / God bore it well. No / containing now. An empty shell.”
The longest section is prefaced by a quote from Eavan Boland, which says, “The only story I have ever loved is / The story of a daughter lost in hell” and it introduces the most interesting section of the collection. In it, readers follow Jesus on his descent into hell, where he meets Persephone. There are other epigraphs from “The Iliad” and the Apostles’ Creed here. The poems are dialogues between Christ and Persephone, both waiting out their time in the inferno, sent there by their fathers. They try to understand one another and offer each other comfort. Interspersed are “hellpsalsms” which cry out in agony and despair.
One of these “hellpsalms” asserts, “This is why I do not turn to you. I’m terrified you’ll answer. […] I postpone your mercy because I do not want your mercy. I remove your hand from mine.” Another one simply says, “i left you / i needed to / i think this / was your plan too.” The poems seem to rise up from another corner of hell where the speaker finds himself, sounding a bit like Augustine confessing his past sins but delaying God’s grace. In all of it, though, God is not absent, even if unseen.
In the final section of “Kitchen Hymns,” another thread is added to the “nothing” the collection has been probing. The poem “The Second Coming” starts: “there will be no fanfare / no trumpet no end of days” and concludes: “just nothing darlings / nothing.” The very last poem returns to creation, as it did in the beginning. A litany of animals similar to the one seen in the first poem is offered as blessing and the speaker goes “in the name of all of them” and “their ignorance of why, / or how, or who.” The epigraph for this section came from Jalal al-Din Rumi and reads, “If anyone asks: ‘How did Jesus raise the dead?’ kiss me on the lips, say: like this!” After the “hellpsalms” and the descent into hell, it seems Ó Tuama offers this last section of hymns to suggest that the way out of despair that feels like death is love; it is the kiss of Christ.
The Mass is a prayer and Ó Tuama’s “Mass” in his “Kitchen Hymns” is also a prayer, for it is a sincere lifting of the heart to God, a colloquy. “Kitchen Hymns” is contemplative, imaginative and en-chant-ing — for it’s like chanted songs at Mass in its psalm-like language. Yet it also confirms that a God we fully understand is not actually God, as O’Connor said, for there are no pat answers here. There are, however, examples of loss, need, grief, emptiness, that reach for God. And, as prayer is meant to do, offering these changes the person.