Kitchen hymns are the songs sung at home, not in the chapel; in vernacular speech, not Latin. The poems in Padraig O Tuama's new collection are a form of hymnody that arise neither from belief nor devotion. A man asks himself if he believes in God and turns to language rather than the maker of language; an agnostic Jesus meets a curious Persephone at hell's exit; a mass for the end of the world is offered by someone more interested in birds than in salvation. In registers of rage, eros and melody, towards nature, elegy and praise, Kitchen Hymns is a study in form and lyric address: the sights and sounds of a poem; the lungs of the world; skin touching skin; experience. Here are poems of originality and feeling - a provocation to thought, and an invocation of the forces that direct the strange, branching paths of our lives.
