In 1977 Annie Dillard wrote a book on art entitled Holy the Firm.
In it she wrote that artists of all kinds are to be ‘in flawed imitation of Christ on the cross stretched both ways unbroken and thorned. So must the work be also, […] spanning the gap from here to eternity, home’.
The opening track on Wilder Adkins’s latest album, Hope & Sorrow, speaks of being left behind, of head-in-the-clouds escapism, and of meeting a fellow ‘dreamer’. The song ends with a beckoning to ‘let’s get lost’, repeated as an enchanting refrain as we enter into an album conscious of the themes embodied in its title – the lyrics are littered with glimmers of hope and shadows of sorrow, often exchanging dreams for glimpses of nightmares.
Bright, poignant poetry
Penned by the Birmingham, Alabama musician and recorded in Atlanta, Georgia, the songs of this album turn the quickly forgotten domestic moments of our day-to-day lives into bright and poignant poetry.
Throughout, there’s a sense of looking forward to a time to come, where light will flood the dark and hope will outweigh sorrow. On ‘Gentle Woman’, Adkins imagines a perfected, future home: ‘when I get to my home, let that screen door swing wide / open hearts, peaceful tongues, open arms, open eyes.’ The sense of searching for what we’re made for tinges this album with a chord of discontent, dealt with at the beginning by a naïve resolve to ignore difficulty by dreaming, but through the course of the album maturing to leave us with the closing track ‘Wrestle’, a personal take on the biblical story of Jacob wrestling with God until dawn breaks.
As well as visions of home, the songs are full of the people of Adkins’s life. ‘Bright & Beautiful’ conjures up nostalgia, not only in the way the title harks back to the childhood Sunday School hymn, but also in wishfully recalling the comforting security of the childhood home, the familiarity of sound and touch found in the people who have known us our whole lives: ‘Mother’s voice, Father’s arms, wrapped around me tight / meek and mild, woman’s smile, it fills me with delight.’
Having begun married life since his last release, in ‘Cherry Blossoms’ Adkins sings to his new bride: ‘let my roots grow deep beneath the southern stars, keep me by your side, I will blossom where you are.’ The bliss of new marriage contrasts with anguish felt for his brother, ‘a lonesome man on whom the shadows did descend’. Listening, we get the sense that it is exactly because of these relationships of his life, in all their varying depths, histories and present influence, that both hope and sorrow are felt vividly.
Acknowledging God
The centrepoint of the album and the titular track, ‘Hope & Sorrow’ pulls the first half of the album into focus by acknowledging God as being above all those other relationships and acknowledging him as the reference point for them: ‘the love of God is deep and wide / the heart of God – beauty defined / the love of man’s a fickle tide / why do you love us so?’
Holy Spirit
In the next song, ‘Mecca’, the divine meets the domestic, as Adkins sings of encountering the Holy Spirit not as the result of a pilgrimage to some man-made holy city, but in the unassuming simplicity of his mother’s garden. He goes on to sing of how God found him ‘amidst the poison and the pain / and the furrow on your brow / speaks of love I can’t explain’. We can hear more than a whisper of the story of the prodigal son in this song and in others on the album.
In a stunning pairing, ‘Our Love is a Garden’ and ‘Wild Things’ our relationship with creation is used as a metaphor for different seasons of life, embarking on stewarding a garden with his new bride in the first, and being overwhelmed and set adrift by hostile seas in the second.
The closing track, ‘Wrestle’, encompasses all that has gone before in its resolve to see God in all the shifting seasons of life and to cling to him trusting that he sees the whole picture where we see only fragments: ‘here I’ll stay until the dark has lifted / ’til I know your name as you know mine.’ This is a record of songs stretching both ways, reaching toward hope and not flinching from sorrow. In doing so, like all art which lifts our eyes and points to something beyond ourselves, it helps to span the gap between here, and eternity, our home.
