When the poet Joseph Kidney visits a cathedral or gallery or museum, I imagine he stands exceptionally close to the art. The striking cover of his debut collection Devotional Forensics certainly suggests intense scrutiny. Of the twelve figures on a medieval rood screen in St. Michael and All Angels Church, Kidney’s book cover homes in on one of two unrestored faces vandalized by fundamentalist sixteenth-century congregants who adhered to the Reformation’s call to challenge the appropriateness of sacred imagery. The immediacy of Kidney’s art-appreciative eye is reflected in this cropped detail of the screen which divides the altar from the nave and crowd. Much like his poetry on the pages within, Kidney’s cover draws attention to the boundary between sacred reverence and profane commentary.

Many of the poems in Devotional Forensics investigate and interrogate sacred imagery. For example, “The Écorché of James Legg” portrays three London artists who are “not satisfied” with studying manmade images of the human body. With the help of a “surgeon and freelance teacher of anatomy” they remove the skin of a hanged murderer’s cadaver then crucify the corpse to make comparisons between the abject musculature of their in-studio model and the “Christs of Titian and Velázquez” or “Rubens.” The artists’ dissatisfaction pushes up against the “satisfactionem” in the poem’s epigraph citing Anselm of Canterbury. In Anselm’s sacred context “satisfactionem” purports that sinful humans are finite and thus will never achieve recompense due to the infiniteness of God. In the final line of this poem, the artist West falls to his knees. Does he fall in reverence before this muscle-and-bone replica of Christ? Or is West ashamed by the “travesty” they’ve made of a human body? This poem is captioned on Joseph Kidney’s Instagram as “the good friday poem in my book, finished on good friday 2024.” Kidney’s caption and the genuflection of West evoke John Donne’s poem “Good-Friday, 1613, Riding Westward.” Donne’s speaker rides away from the risen sun/son because he “durst not look” on the “flesh which was worn / By God for His apparel.” Kidney doesn’t tell us why West falls to his knees. Like any significant poet, he leaves the ending open to interpretation.

In another vein, Devotional Forensics inspires me to meditate upon warp and weft in the art of weaving. Warp creates the fundamental composition of any woven structure; it forms a backbone with tightly packed thread, or in the case of this collection, with words. Kidney’s poems remind me of warp, long blocks of thickly populated text and buried references. But the poet also creates weft by repeating words and ideas horizontally across pages. Repetition, like weft, emphasizes imagery and texture. For example, the poem “New Year’s Eve in Gibsons” faces opposite “The Écorché of James Legg” and ribs about “de-skinning” vs. “skinning” a halibut. The halibut iterates the cadaver of “The Écorché.” Furthermore, the speaker in “Gibsons” scratches beneath the surface of this poem to expose grammar and an enigmatic thesis: “fear is … a noun whose verb is its own removal.” Alternatively, consider the poet’s many, list-like mentions of birds such as “siskin / run through by wind” and “crows … speckling sheen.” These phrases embody conventionality, represent birds as we know them. As more birds weave throughout this section, the depictions become stranger, but do they? “Both a bird and a theatre / have wings, take flight” and “Pelicans hung their DeLorean wings on the salt winds.” The poet builds with repetition. The sacred nature of birds is interwoven with the manmade architecture of theatres and cars. Each phrase is aptly placed, and impressions sing together with precision.

Densely woven and packed with references, Devotional Forensics pulls upon threads of ancient classics, medieval religion, early modern literature, and other subjects including ecology, ornithology, and the orchestral conducting career of the poet’s brother. Did I sometimes feel I was drowning in a sea of intellect and academia? Yep. Do I need to understand every one of Kidney’s poetic lines? No. Some threads are likely designed to stay hidden. When I grew weary of digging up allusions on my own or examining others using Kidney’s generous endnotes, I felt content to let lines drift by. Rather than “seek a net to hold the wind,” I wafted through witty words and clever phrases. I like to lean in and analyze as much as any other reviewer. But unlike the speaker in Kidney’s “The Salt Lamp,” I’ll stop short of licking the surface of a poem, to see if it tastes as good as it looks.