Faced with the title Poems & Prayers, an innocent reader might well think back to the Morning Homilies of Pope Francis. Sure, the late Pontiff never brought down the house in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. Nor was he—in public, at least—to be seen playing the bongos in the nude. But he might easily have begun one of his soulful petitions, “What do I forgive and where’s the buck stop here?,” even if less likely to continue, “Been forty-eight days since I had a beer.”
Lovers of literature will recall that Matthew McConaughey’s Greenlights shot to the top of the best-seller lists five years ago—it’s sold more than six million copies worldwide—as the Oscar-winning actor mixed the wisdom of Seneca with accounts of how his dad breathed his last while riding his mom. “I’ve had many people give me poems that I did not know I wrote,” he confessed, disarmingly, at the outset, having just told us that he once enjoyed peyote while stuck in a Mexican cage with a mountain lion and (in an unrelated incident) had 78 stitches sewn into his forehead by a veterinarian.
Now, in a more intimate—even humbled—work, he throws out a carefree shower of homespun proverbs, meditations on “Divinity’s Law,” and rhyming ditties that might have been written by Jimmy Buffett after an immersion in the works of Saint Augustine. Imagine a country-and-western song that stops in at every bar on Saturday night before finding itself in the pew on Sunday morning, and you’re halfway there. This is wisdom earned the hard way and repaid with compound interest: “I know I’m seldom wrong, but there’s more than one way to be right. Others deserve a chance to belong, especially my wife.”
The Gospel According to Matthew begins in a state of freewheeling joy, and with the premise—hard to contest—that conscience, trust, and knowledge are in short supply these days. Different sections of the book draw on both II Corinthians and Mexican dirt weed to shed light on such abiding themes as love and success and regulation gauges. Our writer is a “prescriptionist at heart,” he reminds us on his opening page, as well as a “hopeful skeptic,” and none but a hopeless skeptic would question why a professor at the University of Texas would choose to rhyme “giggle” with “wiggle.”
I must confess that at times he leaves me behind with his reasoning, but, as in “The Waste Land,” his work comes with regular footnotes that shed light on some of the more esoteric material. On first reading, I stumbled over the line “This two-way traffic don’t lean on yellow lines and the burrito at the bank’s worth a dollar for my dimes.” Yet, at poem’s end, an invaluable postscript explains that the poet once enjoyed a “no-tax two-buck burrito from a lady who had set up a stove at an abandoned bank.” It proved tasty beyond compare.
The reader well acquainted with Texas will find himself especially at home here: “Forty miles south of Poteet,” one poem begins, “looking for a lid to rest my seat.” When our author passes a janitor, it “gave me faith—and resolved my doubt,” though less for scriptural reasons than because the man’s presence suggested a porta-potty in the vicinity.
This is not the material we associate with George Herbert or Saint John of the Cross. But at the end of the volume, we’re offered a poem handwritten by the author at 18, as he sat in a bathtub in Australia “strongly considering becoming a monk.”
And as we bump along the back roads of these verses—with God riding shotgun—we never know where revelation might appear. At one point Matthew devises his own version of Pascal’s wager; at another he reflects on the difference between patience and passivity. Like many a spiritual teacher, he urges us to condemn the action, not the actor—though unlike many a voice from the pulpit, he’s brought to a near-mystical awakening by seeing “an albino armadillo irrigating my lawn.”
The theologically inclined will note that his early line “Prayer is paying attention” is a near-perfect spin on Simone Weil’s celebrated claim “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” The very first name cited in the acknowledgments is that of the 14th-century German mystic Meister Eckhart—closely followed by both King Solomon and Lord Byron. Yet such exalted precedents never deter our poet from finding treasures not to be glimpsed in Eckhart’s Prologus in Opus Propositionum. What do you do, this writer asks the heavens, “when the lady in your bed starts ridin’ a broom and you need to go to jail but they ain’t got room”?
I’m sorry at this point to have to cite what I call the Neil Young Rule of Poesy: any writer who’s not a full-time poet should never, ever, under any circumstances, feel obliged to encumber his lines with rhyme. The musical genius who’s responsible for 43 solo albums, in every genre, has confessed that he composes his lyrics at stoplights on his 15-minute drive to the recording studio. The result, tragically, is: “It’s so noisy at the fair / But all your friends are there / And the candy floss you had / And your mother and your dad.” The star of Failure to Launch is likewise not at his best when averring, of his appearance in a virtual courtroom, “People were scrambling the place was a zoo / I wondered aloud what myself was into.”
This brings sorrow only because so much in his book is memorable. It’s impressive that so successful a public figure keeps questioning his ambition and his pride, and it’s hard not to be sobered when McConaughey writes how “my need for certainty, vanity, and independence all feed my doubt.” To those who question the American Dream, he wants to say—persuasively, to me—“‘At least America’s still trying.’ That’s simply not true in so many other countries. So, whether you think it’s a dream or an illusion, if nothing else, it’s the best nightmare available.” More than once, I was moved to transcribe his wisdom: “Just because it’s signed anonymous / doesn’t mean it has no author.”
McConaughey himself is certainly trying, with all his heart, even as he spins out an Airstream vision of working hard while staying laid-back and never forgetting that grace is possible even when you’re goofing off. He advises us not to use a blinker when changing lanes and poses the unanswerable question “How do I read the news if I can’t turn the page?”
His ideal reader, I suspect, is a good old boy in search of a buddy with a beer and a rowdy story to tell—exactly the kind of reader whom, in truth, too many books ignore. Who cares if some lines are so dense and gnarled that it would take a scholar of Gerard Manley Hopkins to begin to untangle them? (I was thrown off by some sentences involving Jiminy Cricket and Desire and had no more luck with the koan “Where standings sturdy in the wind’s blow / and sights are high without tippy a toe.”)
Still, I’m sure that no more frisky—or well-intentioned—volume will grace the best-seller lists this season, let alone dare to posit, “Forgetting more than we learned and remembering more than we knew, it takes work either way.” If some of the lines here work better as greeting-card inspirations than as verse, cannot the same be said of Emily Dickinson? As our hero writes—venturing once more where neither Pope Francis nor Meister Eckhart dared to tread—“When certainty is clear, and your sight is just as valid, thank the garden of knowledge for the greens in your salad.”
Pico Iyer is a Columnist at Air Mail and the author of more than a dozen books, including this year’s best-selling Aflame
