Carol O’Connor
5 October 2025
Matthew Pullar. This Teeming Mess of Glory. Wipf and Stock, 2025
According to spiritual writer Mark Oakley, a prayer for those wishing to introduce a poet’s work to those who may be unfamiliar with it ought to be: “Lead us not into interpretation.” This assertion seems very pertinent with regards to Australian poet Matthew Pullar’s latest collection, This Teeming Mess of Glory, shortlisted for the 2025 Australian Christian Book of the Year award.
This work concerns itself with the nature of creation and our relationship with our Creator which truthfully can never be fully known nor finally interpreted. As Pullar’s title suggests, and much of his subject matter in these poems display, our existence and the world itself defies being pinned down or contained; even “familiar substances” teem with a “vast array of / electrons, orbiting atoms …” In fact, the very beauty of reality lies in the recognition of the unrestrained, wildness of God’s grace, particularly in life’s slipperiness and messy irresolution. Faith, that deep human longing, works like this:
“… belief is often evasive, often abstract,
like air which itself defies grasp
yet needy lungs clutch at it with the certainty
that this, this alone they must have.”
Pullar’s poetry delights in lingering on the ordinary, the particular. Many poems act as small personal word portraits: the remembered childhood “school beneath the mountain where I play”; a conversation had with his two-year-old son whilst shaving in the bathroom, or watching his children playing “Pretend Church” before dinner.
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Three sections of this work are based on the primary elements of earth, air and water, whilst the last combines the various interweaving themes into the subject of life itself. Yet all parts dwell on this phenomenon of life’s abundant disarray, enchanting, amazing, also dark and painful. From Soil, a series of poems recognising not only how many of us are born into a land already invaded, dispossessed and misinterpreted by settlers, but also a country that nevertheless binds overflowing individual memories of childhood with the unique story of each grandparent, our own story and our children’s, to Water where life teems and “No abyss can stop it” every aspect of life seems put under scrutiny. In Breath Pullar muses upon the first sounds and utterances a child makes, and in Listening for Air considers our own human physiological need to breathe, as he “stands between the cot(s)” of his three children during the night waiting “to hear three channels of breath flowing through.”
Several poems poignantly reflect upon his own periods of fragile mental health, times when life loses coherency:
“These days when all of the socks are odd
and all your thoughts are scrambled eggs
and, try as you might to talk to God,
nothing makes any sense …”
The final section, Life, includes a long poem considering Aves Australiae, scanning the vast array of birdlife in Australia spotted in traffic, on freeways, across the seas:
“Feathers unlike and alike all flutter
as Heaven heaves this living
flock together.”
His images, as in Other Bodies, are of life “in constant merging and departing.” The nature of human life is a riddle opening “like a chasm” into “a longing for one” (Riddle I) until it is realised that life only makes sense when “You are / in the chasm”, even at “the end” or “into failure I open in /You.” (Riddle II.)
Many poems here employ a gentle, searching tone which considers the mystery of our being born from dust. Pullar is inspired by other poets; his own tone sometimes echoing the wry, probing conversational manner of WH Auden. We Are Such Stuff examines the “naked naming” of substances in a chemistry class to find a comparison with Prospero’s proclamation at the end of Shakespeare’s Tempest that we are “the stuff of dreams.” For Pullar, “the stuff of life. The stuff of us.”
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However, the thread running through his whole collection, is “You”. And it’s entering into relationship with this “You” that enables this stuff to cohere, make sense and bring life. The word God is seldom used by Pullar, but God’s presence is pervasive. It’s incarnational and personal. In Holy Mess, it is “unholy pain” that “sends me to Your feet”. Here is a relationship not only of stretching out arms to You, but one of being held steady by “patient arms” or the human cry when beset by “every force of hell” of “Hold me. Carry me. Hold me.”
And it’s this quality of his poetry that reminds me of early English poets like Thomas Traherne, who in poems such as Salutation also wondered to find himself alive on earth, “out of nothing now awake” and “a stranger here” seeing “strange treasures lodged in this fair world.” God’s limitless nature too became the ground, sustainer and container of all the beauty, the unfinished and failed in our lives.
The temptation is to slot This Teeming Mess of Glory into a category, confessional or devotional poetry. Indeed, it can be in poems such as Hyperecho which contemplates the capacity of prayer, like Jesus’ deep sleep in a boat during the tempest, not to add more thunder as “hell rages all about” but one whose “reason-defying head / sleeping instead” and “in a voice like ultrasound, / bids me do the same.” But ultimately these poems elude such easy categorisation.
Yet, this remains a work that can be used as an aid for spiritual directors and teachers, to read reflectively in quiet times or simply share with others in recognition of our common humanity. It’s a startling and beautiful collection.
Carol O’Connor is a Melbourne writer and Manager of St Peter’s Bookroom, Melbourne.
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