Book review: A monumental intellectual undertaking that demands much of the reader

James Harpur has long made a virtue of doing the unexpected. His latest release, The Gospel of Gargoyle, a series of poems published by West Cork’s Eblana Press and illustrated by Paul Ó Colmáin, represents another turn in the road of his poetic journey.

The book is written in the voice of a poet who, in a series of dreams, visits a gargoyle on the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral. The poet has a single burning question: Who or what started the cathedral fire of 2019? Gargoyle agrees to answer in return for the poet’s continued companionship and so the pact which defines the entire book is formed.

This is a poetic drama played out above the cathedral with Paris as its backdrop. Poet and Gargoyle take turns being guru and interrogator. This being Harpur, the characters’ exchanges cover a vast range of complex topics: The existence of God, life, death, beauty, love, and the true meaning of art.

In early passages such as The Living Dead, the poet is more ghost than human as he drifts through the streets of Paris: “I haunted gardens/graveyards”. 

In a city of millions, he barely notices the people that surround him: “I passed all life — tourists, shoppers, buskers… ignored/A crumpled… one-legged beggar”. In fact, all he sees is Gargoyle: “everywhere… The gargoyle was reflected”.

As the story progresses, the relationship deepens. By the end, they appear to have formed a strange but ultimately unsustainable friendship. By the end, the mysterious Gargoyle has departed the cathedral roof but he has served his purpose. 

The question of who started the cathedral fire is answered, sort of. More importantly, the poet is now changed. In the poem Under God’s Glory, we see poetry flows through him “like psalms”. As he says in the poem’s closing lines: “My pen seemed guided by a spirit/Or touched by Gargoyle’s claw/And I was his amanuensis”.

In the book’s final poem Shadow, we meet a more serene figure: “I stood by the Seine/And gazed at Notre-Dame/Beneath a pure blue sky”. The poet’s transformation is complete when he again encounters the beggar that he ignored at the book’s outset. This time he shakes his hand, feeling “A transference of such warmth/I found it hard to break our grip”.

The reader is left to decide who or what Gargoyle is. He’s part animal, part spirit. It may be that he’s the darkness in the artist’s soul. In the final lines of the book, the poet accidentally glimpses his own shadow: “It seemed to have two shapes/I hadn’t seen before… long dark wings”. Finally, then, Gargoyle is subsumed by the narrator.

The Gospel of Gargoyle is a monumental intellectual undertaking that demands much of the reader. The book offers us some magnificent passages, with the poem Sinner being a particular highlight. There are also times when the clear, elegant music of Harpur’s poetry is lost amid the dense exchanges between Gargoyle and Poet. 

The device of the speaker visiting Gargoyle in one dream after another is difficult to sustain and unnecessary — the universe created in this book is strange but believable and doesn’t need to be explained away.

In spite, or perhaps because, of its imperfections, The Gospel of Gargoyle shows us James Harpur is a true artist, a restless spirit determined to never rest on his achievements. He is that surprisingly rare thing: a poet who is often challenging but never dull.