The Singing Bowl: Collected poems
Malcolm Guite
Canterbury Press £10.99
(978-1-84825-541-8)
Church Times Bookshop £9.90
Coracle
Kenneth Steven
SPCK £9.99
(978-0-281-07209-5)
Church
Times Bookshop £9
Psalms Redux
Carla A. Grosch-Miller
Canterbury Press £10.99
(978-1-84825-639-2)
Church Times Bookshop £9.90
Holy Luck: Poems of the Kingdom
Eugene H. Peterson
Canterbury Press £10.99
(978-1-84825-624-8)
Church Times Bookshop £9.90
Unfurling
Ian Adams
Canterbury Press £9.99
(978-1-84825-645-3)
Church Times Bookshop £9
TRAWL through the micro-library that these varied poetry
collections represent, and you find sonnets, psalms, and haiku
being recruited by writers in the Christian tradition.
Sonnets form just part of the finely written and deeply
intelligent work in Malcolm Guite's The Singing Bowl.
Guite, Chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge, holds faith to light,
re-examining the historic through the prism of the immediate. He
follows in the disciplined tradition of John Donne and George
Herbert, while pausing to light his pipe near Granchester, and
elsewhere receiving an idea for a villanelle from a broken
photocopier.
Like the earlier Metaphysicals, Guite does not deny struggle, as
in poems about prayer or child neglect, but he also celebrates, as
in the faithfulness of saints, from Cuthbert to C. S. Lewis, and
the fulfilment of human love. Guite forms alliances; his work is
both classical and yet immediate. Poems include an autobiographical
snap from Bewley's coffee house in Dublin, a meditation on a
register of ships' names, and the view from William Cowper's old
church, "with its flood meadows holding scraps of sky".
The collection is completed with three sequences, including a
searching examination of prayer, six biographical "glimpses", and
reflections on Dante's Commedia. Deeply thoughtful and
humane, technically varied and adept, realistic and faithful, Guite
has written a memorable, fluent, and enjoyable collection.
Kenneth Steven starts in familiar Celtic territory in
Coracle, but soon sails into testing waters on
contemporary concerns. Deftly, through story, he raises big issues
such as peace and war ("George"), bullying ("School") and
institutionalised health care ("Patient"). Steven is a fine
conjurer of atmosphere, both indoors and, especially, outside. He
finds "Corridors smell of shouting and tears; The windows are huge
opportunities For suicide", while, later in the collection, "The
trees held in a bonfire of the last sun".
There are nods to other atmospheric high masters such as Edwin
Muir ("Horses"), Seamus Heaney ("The Mid-March Frogs"), Ted Hughes
("Otter"), and Carol Ann Duffy, where there is "The sadness of
Latin nouns being chanted". Michael Longley is honoured through
"The Ghost Orchid", the title of Longley's 1995 collection, and
Steven returns to his Celtic bloodstream with a concluding poem,
"The Hermit's Cell", celebrating the paradoxical travel through
stillness: "I need nothing;/ all I want is where I am". Coracle
adds memorably to the fine work Steven has already developed.
Carla Grosch-Miller, a United Reformed Church minister in
Oxford, re-casts some 60 of the Psalms after experiencing personal
spiritual problems with the originals. Her work is not intended to
"supplant" these, but to provide "prayer aids for those of us who
need a fresh language that guides us into the depths of renewing
prayer". Comparisons are, however, inevitable, and her poem-psalms
appear slight and diluted as a result. Stronger material in
Psalms Redux appears in her own prayers.
Eugene Peterson's reading of the Psalms at 13 rescued him from
biblical literalism, and led him to a wider appreciation of poetry,
"but it was David who got me started". Later, poetry helped to make
his theology and pastoral ministry more "alert", as he wrote poetry
"in the working context of the Kingdom of God". Many of the 70
poems in Holy Luck appear in disciplined sections of equal
line lengths, preceded by Biblical quotations. He has a sharp eye
for the ironies that often provide foundations for God's
Kingdom.
Ian Adams, an Anglican priest, transposes the Japanese haiku
form into a biblical key (the Beatitudes), and the devotional day,
alongside the 42 that compose his "unfurlings". These show not only
a real understanding of the form, but offer the requisite fresh
insights required by the originals. There is a realistic sense of
suffering within his celebrations of love and creation, and his
openness to Eastern spirituality adds a depth and space to his
searching, and his honouring of our world.
Dr Halsall's new poetry collection, Sanctuary,
reflects on his year as Poet in Residence at Carlisle
Cathedral.