“POETRY, like the love of God, has tremendous potential for newness,” once commented the journalist and poet Martyn Halsall in this newspaper. In this latest collection, he shows us how. He has dedicated it “For all who experience cancer”, and, in 75 short poems, each shaped in a simple and unadorned form, he takes us with him into his “internal cosmos” — from his own diagnosis, through treatment, and into remission.

The poems are exchanges with his faith and the natural beauty of his Cumbrian homeland and the Scottish islands. His imagery stays with you: prayer is “overheard tide”, cormorants drying their wings “become their own black crucifixions”, the drip sac next to the hospital bed turns into an “old wineskin”, and, on returning home, he knows that “return is simply antiphon / to what the silence sang, during our absence”. His hospital visits are part of a scrutinising spiritual laboratory. He even notes how everyone pauses for hand-gel before entering the ward, as if they were penitents at the church door marking themselves with holy water.

On the front of the book is a drawing of a curlew, the bird that wades on the edges of land and ocean. It might get its name from the Old French for “messenger”. Curlews appear in several of the poems, their search and their call both evocative of the poet’s place. This bird’s song, he writes, is “lament and consolation in one song”. The same can be said of these poems.
 

The Revd Mark Oakley is Dean of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Canon Theologian of Wakefield Cathedral.

Visible Music
Martyn Halsall
Caldew Press £8
(978-1-916388-11-6)