I HAVE been rereading Micheal O’Siadhail’s wonderful collection Our Double Time (Bloodaxe Books, 1998), amazed to discover how much richer it has become, and yet how fresh it remains after nearly three decades.

I returned to these poems as part of my preparation to speak at a retreat on the theme of improvisation. “Why prepare?” you might ask. “Why not just improvise?” But, as every jazz musician knows, the spontaneous free flow of an improvised line is, paradoxically, the fruit of preparation, of a disciplined apprenticeship, a complete familiarity with the theme on which one is going to play so many variations. To make something new, you must know and love how it was made in the first place.

O’Siadhail is the living poet who writes most fluently and at greatest depth about music, about the experience of both hearing and making it; and, returning to this collection, I was delighted to rediscover the many lucid phrases in which he captures that experience and offers it to the reader as a symbol of so much else in life and faith.

So, in the opening of his poem “Overflow” he writes:

The jazzmen say to improvise is both to hear
And answer at one time. Careless and austere,
How a knitted music revels in its discipline.

The phrase “revels in its discipline” captures the paradox at the heart of improvisation perfectly. His poem “Flightline” opens with two couplets that take us even deeper:

At the core of all the jazz’s lavish promise:
Just to keep on playing, to improvise what is.

Saxman Keith Donald told me when the solo moves
It’s loose and certain as the promise of loves.

There’s so much on offer here: the paradox of “loose and certain”, and, best of all, the insight that, at the core of music itself, there is a “lavish promise”. Larkin, another poet with an enthusiasm for jazz, also found in music a promise, an affirmation, that seemed to evade him in almost every other sphere, and wrote, of listening to a solo by Sidney Bechet, one of the earliest jazz improvisers: “On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.”

In the course of our retreat, we were reflecting on the way in which “all God’s promises find their ‘yes’ in Christ” (2 Corinthians 1.20); how, in the great improvisation of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, all the deepest themes of the Old Testament are replayed, remade, renewed; how, even in the midst of the old, we hear in Christ a glorious anticipation of the music of the new creation. Once again, I found, as I developed this theme, that O’Siadhail had already expressed this hope perfectly. Thus he opens his poem “March On”, about hearing Louis Armstrong improvising on the great Spiritual of hope:

Always this urge to begin and re-begin.
Armstrong’s trumpet swings and skips
O when the Saints go marching in.

He goes on to say, in a verse that could apply not only to jazz improvisation, but to all our improvised imaginings of heaven:

He can’t imagine it and still he must,
A garden where beginnings and ends collide.
Every image is trying to widen our trust.