THE recovery of Advent as a time of reflection and spiritual preparation is one of the more hopeful signs of life and growth in the contemporary Church, and in this Advent book Richard Harries makes a distinguished and helpful contribution to that recovery.

Harries offers a thoughtfully chosen selection of George Herbert’s poetry to accompany us daily through Advent and as far as Christmas Day itself. What distinguishes this book is, first, the selection, which takes us well beyond the usual handful of often anthologised poems — George Herbert’s “greatest hits”, as it were — and quarries out poetry that goes against the grain of modern taste and, for that very reason, is more helpful to us.

A central tenet in Harries’s introduction is that, in an age of self-affirmation, Herbert’s talent for rigorous self-examination is a helpful corrective. His self-searching poetry also searches the reader, but what emerges, both in Herbert’s poetry and in Harries’s sensitive and helpful reading of it, is not morbidity or self-loathing, but the conviction that the searching grace of God and his inexorable love are always there for us even amid our “quarries of piled vanities”.

Indeed, the second gift that this book has to offer us is Harries’s own gift for close reading and his deft and illuminating little essays, following each poem, which open out some of the difficulties that poetry of this period can present, and more importantly draw from the 17th-century poet just those counter-cultural insights that a 21st-century Christian might need. Here, we meet the literary critic as pastor. Harries helpfully cross-references other poets, such as Hopkins and Eliot, and draws them into our conversation with Herbert.

Harries is mindful of the shape and meaning of the Advent journey on which he is taking us. His selection takes us, week by week, from God’s wooing of our hearts, through our struggle to welcome him and to accept his welcome, and then on to a closeness and intimacy that finally flower into praise. In many ways, this was Herbert’s own journey. In this little book, Harries helps us to make it ours.

The Revd Dr Malcolm Guite is a poet and singer-songwriter.

Wounded I Sing: From Advent to Christmas with George Herbert
Richard Harries
SPCK £10.99
(978-0-281-08942-0)
Church Times Bookshop £8.79