JAY HULME and Kenneth Steven are, in some ways, very different poets.
This is Steven’s 20th book of poetry. He writes poetry that is formal, beautiful, and patterned. (The final 13 poems in the collection are sonnets.) He is rooted deeply in the specific Highland countryside. Seeing the Light is a manifesto urging us to step outside into the natural world and into joyous possibility.
This is Hulme’s second book, following on from the success of The Backwater Sermons. Hulme writes with the passion of someone who has just been found by God. They are immensely in love with God, but less interested in the Church and its cold stones, and rightly angered by abuse and prejudice in the Church. Hulme’s poems are playful, earthy, vibrant. They experiment with form and structure and tone.
What is inspiring and exciting about both collections is the striking overlap in theme and content: we feel fully alive when we engage with things outside ourselves, stepping out of what is comfortable and opening ourselves up to all that longs to touch our hearts. Steven’s “Vincent” is about how Van Gogh’s art outlasts his pain; Hulme’s “William Turner’s Cataracts” are about how his failing sight is the price that he is willing to pay for the clarity of his vision. Together, they form a striking and a wonderful duet.
Steven draws us into the wilderness, the woods, coming face to face with otter and swan and deer — and into nurturing our children until they are able to step into the world and the woods themselves. Hulme travels to places where the saints have worn the curtain between here and eternity thin, and seeks to emulate them.
Both collections inspire pilgrimage. They invite us to open ourselves to all of the glory and truth and vibrancy which is waiting for us to turn up, humble and hungry. They call us to live, to breathe, to sing as we step into the light, into nature, into the stream of God’s encounter, into our fullest selves.
Which collection people prefer will be a matter of personal taste — but, together, they remind us that, at its best, as here, poetry takes the stuff of our daily lives and draws out the meaning and the beauty that we often miss, and makes them shine. In their different and complementary ways, Steven and Hulme do precisely that.
We should give thanks for both of them for producing works that make us sit there, awestruck, at the way that a poem can be at once entirely new, and also feel like something that you had glimpsed without being able to capture — certainly not with the grace and beauty that Hulme and Steven display in these outstanding collections.
Canon Richard Lamey is the Rector of St Paul’s, Wokingham, and Area Dean of Sonning, in the diocese of Oxford.
The Vanishing Song
Jay Hulme
Canterbury Press £10.99
(978-1-78622-525-2)
Church Times Bookshop £8.79
Seeing the Light
Kenneth Steven
Canterbury Press £10.99
(978-1-78622-536-8)
Church Times Bookshop £8.79