Frederic Lamond is a 69-year-old computer consultant and Wiccan and author of "Religions without Beliefs", published by Janus Publishing. He is a member of SoF JENI PARSONS reviews a liberation theologian's celebration of 'the abundance, diversity and gratuitousness of life on Earth' poetry The Poetry of Earth, by Dinah Livingstone (Katabasis, £8.95) This is an uneven book and that should not surprise or disappoint the reader since Dinah Livingstone warns us at the beginning that this is 'but a common essay, whose argument covers poetry, ecology, theology and politics". She goes on to explain that she is using the phrase "the poetry of Earth", borrowed from Keats but broadened to include "the particularity, abundance, diversity and gratuitousness of all life on Earth".
With such a big aim, and using so many disciplines, we might expect and even applaud a diversity of textures and styles. Indeed at times it seemed like a kaleidoscope of examples rather than an argument, or a bunch of flowers of all different kinds rather than a treatise. I suspect this was intentional and after a while I warmed to it and indeed experienced disappointment to be met with two great slabs of text that were so different in style and density - one on language and the other on Trinity.
The book is about several things at once. Livingstone is a political theologian who rightly takes Don Cupitt to task for his loss of interest in the Kingdom of God as a future project and his cosying up to postmodernists. She is sharp about the human and environmental cost of multinationals, the search for empire in the past and present, and about the idols which confront us today with their greedy lies. She also has an eye on nonrealist theology and sees poetry as a way of using theological metaphor devoid of any supernaturalist content.
For Dinah Livingstone the poetry of Earth (always capitalised, so that I think it has become for her the real divinity) is the Incarnation, God brought down to Earth, and the human Poetic Genius which creates religion. Humanism is that which undergirds liberation theology and is the core value for her because of its respect for human life. Poetry offers humanism a liturgy, a social poem, by which it can "perform" that which it recalls. So she calls the Eucharist "a social poem of commemoration, consolidation and prefigurative politics".
Livingstone presents a theology that one could live by and which has no referent beyond the things of this world and its human inhabitants. It speaks of love, self-giving, the need of community, the risk of isolation from living lovers by falling into the non-existent arms of a fictitious God - and it is at that point that I find her unnecessarily crude and anti-poetic. Like many nonrealists, she rejoices in metaphor, and in this case in the depths of poetry also, but then, just like someone who tells you the wonderful flowers you have been enjoying are in fact plastic, she says God is imaginary and tells us not once but several times, in the fundamentalist tone I've heard before. It came as a disappointment in what is in many ways an entrancing book with a big heart.