Sofia, Poetry
Red Carnations
Poem imagining a meeting with a dead wife at St Pancras, talking about their children and carrying red carnations; one of three poems in memory of the poet’s wife Linda.
Poem imagining a meeting with a dead wife at St Pancras, talking about their children and carrying red carnations; one of three poems in memory of the poet’s wife Linda.
Poem in the voice of sunflowers in a Ukrainian field after a plane crash, with howling dogs, soldiers emptying the pockets of the dead, and the question whether they can still be called sunflowers.
A poem in which an immigrant surgeon reassures a patient while naming the international team, from India, Syria, Sri Lanka, Romania and Sweden, caring for him; a quiet answer to hostility to migrants.
Snowdrops speak of the destruction of holy places in East Anglia, such as Walsingham, when horsemen tore up the ground. The poem alludes to the violence of the Reformation and its lasting grief.
Review of John Rety’s Notebook in Hand: New and Selected Poems, describing his plain, wandering, funny and tender poems, the book’s production, and several individual poems.
A humorous poem in which a poet commissioned to write on ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ space fuses both into a poem about ‘personal space’, talking to his dog.
Peter Phillips examines how early Christian belief developed, using James Robinson and Margaret Barker to argue that resurrection was first expressed as exaltation and later hardened against gnosticism into physical terms.
Peter Phillips examines how belief and practice shaped each other in the early church, arguing from Robinson, Daniélou and Barker that resurrection was first expressed as exaltation before orthodoxy emphasised bodily resurrection against gnosticism.