A Century of Poetry: 100 poems for searching the heart
edited by Rowan Williams
SPCK (London 2022) Hbk. 375 pages.
Rowan Williams, for ten years Archbishop of Canterbury, is learned and remarkable; academic theologian, literary critic, linguist and poet. He is also genuinely insightful and original in his approach to this anthology, a substantial book, in every respect, and a fascinating one.
The initial response to most anthologies is to question the principles of selection, as unrepresentative, too narrow, pedestrian, exclusive, eccentric or self-serving. So it is useful to say first of all what the book is not. It is not ‘best religious poems of the century’, not devotional, nor celebratory. In so far as the chosen poets have a religious background, the selection covers most conceivable varieties of Christianity and other world faiths, with considerable cultural breadth, many poems translations, including from Welsh, Hebrew and Yiddish.
It would be invidious to list names: some are obvious and often anthologised, but many are much less familiar. Themes cover obvious topics from fundamentalism to environmental disaster, but the editor’s chief aim is to find poems which simply ‘open the door’ to challenging insights about the nature of humanity, whilst assuming that ‘the world of faith is at the very least a serious dimension of the human imagination’. The word ‘imagination’ is key here, since Williams sees poetry as an important tool for thinking about the world, for seeing patterns and teasing out the language of the holy, a means of knowing which is more than two-dimensional.
The justification for the particular choices lies in one of the most striking aspects of the book: the two or three page critical analysis which accompanies each poem. Take, for example, the first of the hundred poems, Gillian Allnutt’s spare, enigmatic ‘Verger, Winter Afternoon, Galilee Chapel, Durham Cathedral March 2004’. Williams paints the context of the chapel, a smallish space where the local saints Bede and Cuthbert are buried. He then points to the diverse images of the poem’s first word ‘careful’, explores the often-reported sense people get in holy places of a presence just missed, the intangible becoming, as Williams puts it, ‘the indwelling of light in the heart’. He relates this to Eliot’s more famous extended meditation on ‘presence’ in ‘Four Quartets’ and concludes that the poem is ‘an appropriate grammar’ for opening ourselves to grace. So Williams moves from exegesis through literary critical analysis to pastoral messages and finally to a transcendental insight.
In other chapters the theologian is more prominent. Williams finds in W H Auden’s less known poem ‘Friday’s Child’, one of ‘the most nuanced and insightful responses to Bonhoeffer’ and argues it is ‘one of the most profound poems about faith written in the last century’, a study of what freedom means and the importance of seeing beyond our own deceits and confusions. Especially helpful are the explanations of non-Christian cultures, for instance the esoteric aspects of Jewish thought and the significance of imagery like the almond in poems about the Shoah and survivors’ guilt. Yet Williams is never far from a poetic, rather than a teacherly, sensibility evident, for instance, in his choice and analysis of the poem ‘Noli me tangere’ by Yves Bonnefoy, where the delicacy and tentativeness of a snowflake, which transforms but cannot be grasped, becomes not only a metaphor for the divine but a message for humanity to free itself from the craving to grasp and possess.
Poems are often about the art of poetry but in this anthology God, too, is presented as a poet. So in Larissa Miller’s poem ‘It was on the Very Last Day of Creation’ God rises to ‘the height of the Divine game’ when he sees everything come together like a rhyme. Writing itself is a resistance to a mechanical or untruthful world. As Len Murray puts it in ‘Poetry and Religion’:
‘You can’t pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can’t poe [sic] one either’.
The right use of language is a moral enterprise and challenges the constraint to find total explanations and final meanings.
This book is for explorers, whether individual or in groups, and is profound material for mindful human journeys. This reviewer will certainly keep it by her as a much-valued resource.