Embodiment by Dinah Livingstone (Katabasis, London, 2019). Pbk. 62 pages. £10.
Dinah Livingstone is probably best known to Sofia readers as the magazine’s editor and, as such, a leading light in the SOF Network: a theologian who sees theology as poetry and knows, with William Blake, that ‘all deities reside in the human breast’. But when she isn’t chiding Don Cupitt for equating globalisation with the kingdom of heaven, or translating Nicaraguan revolutionary poets, she is making waves with poetry of her own. ‘Such an original and accomplished poet,’ the Times Literary Supplement called her, and Red Pepper said ‘Dinah Livingstone’s poetry speaks persistently and openly of the struggle for the heart’s hope of utopia in a language at once celebratory and defiant.’ Dinah published her first poetry pamphlet, aptly titled Beginning, in 1967 and her first collection, Saving Grace, in 1987. Embodiment is her tenth, and it comes in two parts. As she explains on the back cover, ‘Part 1, Voices, listens to many speakers, both living and dead, real and fictional, from a close neighbour to an exile from Earth on an exoplanet. As well as humans, there are grammatical great tits and a talking fox. Part 2 has the title sequence Embodiment and more on the pain and pleasure of our life as an animal with imagination.’ ‘Animals with imagination…’ It’s there in her first poem: ‘… one species among many that belong, evolution’s product, mortal like the rest, fallible, linguistic, making the planet articulate her story, form the poem wording Earth’s deep hum.’ The hum is heard by an exile in the Goldilocks zone of exoplanet T677f: ‘Earth has cities where they speak 300 languages, have meetings, music, arguments and laughter… I’ve heard too that some Earth people yearn for another country above the sky. They call it heaven.
How strange when they have so much…’ Then there are those Japanese great tits who ‘… have the power/to form a compound sentence in four tweets/combining ‘Scan for Danger’ with ‘Come Here’… Communicating some complexity,/their tweets are not just isolated words:/a simple grammar quickens what they say;/they are incipiently linguistic birds.’ Part 2 has the title sequence ‘Embodiment’ consisting of six poems introduced with a sonnet. Like the whole body of Dinah’s work, these poems celebrate the wholly human spirit but with the paradoxical reminder that our spirit is not some disembodied soul, a ghost outside the machine, but the messiness of our flesh and blood and birth and death, We are embodied beings, incarnations: ‘How could a disembodied spirit speak or dance or sing the paradox, the power, the passion and the truth of human hearts?’ Dinah’s style is direct and conversational. As one critic puts it, ‘The language is direct, unselfconscious and colloquial but under its apparent artlessness lies work of considerable intelligence and subtlety.’ From ‘Love’: ‘Everywhere in the universe bodies attract and are attracted, particles, planets, heavenly bodies relate to one another, gravitate.
My love is my weight, Augustine said, my gravity… Though sounding a bit quaint today, William Morris’s John Ball was right that fellowship is life and lack of fellowship is death…’ From ‘Ageing’: ‘I wanted to take down a curtain But couldn’t get the ladder up the stairs.
It is such a nuisance being old… But sometimes there comes a clarity, A sense of calm and gratitude.
Life’s precious and while I’m still here I have many things to do before I go…’ Like editing Sofia, and more poetry, please!
David Boulton, journalist, broadcaster and author, is a former editor of the investigative series World in Action and head of current affairs at Granada TV, one-time editor of Sea of Faith magazine and a founder of the Nontheist Friends Network.