The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry
by Mark Oakley
Canterbury Press (Norwich 2016), Pbk. 218 pages. £12.99.
Mark Oakley is Chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral and visiting lecturer at King's College, London. This book, a sequel to his The Collage of God, focuses on what he sees as central to his own journey: poetry, the very language of faith – as the punning subtitle aptly suggests. He writes, he says, for those committed to a religious faith and those 'intrigued by the possibility'. The book jacket includes recommendations both by the former poet laureate and the former archbishop of Canterbury, among other distinguished and culturally diverse luminaries.
'Collage' is a powerful metaphor for Oakley's belief, in which there is no certainty, no closure, only an accumulation of fragmentary insights which are never expected to join up neatly, a space which can shift about and change focus without denying any of its parts. There is room here for challenge, for doubt, disappointment and rebellion, all amply evoked in the thirty poets, dating from the fourteenth century to the present and across a range of countries and languages, through which the author has chosen to explore his vision. Many are unsurprising choices, such as Louis MacNeice, Edwin Muir, and the preacher-poets George Herbert and R.S. Thomas whilst others, such as Wendy Cope, Jo Shapcott, Alice Oswald and Carol Ann Duffy, are familiar but not obviously religious poets. Duffy's lovely Prayer, for instance, evokes the religious imagery of her childhood Catholicism in a haunting secular mysticism which concludes memorably with:
Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer Rockall, Malin, Dogger, Finisterre.
Included, too, are lesser known poems from Europe, the USA, Australia, Afghanistan and fourteenth century Persia but this is more than a representative, annotated anthology. Each chapter is designed for individual daily meditation or group discussion and would work well for either purpose. Its contextual information is scholarly without being oppressively academic and is critically effective in showing how the poems work. Oakley gives poetry the respect of a serious literary reading, rather than simply using it for religious reinforcement. As he says, poetry and faith are both arts of attention.
They are also arts of indirection, of showing rather than telling – or at least of inference rather than statement – as Emily Dickinson would say, telling it 'slant'. So the chapter on W. H. Auden, 'probably' Oakley's favourite poet ends, paradoxically, with an aphorism about poetry and faith:
What but tall tales, the luck of verbal playing Can trick [our] lying nature into saying That love, or truth in any serious sense, like orthodoxy, is a reticence?'.
In relation to the poem by the Norwegian writer, Olaf Hauge called Don't give me the whole truth, Oakley comments that God does not make himself into a convenient bit of information packaged for human consumption. It is in the glints of insight, the 'receptive modesty' that we become capable of attending to the rhythms of the world. As Dickinson, again, tells us: truth 'must dazzle gradually', or we will be for ever blind.
Oakley quotes John Robinson's dictum that nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defence and the need to be truthful takes us into dark, challenging and distinctly un-clerical, un-institutional places. This is the book's humanism, its theology and its integrity. Those outside 'the system', such as gay Christians or the Occupy movement which campaigned outside St Paul's for social justice are essential to the collage. The effigy of John Donne, 17th century poet and Dean of St Paul's, is a presiding presence for Oakley in his daily work but he is influenced at least as much by a woman – 'one of the priests in many ways' – who comes into the cathedral every day and shouts at God in pain and anger.
His final chapter is devoted to Afghan landays, which are short folk poems recited by Pashtun women who have no other outlet for their passions and protests. The chapter is also devoted to Zarmina who, beaten by her brothers for writing poetry, set herself on fire and died. For Oakley she is a witness to poetry's power and its celebration of 'the whole uncensored person in a whole and uncensored world'.
Kathryn Southworth is the former Vice-Principal of Newman University College, Birmingham. She now lives in London. Her poems have been published in South Bank Poetry and a number of anthologies.