Ruth Shelton
A young man nervously polished his glasses and climbed onto an upended fruit crate. He began to read, hesitantly and in a low voice, to about 150 people who were laughing, drinking from buckets of red wine and taking no notice. As the reading continued, his voice became stronger and one by one people fell silent (although some accounts describe Jack Kerouac thumping the wine bucket in time with the increasing rhythm of the poem): ‘The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! ... Everything is holy! Everybody’s holy! Everywhere is holy!’ (Ginsberg, 1984: 3–5).
‘In all our memories no-one had been so outspoken in poetry before’, Michael McClure remembered:
We had gone beyond a point of no return – and we were ready for it, for a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the gray, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellectual void – to the land without poetry – to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision. (1994: 13)
Allen Ginsberg’s long poem, ‘Howl’, illuminates the theme of the divine in the everyday world in a country he perceives as unholy, America. His audience, in 1955, thirsty for meaning, in despair at the political rhetoric of war and threat of bombs, recognised something in his words which spoke to them and yet pointed beyond them.
In a tribute to the poet Michael Donaghy the poet Sean O’Brien writes:
For him – as it surely should be for us – the poetry that matters, that deserves to live, that engages the imagination and nourishes the memory, emerges in contact with ‘a live tradition’. It offers itself to a general audience as both challenge and invitation, to create a space which can be colonized neither by vulgarity nor remote self-regard. It is, in the teeth of the odds, poetry undertaken as an act of good faith. (2008)
In embarking on this project with the other Diviners I had little idea where it was going to lead me. I did not want to examine too closely how the (for me) implicit and given connectedness between the life of faith and the life of a poem happens. If that has been illuminated for myself and for some readers, it remains of less interest to me than an exploration of how writing poetry can take one outwards beyond limitations of culture, class and location towards the ‘other’ – by which I do not mean necessarily other worldly, but the world of the other person – and to meaning which has not been merely self-generated. In this chapter I will attempt to explore how the practice of faith and spirituality and the writing of poetry can be an activity in the world which effects change in oneself and others and which illuminates everyday life. I will also try to identify the barriers which prevent us continuing that journey ‘in good faith’.
Those who heard Allen Ginsberg read ‘Howl’ experienced something unexpected, perhaps a moment when the sacred entered their lives, a moment which was intense and revelatory. Ginsberg’s ‘act of good faith’ arguably generated other acts of good faith in his audience. Some of those might have taken the form of a conscious decision, small or large, which would affect the rest of their lives; others might have taken the form of a slight shift of consciousness of which they were barely aware.
I remember learning off by heart as a child that prayer was ‘a raising of the mind and heart to God’ (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2000: 2559: 544). I also knew the answer to the question from the old ‘Penny Catechism’ ‘What is a sacrament’? ‘A sacrament is an outward sign of inward grace …’ The ‘new’ Catechism of the Catholic Church describes the sacraments as ‘actions of the Holy Spirit’ (2000: 1116: 256) and I would now attempt to include in my understanding something about the ‘act of good faith’ which writing a poem, saying a prayer or receiving the Eucharist requires, being defined by its capacity to make something happen.
It is possible to propose that the common task of both the poet and the seeker of the holy is to foster a quality of attentiveness and an active readiness to see their location with new eyes and to encounter the divine in its places and people. While secular poets might reject this terminology, I have often thought that if there was a wider understanding of metaphor, there would be less division between believers and non-believers.
The authorial ‘I’ is highly problematic since a poem is a supremely individual act, and cannot be on behalf of anyone else, and yet it will fail if it is only about the poet. The same would be true of a prayer group leader or preacher. The writing of this chapter is, for me, a good example of the tension between the moral dimension of the responsibility involved in writing and the flawed ‘I’ character who fails to do any of the things that he or she points to in their writing.
Changing TV channels one day, many years ago, I found myself unexpectedly drawn to the sight of an outdoor liturgical procession. Priests, choir boys and acolytes in white robes were followed by an elderly bishop carrying a monstrance. His hands, peeping from beneath the folds of the cope, were encased in white gloves. Temporarily, I felt very moved by the hieratic reverence of the scene, which brought back vivid memories of the processions we used to take part in during my Catholic childhood. Later on in the programme, one of the priests, part of a group who had broken away from Rome over the reforms of Vatican II, was interviewed. As he spoke he became angry and looked a little mad as he condemned divorced people, gay people and non-Catholics. His emotional incontinence was in extreme contrast to the discipline observed in the presence of the sacrament. As the rant continued, my emotional response to the white gloves drained away.
A more recent television programme followed the progress of six young artists competing for the patronage of Charles Saatchi. One young woman had found a large tree trunk impaled at a dynamic angle on some London railings which she had persuaded the owners to give away. We watched men in overalls with goggles and oxyacetylene torches hack off the whole thing, tree and railings. When the piece arrived at the gallery it was carried in by men in overalls wearing white gloves. Somewhere on the journey, the trunk and railings had become art.
The artwork was too valuable in monetary terms to be handled by bare hands and the host is regarded by the institution to be too holy to be touched; even the vessel that houses the host must be kept apart. Since my childhood days, uncritically infused with the mysterious beauty of the liturgy, I have become aware that the dispensing of grace has been seized by the institution of the Church and severed from the everyday, so that it can be used as a weapon of power and control, as in the exclusion of divorced Catholics from communion. The world ‘howls’ because the imaginative force is crushed into submission.
Both stories reveal our human capacity for awe, wonder and reverence, but also our fear: as soon as we recognise the holy we try to control it. In the case of the artwork we assign it a commercial value: the higher the price, the more it is revered. We make rules about who can give and receive the Eucharist. The Gospels tell a story of Jesus having a meal with his friends. He broke the bread, a simple action with an everyday commodity. The immense significance, beauty and depth of the action depend upon it being an everyday event. The partakers of the bread were ordinary flawed human beings. Why, then, did this story become refined to the point that we are not allowed to touch the bread, not allowed to touch the flesh of the God who entered a womb in order to become flesh? Our attempts to apprehend the largeness and otherness of these aspects of human experience seem to make them smaller. At the same time we cannot pay attention to the everyday because we are ‘gazing upwards’:
O fat white woman whom nobody loves
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves ...
Missing so much and so much?
Frances Cornford’s poem, ‘Lines on a Lady seen from a Train’ (1910: 20), sounds misogynistic to present-day ears but her invective betrays an underlying anger which is nothing to do with the caricature of the woman. (G.K. Chesterton responded to the poem’s cruelty with a spoof: ‘The Fat White Woman Speaks’ [1933: 39]: ‘Why do you flash through the flowery meads, / Fat-head poet that nobody reads?’ – a prescient insult, as it turned out). The poem could be, at its best, about writing and the frustration of the poet at the distancing effect of the chosen word upon the remembered experience.
If we are gloved we cannot feel, touch or remember. If we are gloved we are ‘out of touch’ with everyday experience. We can only search for the holy with outstretched naked hands and arms. My title ‘Steady until Sundown’ comes from the story of Moses (Exodus 17: 8–13) whose outstretched arms were held up by his companions as he wearied and his arms began to droop. We cannot pay attention to the world on our own.
When the invocation and proclamation of the presence of the sacred comes under the control of the institution, a shadowy spirituality, mimicking everyday experience but not grounded in it, starts to take hold and flourish. Our understanding of everyday life, having been effectively cut off from the locus of significance, is then adrift, and drained of meaning. (This is not only happening in Christian forms of spirituality, as a look through the sagging shelves of the ‘Mind, Body, Spirit’ section in many bookshops will demonstrate.) This kind of spirituality is very attractive, seductive even, to people struggling with pain and loss, trying to live in a competitive and alienating world where they are treated as mere economic units. A retreat, in a large house in the country, for instance, may offer space, rest, tranquil music, the potency of candles and icons to create a reflective atmosphere, and the support of others as guides or directors to help participants focus on their ‘spiritual’ journey. These elements may be good in themselves, but if all that is offered and experienced is escape, there is no encounter with the world and there will be no growth or change. Nothing will happen. A chasm is opened between the sacred conceived as ‘wholly other’ and the everyday world.
A woman walks in a garden repeating verses from a psalm: ‘I cry out loud to the Lord / to the Lord I plead for mercy … You are my refuge / you are my portion / in the land of the living’ (Psalms 142: 1–2). The retreat house with its open spaces is a much needed place of respite from her role as an inner city social worker, but when she repeats the words, is this a comforting reminder of the God who sustains her or a cry which comes from the depths of her day to day experience?
As a practice which is only inward, only personal and only devotional, often reflecting middle class values and aesthetics, spirituality becomes a thing in itself which, separated from everyday living and the community, can be bought and sold. In the first chapter of his book, The Eye of the Storm, Kenneth Leech writes:
Today ‘spirituality’ is marketed as a product, in competition with others, on the station bookstalls. It belongs to the area of the ‘private life’… Spirituality is widely seen not as a way of living in every sphere but as a sphere in its own right – ‘the spiritual dimension’… It is not surprising that such spirituality serves to reinforce, or at least not to disturb, the status quo. (1992: 3–4)
This culture, in spirituality as in poetry, is the opposite of the ‘howl’ of those who are willing to risk displacement, vulnerability to the ‘other’, loss of status and cherished assumptions.
Outside the Church, communal respect for the idea of the sacred, which is part of the sacred itself, remains an aspect of contemporary culture. Ordinary people find ways to acknowledge aspects of life and death which touch them most deeply: lining the streets to honour war heroes, observing three-minute silences, tying flowers to lamp posts. Often these things are done in the very places, the specific locations, in which the original event happened. Inside the Church, paradoxically, it is often those who live apparently the most extreme versions of the spiritual life who offer the most grounded versions of spirituality. Philip Sheldrake quotes an American monk: ‘How would you define Benedictine spirituality? We ring the bell, we recite the prayers, we live the life’ (2001: 103). I remember reading an article in a Sunday supplement many years ago about Buckfast Abbey where the Abbot was quoted as saying something like ‘There is a lot of nonsense talked about monastic life. Monastic life is just like any other life, it’s one damn thing after another.’
Established artists sometimes refer to their accumulated work as their ‘corpus’ or ‘body of work’ as if they and their creations are one. I grew up with the idea that my real self existed in a bubble, encased by my body as some sort of heavy overcoat. Of course, we understood this self to be our ‘soul’, which in my case was a fuzzy, kidney bean shaped light, pocked with my sins or shining brightly, depending on how long it was since I had been to Confession. Poetry likewise was broadly assumed to address the soul. It was only when I began to grasp the potential totality of a poem – the sound, the texture, the infinitesimal slice of sensation that it might or might not capture – that I saw how the soul might be given permission to seep through the body, jump around it, go back in again and most importantly reveal itself in the body. A poem can go where it wills (see my poem ‘Verbatim’). This was the beginning of a new understanding that I was one, integrated being. I understood it intellectually, in spite of the fact that the kidney bean-shaped light inside me is still there, a concept or an image learned so early that I have been unable to banish it. The lives of the homeless people I work with are written on their faces, their bodies desperate for food, for warmth. How can this be separate from their longing for stability and friendship? How can we offer one without offering the other?
Wittgenstein’s challenge to the familiar philosophical idea of the self as distinct from the body – ‘The human body is the best picture of the human soul’ (1953: 178) – disrupts the idea, not only that the details of everyday life and of the body are somehow less valuable than the soul with its separate, lofty aspirations but calls those details into life as the life of the soul (or self) itself.
Christians from a wide range of traditions recognise and lament that spirituality and social action have become separated. Women and men, far more involved in the struggle for justice and equality than I am, speak of the limitations of a spirituality which appears to avoid and evade the demands of justice and the cause of a more equal world. These discussions often presuppose a given polarity which colludes with the argument it is opposing. Why would we need to ‘bring together’ concepts and activities which are one concept, one activity in the first place? In A Theology of Liberation, Gustavo Gutiérrez writes:
There are not two histories, one profane and one sacred, ‘juxtaposed’ or ‘closely linked’, rather there is only one human destiny. (2001: 151)
Jesus did not lead two lives, one sacred and one secular, or preach two messages. The life that he led, the friends that he chose, the words that he spoke and the manner of his death were all of a piece, like the seamless garment.
I once undertook a two-year course in Spiritual Direction. While I learned a lot and still think with affection of the other participants, it took me many years to work out that I had always been uneasy with some of the assumptions which shaped the sessions. I felt like (and was once described as, by the course leader) the ‘enfant terrible’ of the group. My interventions, often on the subject of social justice, felt crude and out of place, to me as well as to the tutors. I accepted the critique from one of the leaders that my social activism was a distortion because it was not balanced with enough contemplative practice. I still accept that this may be true because reflection is an essential part of action, but the assumption underlying the critique is that social action is separate from spirituality.
I was asked at the beginning of the course to keep a journal, which didn’t flourish, but towards the end of the course I wrote over 20 poems within a very short space of time. I had always written poetry, since childhood, but these poems were in a new voice and this was when I started sending poems to magazines with a view to publication. Over 16 years later, a friend has helped me see that the poems were a way of breaking through an enforced culture. They spoke in a voice that was my own but seemed to come from somewhere else, certainly not in the language of the course or much of the language of the Church. Spirituality has within itself the capacity to break out of such cultural control, just as the moment when ‘Howl’ broke open on the world could be described as a spiritual moment, a new way of being in the world. Spirituality disrupts power by paying attention to the unlooked for, the unseen, the marginalised and the forgotten. It is a way of ‘living in every sphere’, a way of displacing oneself (or preferably the community) from comfortable and self-defining places. It is the practice of living well and fully, which always takes us (often very reluctantly) outwards. The Greek word for Church, ekklesia (from ek, out, and kaleo, call) indicates not only that the central Christian notion of community is about being together but also that truly being together involves displacement. Henri Nouwen writes:
In voluntary displacement community is formed, deepened and strengthened – each time we want to move back into what is ordinary and proper, each time we yearn to be settled and to feel at home we erect walls between ourselves and others, undermine community and reduce compassion to the soft part of an essentially competitive life. (1982: 64)
A friend of mine wrote to me recently, describing his arrival in Suzhou Province in China where he had gone to work as a teacher. After a very long journey from the airport during which he was handed over, at fixed points, from one unsmiling, silent individual to another, he was left at the door of his apartment in a new western-style high rise. He had no idea where he was. From the window all he could see were more of the same kind of buildings. The lampshades had cellophane wrapped around them. There was no food in the fridge. He found his way out of the building in search of ‘life’, as he put it. He walked through a concrete underpass and as he emerged he heard the sound of laughter. In a nameless space between the backs of the high rise blocks, local Chinese people were setting up a market. A few lychees were spread out on a handkerchief. An old woman stirred bean curd in a large bucket. Teenage boys were filleting fish and splashing each other with water. The buildings around, which previously had felt alienating and even threatening, were now the ‘walls’ of the impromptu market. My friend could begin slowly to make sense of his surroundings. In this account the stranger, or traveller, was able to feel at home because he was open to being at home wherever he found himself.
In my childhood the sacred was not astonishing, but a dimension of the world so utterly accepted that it did not belong to a separate sphere. The lives of the saints, particularly the more lurid details, were as real to us as if they had happened yesterday. St Francis talked to the birds so we did too. Guardian angels accompanied us and sat beside us on the school bus. St Anthony found lost things and Our Lady with her mysterious and beautiful titles, ‘Tower of Ivory’, ‘Star of the Sea’ and so on, answered our prayers and was deemed capable of travelling to earth and talking to us as she did to Bernadette at Lourdes, and Lucia, Francisco and Jacinta at Fatima.
We all wrote and read poetry at home too. We were given old diaries to write in, and I can still see my brother, now a poet, muttering under his breath while filling page after page of the diary with scribbles. At that time he was too young to read or write. I am still unsure where it came from but the sense we had of a connection between the holy and the arts, particularly poetry, has remained with me. In the Catholic culture in which I grew up, image and word peaceably swapped places. I suppose we did not distinguish between a luminous ‘Our Lady’ who watched over us on our bedside tables, a Renaissance painting of the Madonna, or the story in Luke about her meeting with Elizabeth. What mattered was her mysterious presence in the world. Pablo Picasso is widely accredited with having said ‘Everything you imagine is real’. We could make things we imagined real by writing about them or painting them, but the image on the piece of paper was not valued much more than the image in our heads. The conferring of equal status on the ‘inward eye’ with that of the physical world has caused me some problems in adult life! Occasionally I look back on this time with longing, but in a way it was a bit like being a pagan, all was sacred so nothing was asked of me.
In his autobiography, Timebends, Arthur Miller defines stupidity as ‘the want of empathic power’ (1987: 72). After a concert or (very occasionally) a poetry reading, people can talk easily about being ‘taken out of themselves’. But taken out of themselves to where? The power of the imagination (again, a phrase which slips off our tongues too easily) can take us to where other people struggle and suffer. We are able to stand where they stand, and look at the world with their eyes. This call to action, overtly expressed, is rarely successful in a poem, but when I am writing this is adjacent to what I am attempting to do. The agitated wings of the spirit beat and churn our familiar air, creating currents which uphold us as we fly to where, perhaps, we would rather not go.
For some this might be the City. True Cockneys define themselves as being born within earshot of the Bow bells. I have never lived anywhere in Nottingham (where I was born and live now) where I could not hear the bells of the clock in the Old Market Square in the centre of the City that continues to be a vital source of material for my poems. I grew up with a given understanding of the holiness of everything, but our postmodern, pluralistic culture asks something from those who want to search for and understand what the holy is, if anything. Part of the response to this demand has been one of flight from the contemporary world and in particular the city. Yet, according to scripture, God loved the city. ‘The vision of the heavenly city stands firm against the pagan Elysian fields’, as Andrew Davey puts it in his essay ‘Spirituality of Everyday Life’ (2005: 106). The call to enter the New Jerusalem is a call to participate in its making, and to be in the presence of God. Rowan Williams speaks of this call in his sermon ‘Holy Space’: ‘The light of presence is not the sanctuary lamp but the light in which the people of God see each other’s faces’ (1994: 102). The walls have come down, there is no need for churches or designated holy spaces, the whole space of the city is ‘the whole common life of the redeemed community’ (Williams, 1994: 102).
The influence of liberation theology in recent times has helped us to take location seriously as the contexts in which human activity takes place. Location is essential in the discourse of liberation theology for the formation of our spirituality and theology: the places where we live, work, worship and encounter others. Spirituality and theology which seem at times to be almost completely separated come together in urban areas, in which there is an organic reality to the practice of faith and the pursuit of the Kingdom’s justice.
I have been on the judging panel of a few poetry competitions and any poet who has done this will tell you that the majority of poems will describe emotions which arise from being in English countryside (apart from the significant minority which are about the demise of the steam train). Some will draw on rural images and metaphors irrespective of where they live or even the subject of the poem. In the same way the shadowy spirituality, at its worst, wanders in a nameless floating landscape which is neither rural nor urban and which is devoid of warmth, sexuality or passion for justice and fears the political world as squalid and contaminating.
Walter Benjamin, one of the leading cultural theorists of the twentieth century, based his famous enquiry into the notion of the everyday in the Arcades area of Paris, an area of shopping malls in the city teeming with life, bombarding the onlooker with multi-layered images and experiences. The notion of phantasmagoria is a persistent theme throughout the work. Benjamin, in the age of magic lanterns, light shows and early photographic experiments, pointed to the dream-like state which modernity engenders and the processes which create the spectacle. In our time we might think of the crowded underground railway system (‘the tube’) in London as an area of experience which overwhelms, becoming phantasmagoria, moving images which we cannot process or relate to. Each person on the tube with us has a name, a life and a history but we avoid looking them in the eye because of the dream-like state that such an experience engenders. Benjamin points us, not to the dream-like state of our own lives but to the hidden processes that produce the spectacle. The study of the teeming, everyday life of the streets would bring the historian and the reader to the threshold of the present, to the point of waking. Today’s life and culture, with the centrality of the image and the overwhelming demands of urban life, requires a wide-awake spirituality of which poetry could be the lens.
In A Berlin Chronicle Walter Benjamin urges ‘the wanderer’ to pay attention to the city in the same way that poets traditionally have evoked the beauty of the rural landscape:
Then, signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance. (1986: 8–9)
The city calls out to the poet as it does to the seeker of truth and justice in a multi-layered concatenation of voices, demanding attention, perhaps love. The wave of a gloved hand is not enough.
Wide-awakeness is the presiding spirit of Adam Zagajewski’s Mysticism for Beginners, which not only describes the everyday, but uses the everyday as a way of answering the question of what spirituality is or might be:
The day was mild, the light was generous,
the German on the café terrace
held a small book on his lap.
I caught sight of the title:
‘Mysticism for Beginners’.
Suddenly I understood the swallows
patrolling the streets of Montepulciano
with their shrill whistles,
and the hushed talk of timid travelers
from Eastern, so-called Central Europe, ... (1999: 7)
In the opening line of this poem the poet describes the essential conditions for the mystic gaze: ‘The day was mild, the light was generous’. He looks, not rapaciously straining or seeking a higher illumination, nor colonising what he sees for some separate purpose. In his meekness he inherits the real earth on which he stands, the disclosure of the everyday. His notion of mysticism does not belong to him, it is not something he has earned but is a gift from another (the enemy?), a German on the cafe terrace. The poet does not claim the idea, central theme or title of the poem as his, but projects them onto a book lying open for everyone to read. Suddenly he ‘understands’ the swallows in this particular street, in this particular town, Montepulciano. In the ‘generous light’ their ‘speech’, their shrill whistles, and later the nightingale ‘practicing its speech’, are equally understood by him as the hushed talk of timid travellers from his own country, ‘hushed’ by others and renamed as Central Europe. Memories are integrated into the present; the herons, yesterday, the day before. He goes on to describe the head of a little princess that he has seen the day before in the Louvre. Art and nature equally dazzle and are infused with the same source of energy:
and stained glass like butterfly wings
sprinkled with pollen,
and the little nightingale practicing
its speech beside the highway,
and any journey, any kind of trip,
are only mysticism for beginners,
the elementary course, prelude
to a test that’s been
postponed. (1999: 7)
Finally we are brought under the poem’s mild gaze and generous light. All our journeys – to work, shopping, towards and away from one another – are trips to our own lives, to the everyday. Mysticism is not some higher attainment for exceptionally gifted individuals, but a gift which we already have. The joke which ends the poem is that we cannot see our own giftedness or the giftedness in our own context, but live our lives as if we have failed some imaginary test.
‘Who better to understand the nature of words than a poet?’ This rash question was asked in 1955 by David Wallace, manager of marketing research for Ford’s ‘E-car’ project (Richler, 1983: 66–73). The poet Marianne Moore was asked to contribute names for the E-car, and her list included ‘Mongoose Civique’, ‘Andante con Moto’ and ‘Utopian Turtletop’. The E-car was finally christened by Ford as the Edsel.
In scripture, calling and creating are closely linked. ‘He made the stars and named them one by one’ (Isaiah 40: 26). Name giving, as in the stories about Jacob (Genesis 32: 22–31) and Peter (John 1: 40–42), accompanies the moment of their calling by God. During the World Cup series in 2012, I saw a street cleaner pulling his cart, the sort of person who is almost invisible, an extra in the daily drama of the streets. I only saw him because on the front of his cart an England flag fluttered, bravely. There is a poem there, although I haven’t written it. But if someone were to write it, the act of writing, creating, would give the man a name, an identity, calling him out. This is not enough of course. The poem is written, the prayer is uttered but he remains poor and on the margins. However, poem and prayer continue to pay attention, a kind of homage, and slowly the power of the Word will do what it must do: transform the shape of the world that we carry in our minds and imaginations, a shape which, otherwise, is almost always made in our own image.
In the story of Jesus and the rich young man (Mark 10: 21), Jesus looks at him and loves him. The way he looks at him – emblepsas – is variously translated as ‘affectionately’ or ‘steadily’ or the quality of his gaze encapsulated in ‘beholding him’. I prefer ‘steadily’ to convey a quality of attention which calls its subject into being and life. Jesus loved the young man even though he was, like us, incapable of doing what Jesus asked of him. ‘Go, sell everything you have, and give it to the poor … then come and follow me’ (Mark 10: 21–2). Jesus and the young man stood there, on the real ground of their lives, each longing for the other, and wishing that things were different.
A poem, like our longing for God, is pitched between lack and desire, as we wrestle with systemic contradictions, writing into our world the details, the touch, how we wish things to be, the act of creation marked on our (and we hope, our readers’) consciousness. This struggle for transformation would be recognised by anyone reading the Gospels, but it is a struggle which can only be engaged in with bare hands and unguarded hearts, not white gloves and robes of office (of whatever sort).
Among the poems selected for this book, four of them – ‘I Asked a Man for a Light’, ‘Gallagher’s Way’, ‘The Order of Brightness’ and ‘When Pigeons Fall’ – are poems from a collection I have been working on for a number of years, on and off, loosely connected to the Arthurian myths. The ‘I’ figure in this series is highly problematic since the voice can only have come from me and it would be presumptuous to assume that I could speak on behalf of anyone else. The device of the voice, however, allows me to imagine another self, and wander about in their imaginary landscape. The collection concerns a central character called Arthur, who might or might not be homeless, who might or might not be the Arthur of the myths, and who might or might not be a king. The final lines from David Jones’ poem, ‘The Sleeping Lord’, had been in my head for a long time:
Does the land wait the sleeping lord
or is the wasted land
that very lord who sleeps? (1974: 96)
The idea continued to develop very slowly when I began work in the mid-seventies in a day centre for homeless people, Emmanuel House in Nottingham. During that time the founder and director of the project, Fr Roger Killeen, became a good friend and mentor. He told me stories of growing up in Ireland where the ‘gentlemen of the road’ marked the doorways of houses where they had been made welcome with chalk. He often recalled how his mother would ask Roger and his brothers and sisters to bring the visitor into the kitchen and make the required tea and sandwiches. Not only that: the children were told to call the visitor ‘sir’. These memories inspired him to found Emmanuel House.
In those days the old street drinkers would sit in circles in inner city parks to share the day’s bottles. These ‘schools’ were governed by unwritten and arcane but fiercely defended rules; whoever was ‘paid’ that day bought the bottle. If they didn’t, the sanctions could be savage. The ‘Sir Tramps’ of Roger’s recollection and these quixotic but governed circles, their ‘high’ language of drama and catharsis, the sudden and immediately acted-on impulses or quests, conflated in my mind with the Arthurian legends. It seemed that in themselves ‘the knights of the road’, the itinerant, homeless citizens of the city were signifiers, their gestures, tics, habits and speech were prophetic wonders and signs of the times.
Many of the Arthur poems explore themes around silence and voicelessness. In the contemporary world, true physical silence is hard to find and seems to make people feel uncomfortable. At the same time, many people are marginalised because their voices are not heard. The permanent noise is a kind of silence, a state of not hearing the cry of people living on the margins.
For many years I held writing classes in HMP Nottingham and other prisons. One way of engaging the participants was through song lyrics, because they all listened to the radio. Among the main differences between poetry and song lyrics is that poetry can be read in silence and depends on silence as part of its structure whereas a song is designed only to be heard. Some of the participants in the writing groups found this difficult, cramming the rhythm and metre, and experiencing space as unsatisfactory, even intolerable. I felt that there might be a connection between this anxiety and their circumstances – a connection between the gaps and silences that surround a poem and the unheard men and women of the cities whose stories are made up for them by others. Silence in poetry created by caesurae, the margins, between the lines, and at the end of a poem, contains its own power in which everyone can articulate their own narrative, or just let the silence speak for them. The unheard silence of the city is a dimension of my poem, ‘I Asked a Man for a Light’.
Two other poems, ‘Prime Time’ and ‘Breaking News’, are selected from poems I have sent out each year instead of a Christmas card. ‘How to Make a Scene’ was the poem for Christmas 2012 and reflects some of the autobiographical material which was required for this chapter. Each year, people are kind enough to respond to these poems, ask questions and even contact me before Christmas to ask what the theme is going to be. It seems that, as I explore images and metaphors about the Incarnation, popular ideas and legends around the birth of Jesus, and my own understanding of the stories, the recipients of the poems are exploring with me, so that it becomes a live exchange and a mutual greeting. In some odd way, because the poems are written for people I know, there is a sense of continuity between each one, even though they are written a year apart. The awareness of the listener creates a semantic community of ‘surround sound’ which reverberates back and forth, sometimes changing or adding to the meaning, or divining meaning of which the poet is unaware. Philosophers speak of ‘performative utterances’ where to speak is to act, and that act effects permanent change. ‘I name this ship’ is a common example. Between reader and poet, as between the pray-er and the prayed for, there is a mysterious common activity in which things are changed forever.
My poem, ‘Transport’, in part draws on a favourite film ‘Wings of Desire’ (Der Himmel über Berlin, translated literally as ‘The Heavens over Berlin’), a 1987 Franco-German production directed by Wim Wenders. I include a sudden shout of ‘Terra del Fuego’ on the London underground by way of tribute. In the film, two angels, Cassiel and Damiel, walk unseen alongside the citizens of Berlin: a pregnant woman in an ambulance on the way to the hospital, a painter struggling to find inspiration, a broken man who thinks his girlfriend no longer loves him. Through their dialogue we learn of their task, to witness the development in humanity of ‘spirit’. In this extract, Cassiel and Damiel are sitting side by side in a car which is for sale in a car showroom. Cassiel takes out his notebook and begins to read his regular report out loud.
CASSIEL: And today, on the Lilienthaler Chaussee, a man, walking, slowed down, and looked over his shoulder into space. At Post Office 44, a man who wants to end it all today pasted rare stamps on his farewell letters, a different one on each. He spoke English with an American soldier – the first time since his schooldays – and fluently. A prisoner at Plotzenzee, just before ramming his head against the wall, said: ‘Now!’ At the Zoo U-Bahn station, instead of the station’s name, the conductor suddenly shouted: ‘Tierra del Fuego!’
DAMIEL: Nice.
I love the demotic ‘Nice’ at the end of the dialogue. The angels interpret ‘spirit’ by paying attention, by reverencing everyday details. When Damiel falls in love with a trapeze artist (her costume includes a pair of wings) he chooses to leave heaven to be with her. When he ‘lands’ he goes to a café. To taste, to bleed, to feel – the culmination of his centuries-long wish for physicality – is concentrated on the blissful experience of drinking a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette. Poets have something to learn from Damiel’s return to earth. As an angel he looks dramatic and noble in a long black coat. Once on earth he buys a cheap leather jacket and ill-fitting trousers and shoes. His immersion into reality is not aesthetically satisfying – his appearance jars, his walk is ungainly. His is the beauty of the everyday, calling forth our empathy, our bewilderment and our distaste, in a way that he never could, as an angel.
‘From The 110th Floor’ was inspired by the work of Michel de Certeau (1925–1986), the French Jesuit and scholar whose chapter ‘Walking in the City’ (1988: 156ff) was based on his observations from the top of the World Trade Centre in New York, a poignant standpoint from our perspective. He observed that through walking in the city, people created their own style, their own pathways, a sort of language which spoke about the city and contributed to creating its meaning. The pedestrian gives new meanings to places and streets which are not the same as those originally assigned to them. The purposeful cat in ‘Swedenborg’s Drains’ also represents the transgressive imagination, making pathways to new, or other worlds.
As a way of exploring these ideas I decided to write a poem (‘There Will Be No More Temples in the City’) which was constructed by recording every piece of writing: billboard, graffiti, ‘Back Soon’ notes, personalised wheelie bins, every consciously scripted mark on the face of the city in a specific location, in this case one side (it’s a long road!) of the Radford Road in inner city Nottingham. I made many discoveries during this project. For instance, although it is among the highest recorded areas of deprivation nationally as well as locally, there are many businesses and small enterprises there. There are very few graffiti, but the occasional flourish is highly stylised and not abusive. Notices, flyers, hoardings and shop fronts disclose food, celebration and travel as major preoccupations. Although I live near this street, in many ways I am a tourist there but I would rather not be. Tourism brings you back home unchanged. In an encounter, you are changed forever and you never quite go back home. A poem should have the quality of an encounter for poet and reader, both responding to the echoing mysteriousness happening in the space between.
‘If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry’ (Dickinson in Johnson 1958: 472–4). It is hard to imagine the reclusive Emily Dickinson on the London tube, but her famous remark reminds me of a phrase (attributed, among others, to Herman Melville writing about Hawthorne) now used widely to describe the power of literature to raise one’s level of awareness above its own capacity: ‘the shock of recognition’. This recognition which poetry is capable of engendering may be one last vestige of connection with our selves. In 2007, feeling exhausted after a long interview for a job I knew I hadn’t got, I went to Tate Modern to see ‘Shibboleth’ in the Turbine Hall by the Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo. I still cannot think of this piece without associating it with the ‘shock of recognition’. It ran the full 167 metres (548 feet) of the cavernous hall, beginning as a hairline crack in the concrete floor of the building, then widening and deepening as it snaked across the room. There was some mystery as to how it was ‘installed’ (a mystery no doubt carefully managed by the Tate marketing department) and the vestiges of it, if you look closely, are still there. ‘The Crack’ (as I think of it) both described and illuminated the everyday and any ‘beyondness’ which it evoked was present in its own physicality. At the time I attributed the astonishing impact of the work at least partly to my own exhaustion. Much later in Philip Wander’s introduction to Henri Lefebvre’s Everyday Life in the Modern World I read:
But beyond the bleakness of an everyday life regulated by the needs of consumption, Lefebvre points to ‘the cracks in the concrete’ made by that which cannot be wholly repressed; the awakening of sexual desire and love; the undeniable delights of play; and the allure of the festival; the bursting of work time and pre-fabricated leisure experience into celebration. (Lefebvre 2000 p ix)
The everyday is also dangerous because, as Henri Lefebvre notes: ‘it exposes the possibilities of conflict between the rational and the irrational in our society and our time’ (2000: 23). It is the nature of poetry to be dangerous, to burst through the cracks, to surprise, to invert, to praise, to illuminate: a list of activities which sounds very much like the job description of the Holy Spirit.
The crack in the Turbine Hall was surrounded by Health and Safety warnings because it was, in places, several inches deep. These warnings were apposite because the everyday is open-eyed towards the exercise of power.
Christine Levich’s translation of Henri Lefebvre reads:
Banality? Why should the study of the banal be itself banal? Are not the surreal, the extraordinary, the surprising, even the magical, also part of the real? Why wouldn’t the concept of everydayness reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary? (1987: 9)
A few years ago I was in the back of a taxi and the driver and I both noticed a man lurching painfully down the road towards the city centre. I knew this man vaguely, although he never appeared in any of the day centres or hostels. His progress, as his body swung dangerously from side to side on two sticks, was so slow that often I passed him going into town and, on my return, he would still be making his way down the hill. With every excruciating lurch forward he emitted a loud groan. The taxi driver said to me: ‘We have people like that in my country’ (which turned out to be Nepal); ‘they are holy men.’ And turning round to face me, hands still on the wheel, with a smile he said, ‘I think he turns clay into gold’.
… and then I sat on the steps of the Council House
between the stone lions who seem
to be guarding something, I don’t know what;
Hint of marble within, uniforms,
do they not know that I am a king?
That day I asked questions of the air, the pigeons
and these are my questions: when I look at my hand
who am I looking at? When pigeons fall
from the sky, why are the cracks
smoothed over, made blue again?
The orange flags, stirring above cars in Motor Mart,
what country? What song are they singing?
and this drum drum beat beat which says do this do that
every day, hearing it. I know I’ve left my sword somewhere;
spurs, fealty, quest, words people heard and answered
all tumbled by the side of the road.
No-one, not even my Key Worker, who has the answer
to everything in her filing cabinet, can answer these questions.
Why does the fountain seem triumphant and why can I recognize the joy
when I can’t remember it? What do I sound like when I speak
and most of all where among the pigeons is the one who cries ‘you, you’?
When will the doorways pour light
onto my waiting head?
I asked a man for a light, once,
and he gave it to me. Car lights
swam in the rain; cars hooted,
the bricks of the Night Shelter
red, black, blue, red, black,
blue, as clubbers parted around us.
I have this one rule, I call none of them
Sir. This one’s face
bending towards me, was ordinary,
darkish, he’d cut himself shaving;
circles under his eyes.
It wasn’t a great moment for me
I try to avoid this sort of thing,
and for him it would be forgotten
before it was over. If it were not
that he looked tired, and his lighter
was square and polished,
dark hairs on his thumb
rain on his lapel,
and that, briefly, in the flame,
he looked at me,
I would have forgotten it myself.
‘He has the way of it,’ said Smudge,
we nodded, drained our glasses,
conjuring Gallagher and his way,
walking everywhere, upturned eyes
seeming sightless; (he could see alright)
fixed on something floating above his head.
‘A bottle most likely,’ said Binky,
or a cup, I said. But we all agreed
that Gallagher has the way of it.
Every day he meets a swan
in the stone lake behind the Museum.
Every day the swan comes looking
importantly, like a witness at a line-up,
then rearing, in a blink half-snake,
the black line of his face breaking,
Gallagher holding his one piece of bread
over the warning ‘Do Not Feed
These swans can be dangerous’.
‘He drinks the same way,’ said Chalky.
‘Gazing above the glass for a minute
before raising the next.’ The way
he buttons his coat precisely,
tied round the middle with a striped necktie,
one hand pressed on his breast pocket
where the bread is, treading steadily,
those upturned eyes unchanging,
never wavering or stumbling.
‘He’ll be in, in a minute,’ said Smudge,
and we fell quiet, looking at the chair
as if waiting for something to begin.
‘Did y’ever see him fall?’ asked Binky.
‘He’ll fall down finally,’ said Chalky,
‘when he’s had enough, still in his coat’
‘With those eyes, you’d not know the difference,’
said Tully, who’d had a few, but old Mary
said, ‘I’d like a little piece of that bread from him, myself.’
1 small cabbage, 1lb pots, 1pkt. streaky (if cheap).
Rosary at 8. Write to Earl.
The butter sputters in my bent pan
Smearing Norah’s postcard of the Bridge of Sighs,
which I’d always imagined as puffs of breath,
like broken beads,
barely holding their own.
Our breaths froze in the dark mornings,
as we carried cabbage and bacon to the boys.
That pearl of air was part of me,
but where’s it gone? ‘You have some fancies,’ says Norah
She thinks I’m simple, writing to Death Row
but it’s not easy. ‘Just be yourself,’
the lady from Amnesty said.
During the Sorrowfuls I saw his black finger
tracing my writing on the airmail paper.
During the Joyfuls (which Norah gabbles)
I saw the rare light, like a medal on his breastbone.
During the Glorious Mysteries, his breath rose
from behind the walls like a long-held note.
his whole lost body failing to come out.
Beside a boarded-up Burger King,
a white pigeon began to sing.
In the aisles of ‘Everything’s a Pound’
two enemies passed – then turned around.
While Krista slept in the bus station,
forgotten stars made a new constellation,
and midnight chimed. Sleepers in the doorways heard
their names, and as they stirred
The Town Hall’s stone lions spread their wings,
three homeless men appeared as kings,
and a sail unfurled in the waiting skip
which cleaved through The Square as a blazing ship,
a child at the helm. Women of the night wrote on the prow
‘We name this ship the Here and Now.’
Late one afternoon, on the Piccadilly line
between Knightsbridge and Acton, where once
I’m told, the Jarrow hunger marchers sat
in a terraced street, and the women ran out with food
and the marchers sang ‘Jerusalem’
by way of thanks and rose up again, silently,
and a man with an eye-patch
sitting next to me said suddenly, very loudly;
‘Tierra del Fuego! Tierra del Fuego!’
A woman in a knitted beret with a thistle hatpin
was reading a typed manuscript, open on her knee,
‘Wild plants of the London Underground’.
With each shudder of the train she mouthed
‘Squirrel-tail fescue, Fool’s watercress,
Mouse-ear hawkweed, Yarrow.’
The train shook over a narrow bridge
and I could see a row of houses with yellow doors
and a woman taking pyjamas, sheets, towels, off the line
and when the person on the other side of me got off
at Barons Court they left behind a half-open bag
and a clown costume was spilling out,
a false nose on elastic and some shiny cloth
with pompoms. I picked it up
with some idea of doing something – what?
and I wondered if someone had been a clown
and changed their mind, there and then,
wanting to be someone else, and was at that moment,
sitting on one of those wooden benches on the platform
with the station name along the back on enamelled metal panels
which are a unique feature on the entire London Underground.
Each Christmas they make an arch of stars
in the precinct, spelling out
‘Festive Bonanza – Doug’s Used Cars’,
but I haven’t noticed.
‘Do not sit here’ warns the arrow,
pointing to the blue-glazed steps – this is the place,
beneath the blank eye of the disappearing sparrow
on the ‘Birds of Britain’ mural.
My bags look up at me like children
and I begin. I don’t need their shreds of paper,
just their fat shapes and rapt attention.
Stars shoot and return.
Wilfrid – cause of death unknown,
James ‘Binky’ O’Neil – the winter,
Seamus – an infected splinter,
Patsy – just decided time to go.
The Weasel, loathed by all, disappeared.
Also Feegan with his Assyrian beard,
Whisky John.
Geordie ‘The Crow’ set on fire
Meredith, climbing St. Aidan’s Spire,
Blind Mary, the winter.
Officer, I’m halfway through,
Sir Fingers Donnelly – adieu,
Queenie missed her step.
Let go of my arm, I’ve done.
You rolling shutters, rattle. Stars
flow down, prick through my overcoat.
Your names are the pain in my bones.
Up-end a cardboard box, paint it brown and green,
paste red cellophane behind the cut-out window,
light a candle (ask a grown-up to help),
run round; be awed, astonished at the glow;
find Mexican Mary in her brown poncho.
Noah will do for Joseph from the old Noah’s ark.
Twice his size, a raffia sheep keeps watch
with an odd menagerie; one year, a clock-work shark.
Leave them round the empty walnut shell, the half-dark
is alive with expectation; it will follow you up the stairs
and never leave you. Somewhere on the journey
the Town Hall clock strikes midnight: you are there
under the Christmas lights in the Market Square.
You speak, she doesn’t answer, there’s nothing you can say,
she smiles back and pats her belly,
you stay a while, give money, turn away.
Turn back. Walk towards the woman and her child,
crouch beside them to keep dry.
Peer round the cardboard,
at the rare worshipper,
the passers by.
On this spot, which you know
well, at the bottom of my street,
where it joins the boulevard and the park,
where each year there is a fair,
where tree roots swell
through the paving-stones,
we parted. ‘See you next week!’
As we say it, we see it, heads bent
over the table, but I have to go,
the drain men are there
with their rods and cameras.
Next door’s cat with exact feet leads
me to the screen they’ve set up
in my back yard. Inside
an engraved page flutters
open, Emmanuel signals
to William, their effortless angels
stir underground. ‘Have a look,’
says the drain man. The cat brushes
against blue tunnels, parallel rooms,
where you and I are still
at the bottom of the street,
roots growing from our soles.
I’m hiding a gift, one hand behind my back.
Behind us the sky changes, blue, grey, blue grey,
disappearing on the lips like sugar, lightening
above the staggered satellite dishes, transmitters, observation towers.
Now we can see the rain. I wish I were not consoled by this,
I wish I were consoled by the emblazoned ARISE on the end terrace wall.
I wish I were the busker’s fanfare; here I come,
struggling through the entrails of his trombone,
landing upside down, seeing what he sees, the streets, the pouring light,
Oh yes, the gift. I’ve opened my hand, it’s empty.
Take it. If you do, all that’s gone before
will never be the same again.
Pitched between twin and twin, the endless
thin skin of sky, he watched, uncertain, always
of the unseen, tugging like tides
between
the grid of West Side Highway and Vesey St,
silent traffic; the angled yellow cabs,
packed like bees. He repeated notions
from unfinished chapters; consolations and desolations
as familiar as his own circulating
blood, rushed up
one tower, down the next, blending as they always
would, into one. ‘It’s hard to be up when you’re down’
‘Must one descend fall back finally into
the dark space where crowds move back and forth…?’
– On the other hand, they are in the arms of lovers –
a fall of grace
He extended his fused fingers, the wing
of his body covered the pigeons, their stratagems.
with verses from the book of Ezekiel, chapters 40–43
At the beginning of the year, on the tenth day of the month, in the twenty-fifth year of our exile.
tell us everything you see
Mann Leisure, Sale and Distribution of Amusement Machines, also TV and video repairs; Midlands Community Training and Development (boarded up), The Sanctuary.
The length of the rod which the man was holding was six cubits.
Nations Grid Gas (defended by steel fence) Pound£leshcontempt appearing, Dovetail Joinery manufacturer of Exclusive and Fitted Furniture, Whatever You’re Planning for in 2012 We Can Help.
Reckoning by the long cubit which was one cubit and one hand’s breadth.
5 star Motors – Car washing incl. Sundays, also Parts, Keep Hyson Green Blooming, Jesus4Shariah. Chapatti Junction Curry King, Warszawa International Mini Market, Persian Mini-Market, mind the step.
He measured the thickness and height of one wall, each was one rod.
Ozi’s £ Plus, Demad House Lace Manufacturers. (on a wheelie-bin) ‘All the darkness cannot put the light out of a candle’ Patik loves Rosie. Kerkuk Restaurant – men only, (on a wheelie-bin) Knowledge without Understanding is Empty.
He measured the threshold of the gateway, each depth was one rod. Each cell was one rod long, and one rod wide, and there was a space of five cubits between the cells
Faith in Action: Enjoy the Fun – Party Games, Please drop your washing off here. Bro, where was ya, I waited 2 hours, Adult Shop. E-L-evate School of Motoring, Win your golden ticket here!
The threshold of the gateway on the side facing the temple was one rod.
Mishimushi Records, Church of the Body of Christ Car Park , Youth for Christ Night Tonight.
Now the cells of the gateway, looking back eastwards, were three in number on each side, all of them same size, and their pilasters on either side were each of the same size
Nutan Jewellers Pawnbrokers – We cash cheques – any cheque considered, The Old General – quiz night most nights, Wilok’s International Food Stores – African and Caribbean Food – Mobile Phone top-ups – Money Transfers and International Calls. Drongos for Europe tickets here.
He measured the entrance to the gateway; it was ten cubits wide, and the width of the gateway itself was thirteen cubits
Christelle Shop African Hair and Beauty Design. Back in 10. Final Cut – Men’s Hair designs, open ‘til midnight. Madni Sweet Mart and Pan House, Karczna Pod Zbóbnem.
In front of the cells on each side lay a kerb, one cubit wide; each cell was six cubits by six
Accra Central Market – African-Caribbean Foods – exotic and European foods – deals in Ghanaian dishes, Hafiz Supermarket and Halal meat and Poultry, Iberian Delights delicious Panini, Cost of Botched Police Raids – your Evening Post sold here. Nadia, callers welcome, I am George, a blue-green Macaw with orange shoulders, very worried.
The man brought me to the outer court and I saw rooms and a pavement round the court. The pavement ran up to the side of the gateways, as wide as they were long
Skype calls here, Diamond Island – 7p to Ghana. Umani Fashions. All night Market – fresh fruit and vegetables daily – Fresh Naan – Charcoal oven. Carlton, I love you, if you read this you’d know.
A man walks alone in a field of stones,
cutting his feet on ancient stains,
Crow cries ‘seed’ in the leafless skies
‘Bread is breaking where each stone lies.’
Ox stood by a woman and her child;
breathe-in-strength and breathe-out shield;
Ass coughs ‘Fool can’t do, can’t do,
but my breaking back will carry you.’
Cracked bowl, empty well,
she parts dry lips but there’s nothing to tell.
Rough Ground listened but Camel spoke first
‘Waters are breaking for all who thirst.’
Pigeon spoke from the gargoyle’s mouth,
‘grain of truth, grain of truth’.
Woman of the night croons ‘I love you true.’
‘Yes, tonight I’ve come to be with you.’
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Catechism of the Catholic Church (London: Burns and Oates, 2000)
Chesterton, G.K., Collected Poems (London: Methuen 1933)
Cornford, Frances, Poems (Hampstead: Priory Press, 1910)
Davey, Andrew, ‘Spirituality of Everyday Life’ in Spirituality in the City (London: SPCK, 2005)
De Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life (ET Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)
Ginsberg, Allen, Collected Poems 1947–1980 (New York: Harper and Row, 1984)
Gutiérrez, Gustavo A., Theology of Liberation (London: SCM Press, 2001)
Johnson, Thomas H. (ed.), The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Volume 2, (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958)
Jones, David, The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments (London: Faber & Faber, 1974)
Leech, Kenneth, The Eye of the Storm, Spiritual Resources for the Pursuit of Justice (London: DLT, 1992)
Lefebvre, Henri, Everyday Life in the Modern World (London: The Athlone Press, 2000)
Lefebvre, Henri, trans. Levich, Christine, ‘Every day and Everydayness’ in Yale French Studies, 73, Everyday Life (1987) available at http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/skey/research_prev/reading/The%20everyday%20and%20everydayness_Lefebvre.pdf Accessed 18 April 2013
McClure, Michael, Scratching the Beat Surface (New York: Penguin, 1984)
Miller, Arthur, Timebends (London: Methuen, 1987)
Nouwen, Henri J.M., Donald P. McNeill and Douglas A. Morrison, Compassion (London: DLT, 1982)
O’Brien, Sean, On Michael Donaghy: Black Ice, Rain and the City of God, The T.S. Eliot Lecture delivered by Sean O’Brien at the Poetry International Festival, South Bank Centre, London, on Sunday 26 October 2008 available at http://greatamericanpoetryshow.com/articles-and-essays/michael-donaghy-by-sean-obrien/ Accessed 18 April 2013
Richler, Mordecai, The Best of Modern Humour (New York: Knopf, 1983)
Sheldrake, Philip, Spaces for the Sacred (London: SCM Press, 2001)
Williams, Rowan, Open to Judgement (London: DLT, 1994)
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, Philosophical Investigations II, (New York: MacMillan, 1953)
Zagajewski, Adam, trans. Clare Cavanagh, Mysticism for Beginners (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999)
1 Words attributed to William Blake.
2 Commended as runner-up in Manchester Cathedral International Religious Poetry Competition 2012.
3 Commended as runner-up in Manchester Cathedral International Religious Poetry Competition 2011.