We hope you've had a delicious and relaxing Christmas! To tide us over to the New Year celebrations we're looking ahead to April 2018 and the publication of our New Poetries VII anthology. This week's featured poet is Rachel Mann with 'Evensong' and some thoughts on her work.
Rachel Mann is an Anglican parish priest and honorary canon of Manchester Cathedral. She is the author of four books including a bestselling theological memoir of growing up trans, Dazzling Darkness. Formerly poet-in-residence at Manchester Cathedral her poems have been published in PN Review, The North, Magma, and other places. Her current book is Fierce Imaginings: The Great War, Ritual, Memory & God (London: D.L.T., 2017).
Rachel Mann is an Anglican parish priest and honorary canon of Manchester Cathedral. She is the author of four books including a bestselling theological memoir of growing up trans, Dazzling Darkness. Formerly poet-in-residence at Manchester Cathedral her poems have been published in PN Review, The North, Magma, and other places. Her current book is Fierce Imaginings: The Great War, Ritual, Memory & God (London: D.L.T., 2017).
Must priests write religious poetry? It’s a question I’ve wrestled with repeatedly in relation to my own writing. I am fascinated by the question’s imperative: should ‘must’ be read as in ‘necessary’ or as in ‘inevitable’ or even as in ‘doomed’? Is it necessary or inevitable for a priest-poet be tied to the interrogation of the Divine? Certainly, the origins of many of my poems lie in a recognition that I write in what Les Murray has called ‘the new, chastened, unenforcing age of faith’. The genesis of my poems in this selection lie, in large measure, in acknowledgement of the ever-failing grip the Word has on a culture once saturated by it. I hope, however, I am not simply responding to a 21st Century version of Arnold’s ‘Sea of Faith’. Faith is all very well, but the Word is more interesting.
Perhaps the slipperiness of the Word has an analogue in the seeming frictionless quality of words themselves. One doesn’t need to be a doomy Victorian or a playful post-modern to recognise the refrain that words are inadequate to speak the world. At their most basic, these poems are interested in what might be made with words when some degree of formal and rhythmic friction is applied to them.
David Jones reminds us that one of the implications of the Latin root for ‘religious’, religio, is ‘ligament’ or connective tissue. Ligament is a binding which supports an organ; similarly, the religious may be read as a binding or a securing which makes a certain kind of freedom possible. As Jones’s suggests, ‘cut the ligament and there is atrophy’.
The religious binding tissue in my poems is not so much my faith, still less ‘God’, but my Anglican formation in the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible. Those texts provide the bindings for my language-wrangling. I hope, then, that my poems are not simply playful riffs on archaic phrases and gestures, but represent an attempt at what Evan Boland calls ‘a forceful engagement between a life and a language.’
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whilst imprisoned by the Nazi Regime, wrote ‘There are things more important than self-knowledge.’ Christian Wiman has gone so far as to suggest that ‘an artist who believes this is an artist of faith, even if faith contains no god.’[1] If these poems say something, anything, they do so by their relative disinterest in ‘self-knowledge’ and their commitment to interrogating the connective tissue between words and the traditions which have shaped them.
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Evensong
‘Love is a phoenix that will revive
its own ashes’ – Thomas Traherne
September, and the orchard sags with prayer:
Strip the Fruit of Sin! Reap! Reap!
Wye lifts lime, spins pools of silt at the tip
Of fields and it is late, late, late, oh priest
Hurry on! Sing, O miserable offender,
Within thy walls of stone. Hurry on,
Witness His truth:
Glory is not a word, God is, God is
Neither noun nor verb, but shears laden fields,
He reapeth where he doth not sow.
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New Poetries VII is available to pre-order here, and will be published in April 2018.
