Charles Causley*

Charles Causley (1917—2003) is a poet of our times, and yet one more in tune, musically, with the past — becoming at first known for his ballads. He was never a poet of the avant garde — and was called by Dana Gioia, in the late 1990’s, “The most unfashionable poet alive.” He lived a quiet life as a teacher at the same school he had attended, never married, and spent many years caring for his aging mother.

He wrote extensively of his native Cornwall, but also of his world travels. He served in the Royal Navy, and, after completing thirty years as a school teacher, accepted invitations to be writer-in-residence at the University of Western Australia, the Footscray Institute of Technology, Victoria, and the School of Fine Arts, Banff, Alberta.

His first poetry collection, Farewell, Aggie Weston, appeared in 1951; he began to also publish books for children beginning with Figure of 8 in 1969.

In 1984, Gioia said, “Causley’s characteristic mode is often the short narrative…” comparing him to William Blake, his “late eighteenth-century master… [who] provided him a potent example of how the poetic outsider can become a seer.” He added, “The visionary mode has its greatest range of expression in Causley’s religious poetry.”

The following poem is from Charles Causley’s small illustrated book of twelve Christmas poems Bring in the Holly (Frances Lincoln, 1992).

Mary’s Song

Your royal bed
Is made of hay
In a cattle-shed.
Sleep, King Jesus,
Do not fear,
Joseph is watching
And waiting near.

Warm in the wintry air
You lie,
The ox and the donkey
Standing by,
With summer eyes
They seem to say:
Welcome, Jesus,
On Christmas Day!

Sleep, King Jesus:
Your diamond crown
High in the sky
Where the stars look down.
Let your reign
Of love begin,
That all the world
May enter in.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Charles Causley: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Coventry Patmore*

Coventry Patmore (1823—1896) is an English poet and essayist. From 1846 to 1865 he worked for the British Museum. He was best-known in his day for his four-volume Angel in the House which presents an idealized view of married life. Critics, however, suggest that The Unknown Eros, and Other Odes (1877), through never as popular, contains his best work.

Dana Gioia — in a recent interview for Catholic World Report — said, “The best religious poems give us a vividly authentic experience of the divine and the divine order of creation.” He went on to recommended three poems for readers to consider. The least known of these was Coventry Patmore’s “The Toys.” Gioia commends it as “a profound and troubling view of parenthood. As a widower, Patmore had to raise his children without a mother. He was a loving but imperfect father. This touching poem ends in one of the best depictions of God’s mercy in English literature.”

The Toys

My little Son, who look'd from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobey'd,
I struck him, and dismiss'd
With hard words and unkiss'd,
His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darken'd eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing wet.
And I, with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-vein'd stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I pray'd
To God, I wept, and said:
Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
"I will be sorry for their childishness."

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Coventry Patmore: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection is Ampersand (2018, Cascade). His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock, including the anthologies The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

Paul Lake

Paul Lake is the winner of the 2012 Richard Wilbur Award (as selected by Dana Gioia) which resulted in Lake's third book of poems, The Republic of Virtue, being published by the University of Evansville Press. He has also published two "poetry chapter books" and two novels — the most recent of which is Cry Wolf: A Political Fable (2008).

He has recently retired from his Professorship at Arkansas Tech University. Paul Lake is the Poetry Editor of First Things, where the following poem first appeared.

Saving Jesus

"BrickHouse Security saves Jesus for 8th year in a row,
offers free GPS tracking of nativity scenes and holiday displays."

Somehow escaping
The sharp eye
Of angels, shepherds,
And magi,

Thieves snatch the infant
From the crèche
To spirit God off
In the flesh.

Clearly, it’s
The thieves’ intent
To massacre
The innocent

Like Herod
In the dark of night,
Forcing parents
To take flight.

To empty Christmas
Of the Christ
Would seem the purpose
Of the heist—

Unless the abject
And forlorn
Hijack the babe
To feel newborn

Themselves, and think
By robbing churches
They gain a love
They cannot purchase.

Unlike the soulless
Figurine
With planted chip,
The Nazarene

Restores the lost
Sans GPS,
And covers crime
With holiness.

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

Dana Gioia*

Dana Gioia has five poetry collections, including Interrogations at Noon—which won the 2002 American Book Award—and his latest, 99 Poems: New & Selected (Graywolf, 2016). He was the chair for the National Endowment for the Arts between 2003 and 2009. Gioia teaches at the University of Southern California.

He is one of the poets featured in my new anthology The Turning Aside: The Kingdom Poets Book of Contemporary Christian Poetry, which came out in November — (available here) and through Amazon.

The following poem is from the December issue of First Things. More of his poems are available on the First Things website.

Tinsel, Frankincense, and Fir

Hanging old ornaments on a fresh cut tree,
I take each red glass bulb and tinfoil seraph
And blow away the dust. Anyone else
Would throw them out. They are so scratched and shabby.

My mother had so little joy to share
She kept it in a box to hide away.
But on the darkest winter nights—voilà—
She opened it resplendently to shine.

How carefully she hung each thread of tinsel,
Or touched each dime-store bauble with delight.
Blessed by the frankincense of fragrant fir,
Nothing was too little to be loved.

Why do the dead insist on bringing gifts
We can’t reciprocate? We wrap her hopes
Around the tree crowned with a fragile star.
No holiday is holy without ghosts.

Posted with permission from the poet

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Dana Gioia: first post

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

William Everson

William Everson (1912—1994) is a beat poet of the San Francisco Renaissance. When he discovered the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, he dropped out of university and decided to become a poet himself. During WWII he was a conscientious objector, working in lumber camps in Oregon. In 1947 Kenneth Rexroth wrote a bold endorsement of Everson's work that helped launch him as a national poet.

After having recently read Augustine's Confessions, at midnight mass on Christmas Eve 1948 he had a mystical experience, which led to his conversion. He took on the name Brother Antoninus, having become a lay brother with the Dominican order. The three books he wrote during this time are often considered his finest work: The Crooked Lines of God (1959), The Hazards of Holiness (1962) and The Rose of Solitude (1967). The media grew intrigued at the thought of a monk being associated with the Beat movement, and so Everson was in demand for public readings. Dana Gioia says that "Fame proved Everson's undoing." He left the order in 1969 to marry a woman he'd been counselling.

He was poet-in-residence at University of California, Santa Cruz during the '70s and '80s.

The Making of the Cross

Rough fir, hauled from the hills. And the tree it had been,
Lithe-limbed, wherein the wren had nested.
Whereon the red hawk and the grey
Rested from flight, and the raw-head vulture
Shouldered to his feed—that tree went over
Bladed down with double-bitted axe; was snaked with winches;
The wedge split it; hewn with adze
It lay to season toward its use.

So too with the nails: milleniums under the earth,
Pure ore; chunked out with picks; the nail-shape
Struck in the pelt-lunged forge; tonged to a cask,
And the wait against that work.

Even the thorn-bush flourished from afar,
As do the flourishing generations of its kind,
Filling the shallow soil no one wants.
Wind-sown, it cuts the cattle and the wild horse;
It tears the cloth of man, and hurts his hand.

Just as in life the good things of the earth
Are patiently assembled: some from here, some from there;
Wine from the hill and wheat from the valley;
Rain that comes blue-bellied out of the sopping sea;
Snow that keeps its drift on the gooseberry ridge,
Will melt with May, go down, take the egg of the salmon,
Serve the traffic of otters and fishes,
Be ditched to orchards…

So too are gathered up the possibles of evil.

And when the Cross was joined, quartered,
As is the earth; spoked, as is the Universal Wheel—
Those radials that led all unregenerate act
Inward to innocence—it met the thorn-wove Crown;
It found the Scourges and the Dice;
The Nail was given and the reed-lifted Sponge;
The Curse caught forward out of the heart corrupt;
The excoriate Foul, stoned with the thunder and the hail—
All these made up that miscellaneous wrath
And were assumed.

The evil, the wastage and the woe,
As if the earth's old cyst, back down the slough
To Adam's sin-burnt calcinated bones
Rushed out of time and clotted on the Cross.

Off there the cougar
Coughed in passion when the sun went out; the rattler
Filmed his glinty eye, and found his hole.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about William Everson: second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His new poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

Charles Causley

Charles Causley (1917—2003) is a Cornish poet who, even after gaining international attention, would rarely leave his hometown of Launceston. Although he previously had had slim poetry volumes, such as Farewell Aggie Weston (1951), published, his reputation became established in 1957 with the appearance of Union Street — which included an enthusiastic introduction by Edith Sitwell. In 1967 he received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 1986 he was presented a CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire). In the 1970s, he also began publishing collections of poetry for children.

He was a very private man, and yet had friendships with such poets as Jack Clemo and Ted Hughes. Hughes once said, " Among the English poetry of the last half century, Charles Causley's could well turn out to be the best loved and most needed."

Dana Gioia has called, Charles Causley "a Christian poet in an agnostic age", and notes that the following poem, in which Christ is speaking from the cross, was "inspired by a seventeenth-century Norman crucifix".

I Am the Great Sun

I am the great sun, but you do not see me,
I am your husband, but you turn away.
I am the captive, but you do not free me,
I am the captain but you will not obey.

I am the truth, but you will not believe me,
I am the city where you will not stay.
I am your wife, your child, but you will leave me,
I am that God to whom you will not pray.

I am your counsel, but you will not hear me,
I am your lover whom you will betray.
I am the victor, but you do not cheer me,
I am the holy dove whom you will slay.

I am your life, but if you will not name me,
Seal up your soul with tears, and never blame me.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Charles Causley: second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His new poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre has taken her ekphrastic poetry to a unique level. She is the author of three poetry collections (all published by Eerdmans) which individually take on the paintings of three different Dutch painters. In Quiet Light (2000) shows us Vermeer’s paintings of women, Drawn to the Light (2006) highlights Rembrandt’s religious paintings, and The Color of Light (2007) is about Van Gogh’s late paintings. In these collections each poem accompanies a colour reproduction of the painting which inspired it.

McEntyre has taught at Westmount College, and at the University of California. She has also reflected deeply on the value of language in her study Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies. The following poem came to me through poet Richard Osler, who in turn came upon it propped up within a bookcase belonging to Dana Gioia. The latter poem, of course is from Drawn to the Light.

The Purposes of Poetry

To find a way of putting what can’t be said
To startle us into seeing
To train words to dance
To rescue worthy words from slow death
To reassert the power of whim
To combat mind erosion
To make us feel what we think
And visa versa
To resuscitate the media-impaired
To remind us that truth is round
With holes and corners
To notice what will never happen
Just that way again
To make us consider how our light is spent
Or that the world is too much with us
Or petals on a black bough

The Raising of Lazarus

I wonder how often Jesus surprised
even himself. In Rembrandt's Lazarus
he looks amazed.
The enormity of what he has
set in motion stops him cold.
Hand raised like a lightning rod,
the life force passes through him.
The once dead man struggles to sit up,
gripping the edge of the tomb, wrenched
from a place he might rather have stayed,
called out of darkness into this
questionable light.
It's not at all clear
that this return will give him
reason to rejoice.
Breath comes back to him
with a sigh too deep for tears.
Martha, who insisted,
badgered, accused—"If you had been here
my brother would not have died!"—
holds out her hand, not yet to touch him,
but as if to shield herself
from what she sees.
She didn't know what she asked.
Harsh light falls full on her face.
She is not wreathed in smiles.
Over her head the carpenter's muscled arm
still points toward heaven, raised
in submission to the power that courses
through those veins. A shadow falls
across his face, something almost like fear
fixes his gaze on the miracle from which
there is no turning back.

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

Robert Siegel*

Robert Siegel (1939—2012) is the latest poet to have a volume published in the Poiema Poetry Series. His new book, Within This Tree of Bones is a career retrospective, which emphasizes the spiritual in his work. The four sections demonstrate: the human condition, the disclosure of God through nature, the revelation of God in scripture, and then culminates with celebration.

Dana Gioia wrote in Poetry that "Siegel's imagination is excited by the nonhuman world, and he writes about plants and animals with surprising immediacy...A compassionate observer...he looks at them as mysterious and wonderful signs of a greater order."

For 23 years he taught at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and has also taught at Dartmouth, Princeton, and at Goethe University in Frankfurt.

When I last spoke with Bob, on December 10, he entrusted to me the approving of the final proofs for his new book. He died ten days later. I am honoured to have worked with Robert Siegel to edit this excellent collection for publication. He had not mentioned his battle with cancer to me, until that final phone call. I am sad to know he never held it in his hands, but am pleased that I encouraged him to add many new poems to the collection. The following is the first poem in his new book, and is the source for its title.

Matins

It is morning. A finch startles
the maple leaves. Everything’s clear
in this first light before all thins
to a locust harping on the heat.
While day clutches at my pulse
to inject the usual anesthetic,
now, Christ, stimulate my heart,
transfuse your blood to fortify my own.
Let no light upon these sheets
diminish, Lord, before I feel you
burst inward like a finch
to nest and sing within this tree of bones.

"Matins" from Within This Tree of Bones: New and Selected Poems, Wipf & Stock, Publishers. Copyright 2012 by Robert Siegel. This poem was posted with the poet’s permission. The other titles in the Poiema Poetry Series are Six Sundays Toward a Seventh by Sydney Lea, and Epitaphs for the Journey by Paul Mariani — both published in 2012.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Robert Siegel: first post, third post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

Mario Luzi

Mario Luzi (1914—2005) is one of Italy’s best-known modern poets. His first book of poetry La Barca (The Boat) was published in 1935, and his final book L'avventura Della Dualità (The Adventure of Duality) appeared in 2003. He taught for years at the Universities of Florence and Urbino, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature in 1991.

He is, according to Dana Gioia, “the Italian modernist whom I consider the greatest Catholic poet of the twentieth century.”

The following exerpt is from the book Phrases and Passages of a Salutary Song, translated by Luigi Bonaffini. Within this poem there is a section about the magi, and another about the shepherds. Whose voice this section of the poem is in, is not clear.

from Genia (from the section “Collapse and Overflow”)

Don’t remain hidden
in your omnipresence. Show yourself,
they want to tell him, but don’t dare.
The burning bush reveals him,
but it is also his
impenetrable hiding place.
And then the incarnation — he takes refuge
from his eternity under human
eaves, he descends
into the most tender womb
toward man, into man...yes,
but the son of man in whom he blazes
manifests him and conceals him...
So they advance in their history.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

Dana Gioia

Dana Gioia did not follow a conventional path to become a poet. He attended Stanford Business School, and eventually became a vice-president for General Foods. He is the author of four poetry collections, and was recently (2003—2009) the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts. His influential essay “Can Poetry Matter?” first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1991.

The following poem is from his new collection, Pity the Beautiful (Graywolf Press). In an Image interview he said this poem “offers a set of beatitudes that praise the suffering and renunciation necessary to make us spiritually alert. It celebrates the transformative and redemptive nature of suffering—one of the central spiritual truths of Christianity as well as one easily forgotten in our materialist consumer culture...”

Prayer at Winter Solstice

Blessed is the road that keeps us homeless.
Blessed is the mountain that blocks our way.

Blessed are hunger and thirst, loneliness and all forms of desire.
Blessed is the labor that exhausts us without end.

Blessed are the night and the darkness that blinds us.
Blessed is the cold that teaches us to feel.

Blessed are the cat, the child, the cricket, and the crow.
Blessed is the hawk devouring the hare.

Blessed are the saint and the sinner who redeem each other.
Blessed are the dead calm in their perfection.

Blessed is the pain that humbles us.
Blessed is the distance that bars our joy.

Blessed is this shortest day that makes us long for light.
Blessed is the love that in losing we discover.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Dana Gioia: second post

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

Mark Jarman

Mark Jarman is a poet associated with the new formalism — a movement of contemporary poets who have returned to the use of many elements from poetry’s past; their poems often include metre, rhyme and symmetrical stanzas — but don’t use archaic language, or awkward inverted sentence structures in order to make a poem rhyme. Like Richard Wilbur, who continued writing with formal rhythm and rhyme when others were exclusively writing free verse, newer poets such as Dana Gioia and Mark Jarman seek to maintain that tradition. Jarman co-edited the influential 1996 anthology Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism.

He has taught at Vanderbilt University in Nashville since 1983, where he is the Centennial Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing. His ninth and most recent collection, Epistles was published by Sarabande Books in 2007.

As the journal Image has said, Jarman is courageous, in that he is not only “a champion of the formalist tradition in poetry” which is diametrically opposed to the prevailing trends of recent decades, but he is “unafraid to place [his] religious faith and doubt at the center of his work”. His collection Unholy Sonnets (an uneasy echo of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets), from which the following poem is taken, respects the traditional sonnet structure, and yet is open to its potential variations.

Sonnet #16

And if when he returned he found his mother
Behind the stone that rolled away for him,
Her muscles limp, her memory grown dim,
Unable to respond when he said, “Mother?”
And if he even recognized his mother,
Her outer light and inner light both dim,
Would he do for her what had been done for him?
Would God’s son give a new life to his mother?

I think he would balk. And I know why.
And I know this will sound unorthodox,
For she, like any mother, would have given
A kidney if she could have or an eye
To see her boy alive. The paradox
Is that he’d rather see her safe in heaven.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Mark Jarman: second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca