Peter CostelloPoetry Ireland Review Issue 112: Name and Nature: ‘Who do you say that I am?’
The question posed by Jesus to his followers on the road to Caesarea Philippi, which is recorded by the authors of Mark (8:29), “Who do men say that I am?”, is at the heart of this publication.
The disciples replied that some said he was John the Baptist, others Elias, and others one of the prophets. Though Peter then said that the disciples thought he was the Messiah, the puzzlement of many over the identity of Jesus has lingered over the centuries.
For Christians, Jesus is human and yet divine; his divinity may be difficult to resolve, his humanity is often not fully realised by many.
Approach
Theologians approach the human through the divine; poets apprehend the divine through the human.
And it is with the poets that this special issue of Poetry Ireland Review, edited by John F. Deane, is concerned. Deane is one of the few overtly religious poets at work today. His own poetry, and his critical insights into the poetry of others, has been an important element in the development of modern Irish poetry.
He edited some eight issues of Poetry Ireland Review between December 2011 and April 2014. This is the last issue he put together, but it was the outcome of a long-held ambition to pose that vital question first heard near Caesarea to a range of modern poets concerned in very different ways with religion. Not all are Christians and not all are, indeed, believers in any traditional sense. But in their different ways, all apprehend the divine through the human.
The result is a wonderfully diverse anthology of poems. The real interest of the collection for this reviewer was not to encounter familiar names, but to read the work of less familiar, previously unknown writers, and to be moved to thought and emotion by what they have to say.
Even those not usually interested in modern poetry will carry away things from these poems. But what is astonishing is just how vitalising the nature and idea of Jesus has proved to be to such creative talents – not always the Jesus of the sentimentally pious, but a Jesus at once more human and more mysterious shows through in these poems.
Some 55 poets, not all of them Irish, responded to Deane’s invitation. Grand masters such Thomas Kinsella and Seamus Heaney are among them, which is inevitable enough, but so too are Padraig J. Daly, Wendy Cope, Murray Bodo and Michael Glover, among others.
There is also a colour section of illustrations of icons, very traditional in some ways but also many with echoes of Marc Chagall by Valentina Alexsandrovna Zhogova.
Not all the contents are poems in the strict sense; Colum McCann’s prose piece on his father, Sean, happy in his garden shed “playing God” with his roses in a couple of pages achieves a strange depth.
Connection
In his own way his father was in connection with something beyond. “Sometimes,” he concludes, “we have to allow mystery, no matter how small, to grow around us.” This sense of an essential mystery might stand as the core idea to emerge from this anthology.
This issue of Poetry Ireland Review has already proved successful enough to be reprinted. One would hope that it might actually be reissued in book form and so achieve an even greater circulation.
For further information, contact Poetry Ireland, 32 Kildare Street, Dublin 2; tel: +353 (0)1-678-9815; email: info@poetryireland.ie