Poets and Poems: Sean O’Brien and “The Drowned Book”

U.K. poet Sean O’Brien is one of only two poets who have ever won both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same collection of poetry. The collection was The Drowned Book, published in 2007, and it is unusual in that all of the poems are part of a coherent whole. Typically, poetry collections may have thematic sections or some related poems, but it’s atypical for the entire collection to be unified.

O’Brien, a native of Ireland who is currently a professor of creative writing at Newcastle University, is the author of several poetry collections. In addition to the Eliot and Forward prizes, he’s also won several other awards and recognitions. In addition to his 11 collections of poetry, he’s a critic, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and playwright. He’s also a member of the Royal Society of Literature.

In the case of The Drowned Boat, O’Brien says that a major influence on the collection was the translation of Dante’s Inferno he was undertaking at the time.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Poet Sean O'Brien.

“Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death”

It is England the early 1950s. The ravages, personal and national, of World War II are still visible and felt. A young bachelor canon is assigned to the small parish of Grantchester , near Cambridge. He still experiences flashbacks to the war, where he served with distinction. He finds a bit too much solace in the bottle. His sermons tend to be largely about love, trust and forgiveness, but he seems to have trouble trusting and forgiving himself.

Unexpectedly, he finds himself embroiled in murder, and discovers he can go places and talk to people in ways the police cannot.

If you’re a fan of The Grantchester Mysteries, you will recognize the story line. The first series has shown on PBS here in the United States; the second has recently completed filming in the U.K. and will be aired in 2016 on ITV and (it’s hoped) PBS. Actor James Norton plays the title character of Canon Sidney Chambers.

The series is based on the short story collections of author and film producer James Runcie. The first book in the series is Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death, a collection of six mystery stories featuring the canon, four of which were filmed as episodes in the PBS series.

In “The Shadow of Death,” what looks like an obvious suicide turns out to be something else entirely. In “A Question of Trust,” an expensive engagement ring goes missing at an engagement party. “First, Do No Harm” concerns the suspicions of the local coroner about elderly people dying a little too soon before their times. In “A Matter of Time,” a young woman is strangled in a London nightclub in Soho, apparently in full view of everyone there (including Sidney, who loves jazz). “The Lost Holbein” concerns the forgery and theft of a valuable painting of Anne Boleyn. And in “Honourable Men,” a local aristocrat is killed during a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Casear.

In the first story, Chambers develops a friendship with the local police inspector, Geordie Keating, a friendship that becomes a central feature of each of the stories.

The first four stories formed the basis of the four television episodes of The Grantchester Mysteries, but as television producers tend to do, a number of liberties were taken with the written stories. Relationships were condensed and combined; story lines were greatly simplified. And few of Sidney’s occasional spiritual ruminations are included on television. While a fan of the TV series, I found myself liking Runcie’s stories more – they’re more thoughtful, more nuanced, and a bit more provocative. And a one-night stand between Sidney and a jazz singer in London that is featured in one of the television episodes is nowhere to be found in the written stories.

James Runcie

Runcie has published two other Sidney Chambers mysteries – The Perils of Night (2013) and The Problem of Evil (2014), with the fourth in the series, The Forgiveness of Sins, being published this year. He’s also written four novels. In 2014, he explained in an article for the Telegraph how the inspiration for Sidney Chambers came from his father, the late Robert Runcie, the former archbishop of Canterbury.

If you’re familiar with the format of John Mortimer’s Rumpole of the Bailey stories, you’ll be comfortable with the format of The Grantchester Mysteries – a collection of short stories that share characters and themes and come to seem like a novel.

Related: The trailer from Grantchester’s introduction in 2014:

Top photograph: James Norton as Canon Sidney Chambers in The Shadow of Death.

I, Crispus

After Acts 18

A person of note in Corinth,

I, Crispus, synagogue ruler,

respected, heeded, sought for advice

and counsel, a benefactor welcomed

in the homes of Jews and Gentiles,

my wife acknowledged among the women,

and I have today thrown all of it away

because of the Tarsian, what he said,

what his words burned

into my heart there in the place

I ruled, the synagogue. The others

dismissed him, disparaged him,

laughed at him, ridiculed him,

gnashed their teeth at him and

tore their clothes, mocking outrage.

I did not.

I could not.

I followed him

to the house

next door,

sitting with

Greeks, me and

my household,

baptized.

I am lost.

I am found.

Photograph: The ruin of a Roman fountain in Corinth.

Saturday Good Reads

The disaster refugee crisis still unfolding in Europe has all the world’s attention, but there is another, related refugee crisis that hasn’t – and that’s the one of Christians displaced by ISIS, the Syrian civil war, and related crises in the Mideast. My friend David Rupert is in Jordan, interviewing Christian families who escaped ISIS and civil war to find themselves in oblicion. His reports are sobering.

Photographer Tom Hussey has created a photo essay on elderly people – looking at younger images of themselves. It’s wonderful. Andrew Sullivan at The Dish has a column on America’s most important Christian writer, and it’s not who you think it might be. It’s a story that resists classification – I could have placed it here under faith, poetry, or writing. Or all three.

Doug Spurling changes a flat tire, Monica Sharman writes a letter, Seth Haines has a confession, and Maureen Doallas writes a breathtakingly beautiful anniversary poem. And more.

David Rupert’s Reports on the Christian Refugee Crisis

This Syrian family is looking for a home.

Nowhere to Go: Refugee families escaped ISIS, but cannot escape captivity.

Ancient Christian city, silenced for 14 centuries, comes alive with refugee church.

Family of five: We pray for ISIS.

Poetry

Blow a Kiss – Jerry Barrett at Gerald the Writer.

Rotary Guillotine and The Box – Brendan MacOdrum at Oran’s Well.

Gerard Manley Hopkins – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

Anniversary – A Cento – Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

Graffiti Guy – John Grey at Curator Magazine. 

Faith

Fragrance – Jeanne Damoff at The View From Here.

Her Heart’s Desire – Lynn Mosher.

How to change a flat tire…and a life – Doug Spurling at Spurling Silver.

Why We Walk Six Blocks Through the Cold – Shawn Smucker.

Christians Have One Job – And It’s Not Reading the Bible – Ed Cyzewski.

A Confession, a Liturgy, and a New Ancient Way – Seth Haines.

Open Letter to the Generations Before Me – Monica Sharman at Know-Love-Obey God.

Work

How Do I Know When I Should Switch Jobs? – Single Roots.

Der Champion Tabelle Des Aufbaus Teil 2: Rand – Jack Baumgartner at the School of the Transfer of Energy.

Photography

Elderly People Look at Their Younger Reflections – Tom Hussey at Digital Synopsis.

Vanishing Land – Cate Colvin Sampson at Oxford American.

Party Clothes – Tim Good at Pixels.

Writing

How I Learned to be Human – Mick Silva.

Are Your Book Sales Discouraging? – Sarah Bolme at Marketing Christian Books.

Finding the Words for Faith: Meet America’s Most Important Christian Writer – Andrew Sullivan at The Dish.

Life and Culture

The “Amazing” – What Our Ranking Adjective says About Us – Virginia Hefferman at The Message.

The Shroud of London – a review of London Fog: The Biography – Amy Henderson at The Weekly Standard.

Photograph by Christine Owens via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

“Every Little Thing” by Deidra Riggs

We live in an age of brittle celebrity. You can become famous for, well, being famous. Some of the most popular shows on television are aimed at catapulting unknowns into stardom, and while these shows may be about the people we see on the stage, we know it’s really about us. You don’t publish a book, a play or a song without a pre-existing platform, and in the circular reasoning of book publishing, you gain a platform by first being famous. And what is the evolution of prayer books and rosary beads to smart phones if nothing else but a search for personal meaning? We have all become journalists and photographers and our subjects are ourselves.

The Christian community is marginally in a better place but not immune, although one could argue we should be. Mega-church pastors become Christian celebrities; some Christian authors sell books simply by putting their names on the covers. And we buy and consume according to Christian fads, trends and what’s hot at the moment, much like our secular cohorts do. And perhaps we wonder if only Christian celebrities are the ones who can accomplish the big things for God.

And then comes along a book, a small book, a book about the small things, the little things, the small steps, the people whose names will never be plastered across a mega-church marquee, a book that says what we Christians know to be true: it’s not about who you are, or how big your following, or how big your platform, or how recognizable your name is in George Barna’s polls. It’s about your willingness to serve right where you are, because God doesn’t care how famous you are.

“Most of us will make a difference in this world,” writes Deidra Riggs in Every Little Thing: Making a World of Difference Right Where You Are, “but not because of some grand or large-scale initiative. No, most of us will change our corner of the world and make an impact that stands the test of time through the small and seemingly insignificant (to us) interactions and decisions and conversations of our average days. We make a difference where we live, and incrementally, that place begins to shift (emphasis added).”

Deidra Riggs

The lady knows of what she speaks. She writes from life experiences – jumping from an airplane, the chopping down of a beloved cherry tree, fear of the water (as in ocean), moving from a comfortable Philadelphia suburb to what looks like the end of the earth (flyover country, aka Nebraska), a baby daughter rushed to the hospital. She ties each life experience to Scripture, and she does it in a conversational way, a real way, like you’re sitting with her at the kitchen table and she is telling you her story and it turns out to be your story at the same time.

Riggs is a writer and editor, and she’s also the wife of a pastor. That move to Nebraska? Her husband accepted a position at a church in Lincoln. Initially, things didn’t go well, whether it was the mice in the pantry or parishioners leaving the church with no explanation. She will tell you, and she does: she was miserable, and kept questioning herself, her husband, and God. Seven years passed before she reached the point she did when riding her bike one day: “This is good.” And she could see what God had seen – the difference she and her husband would be making.

Every Little Thing is more than a good book. It’s something that even many Christian books aren’t: it is a true book. It is the experience and wisdom of one woman speaking our common language of the heart, our common language of faith.

Photograph by Lode Van de Velde via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Monica Sharman’s “Behold the Beauty”

It’s an invitation to engage with ordinary, simple, familiar things.

A painting in an art museum. A young boy building a light-bulb circuit. A migraine headache. Searching for thimbleberries. Family rituals, like reading stories aloud. Cooking from a friend’s recipe. Reading a much-loved story from your childhood.

It is in those simple familiar things that writer Monica Sharman finds beauty, and more than beauty. In the beauty of the ordinary she finds metaphors for Bible reading, and has collected those metaphors in Behold the Beauty: An Invitation to Bible Reading.

Her invitation is as simple as the beauty she writes about: “Come with me. Come to that which our ears can hear, our eyes can see, and our hands touch. Extend your hands. Take hold of the Bible, the very words of God Himself.”

This is not a call to excitement and thrills. This is a call to a deliberate, thoughtful walk, a walk with senses alert, yes, but a walk in the quiet things of the everyday. It’s an important call, because we spend most of our lives in the quiet things of the everyday.

And it is there that is the best place to read the words of God.

Monica Sharman

In addition to reading about God’s word, Sharman provides small anecdotes about herself and her family – a hike, a vacation by train, an over-stimulated baby, her own experiences with God at CalTech, where she majored in physics. Each anecdote is carefully woven into the fabric of the story she is telling. And Sharman is a storyteller, a storyteller who seems familiar because she is telling our stories as she tells her own. (Be sure to read the preface by writer Jean Fleming; she knows about Sharman and her storytelling abilities.)

Each relatively short chapter includes practical, simple suggestions – what Scriptures to read, questions to ask (and answer), ideas to try out. She suggests paying special attention to how Scripture uses metaphors and repetition, how conversations develop, how details help tell the story, why the setting is so often so important, and other helpful practices.

Behold the Beauty is written by a woman who loves God’s word and is eager to share that love in practical, familiar ways.

Painting: A Girl with a Broom, oil on canvas; artist unknown but possibly Carel Fabritius, about 1651; National Gallery, Washington, D.C. This is the painting that so captured Monica Sharman’s imagination, as she describes in Behold the Beauty.

Ode to London

A global city, one of the world’s great cities, this place we call and know as London. It has given birth to empire and great literature, houses the oldest continuing monarchy, has created innovative office architecture (The Shard, the Gherkin and the Walkie-Talkie, to mention three) to decorate its skyline, and expresses itself as a contemporary metropolis while more than 2,000 years of history lie beneath it.

It is only fitting that London should have a collection of poems devoted to it. Jane McMorland Hunter’s Ode to London: Poems to Celebrate the City is a small volume but with exactly the right poems to recognize and celebrate the city.

McMorland is a writer and gardener, and works at Slightly Foxed Books on Gloucester Road in west London. She’s published three additional poetry anthologies: First World War Poems, Favorite Poems of England, and Classic Readings & Poems: For Weddings, Christenings, Funerals and All Occasions, in addition to several books on gardening.

Published in 2012, Ode to London includes poems and writers familiar and unfamiliar, historical and contemporary, all of whom celebrate the city. The poems are not in chronological order but rather organized by six categories – its industry, shipping and the Thames, nature, architecture, seasons and people (McMorland gives each section more poetic titles).

Jane McMorland Hunter

The poets include Lord Byron, John Dryden, Mary Robinson, William Blake, Rudyard Kipling, Wilfred Owen, Eleanor Farjeon, Robert Herrick, John Donne, Alfred Noyes, Carrie, Etter, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, John Betjeman, A.A. Milne, and William Wordsworth. They write of summer mornings, arriving in London, the Great Fire (1666), the streets, riding a bus, the Thames and its bridges, the gardens and trees, the weather, Londoners, the statues of Buckingham Palace, and cats (in the case of T.S. Eliot).

The book’s numerous illustrations are all taken from posters published over the years by Transport for London, the government agency that runs the city’s underground and bus systems. Many of the posters are available through the London Transport Museum.

Here is one familiar poem from the collection:

Composed Upon Westminster Bridge

By William Wordsworth

September 3, 1802

Written in the roof of a coach, on my way to France

Earth has not anything to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

This City now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, Theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

All bright and glimmering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill;

Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;

And all that mighty heart is lying still!

Ode to London is a small, readable collection of poems that celebrate a great city.

Photograph: Westminster Bridge, London.