The Poems of Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781847774521
• eBook ISBN: 9781847775382
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

I dislike the idea of being a religious poet. I would prefer to be a poet for whom religious things mattered intensely. In the poems collected in this book, Rowan Williams writes of many things. He visits the Holy Land, commemorates the deaths of parents and close friends, explores elements of ancient Celtic culture; poems are inspired by works of art, landscapes rural and urban, and historical figures from Tolstoy to Simone Weil. What connects poem to poem is the poet's vividly sensual language, his formal mastery, and how he can address, specifically and particularly, what matters most intensely. Earth is a hard text to read', writes Welsh poet Waldo Williams in a poem translated here. For Rowan Williams, this very reading is the task of the poet.

TRANSLATIONS

Experiencing Death

Don’t know a thing about this trip we’re going on; they don’t

give much away about it. So we don’t know where to stand

to look at the unwelcome destination, how to see our death.

Amazed? entranced? or loathing? How the tragic mask twists things

Out of an honest shape! But still, the world can give

you quite a cast-list to choose from. Just don’t

forget; as long as it’s the audience’s reaction

that worries you, death’s at your elbow on the boards.

No audience fancies corpses. Only when you went offstage,

the flats you slipped through let in something else,

a streak of truth: the colour of real foliage

under real sunshine in a real woodland.

For us, the show must go on. All those lines

we learned, struggling and panicky, the stagey gestures

ordered by some director we can’t put a face to … and then you,

struck off the list, you who are real now a long way off,

Your far-off thereness sometimes overtakes us still, falling

around us like that streak of daylight green, and then

we find, just for a bit, we can play life, not scripts;

not give a damn about applause.

Rilke

Roundabout, Jardin du Luxembourg

Out of that foreign land, the gaudy horses

bounce with conviction for a while (never mind

the shadows from the canopy) — the foreign land

that hangs around long enough after closing time before it fades.

They all look feisty enough, even the ones

(quite a few) with carts hitched on. Oh look!

A big bad lion seems to have got in. Oh look!

A sweet baby white elephant. What next?

Oh look! A stag, just like the ones you see

out in the woods, except of course this one

happens to have a little girl in blue

strapped in a saddle,

and the big bad lion’s

carrying a little boy in white, who’s hanging on

for dear life, while the lion grins and slobbers—

Look! the sweet baby white elephant again …

Those girls are getting too big for the ride,

but there they go, giggling and darting sparky looks

all over the place in mid-flight, and they—oh,

there’s the sweet

baby

white …

Round and round and round and round and round.

Red. Green. Grey. Red. Aching to stop.

Nowhere to go. The little profiles sketchy, hardly started.

Listen! There’s someone laughing as they spin,

as if they were—well, happy, blissful even;

wasting their breath, casting a shimmer round

this blind asthmatic game.

Rilke

Angel

He bends his head away, says his hard No to everything

that might commit him, tie him down,

because there’s always something circling, always

just about to land, something enormous

pushing up through his heart.

And the deep blackness

of the sky is full, for him, of shapes,

and any one of them could summon him—come here!

see this! So for God’s sake, don’t try to put

what weighs you down into those airy hands of his;

because it’s you they’d grab for.

In the middle of the night

they’d burrow in and scrabble like a maniac

round your house, and clutch you, wrestle you to the floor,

squeezing and kneading, wanting to sculpt and hollow,

to push you, break you out of the form you know

that clothes you round.

Rilke

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Gwen John in Paris
• Drystone
• Six O’Clock
• Our Lady of Vladimir
• Advent Calendar
• Return Journey
• Crossings
• Déjeuner sur l’Herbe
• Twelfth Night
• Great Sabbath
• Oystermouth Cemetery
• Third Station
• Pantocrator: Daphni
• Augustine
• Indoors
• Rublev
• Snow Fen
• Kettle’s Yard
• September Birds
• The White Horse
• Cornish Waters
• Bach for the Cello
• Los Niños
• First Thing
• Dream
• Feofan Grek: the Novgorod Frescoes
• Thomas Merton: Summer 1966
• Walsingham: the Holy House
• Penrhys
• Curtains for Bosnia
• Murchison Falls
• Kampala; the El Shaddai Coffee Bar
• Woodwind: Kanuga in March
• REMEMBERING JERUSALEM
• GRAVES AND GATES
• CELTIA
• TRANSLATIONS
• About the Author
• Copyright