Abstract
Poetry is the native language of the person of faith, claims Oakley. Poetry enables the expression of doubt, an opening space for the imagination. There are numerous ways to read and use this book and it will invite return. Oakley has selected 29 poems and written a short essay on each poet; there’s Auden, Shapcott, Hafiz, Fanthorpe, O’Driscoll, Duffy, others, all offering the comfort of familiarity and the joy of new insight. He speaks personally, inviting the reader to respond in like manner to each poem and its poet, to discover the fresh depth of emotion, suffering, joy – the range of human experience. He offers a gentle dissection of how the poem works – nothing too forensic, but helpful, especially to any reader who is coming to poetry for the first time. Skilfully woven are reflections on belief and doubt, on the way poetry reveals the surprise that takes the reader beyond the page.
The title is from a poem by Louis MacNeice. The words splash, as if thrown in a pond, disturbing the surface of life, with ripples of meaning towards the shore. Each of the selections and accompanying essay is a gift to relish and digest. To return to. It’s a book to give away; or to use with those new to faith. For anyone determined to question the clichés of life.
Oakley’s own experience is an undercurrent, surfacing now and then. As we ponder Herbert’s ‘Love bade me welcome’, we hear how love caught Oakley by surprise in Dresden, visiting to preach. His grandfather had bombed the city on 14 February 1945, as he explained to the taxi driver. The man was silent. Then said ‘Ah, that was the night my mother was killed.’ Oakley describes how the driver pulled over, put his arm towards him and said ‘And now we shake hands.’ The forgiveness of Herbert’s poem, illuminated afresh by Oakley’s experience.
It matters to Oakley that language has quality to enable ‘fresher, deeper waters, avoiding the tyranny of cliché and deaf answers’. Dickinson’s words tell us that there ‘… ought to be dashes everywhere interrupting our casual fluency, a lack of prosaic grammar charging through anything that speaks of the holiness of God’. If I have one small criticism, it’s that occasionally Oakley’s own prose lets him down.
His greatest achievement, though, is the skilful way he draws on his own rebellions and reverence, as a priest offering the counterpoint in a world that forgets God. The reader sees how poetry opens up space, just as the words of the liturgy should, but so often fail. It’s no surprise that R. S. Thomas has the longest essay in the collection. Oakley describes how Thomas keeps the rumour of God alive in a world of bad religion, when mystery is dismissed, where false gods abound. Thomas resisted what we have become, the low expectation, the degradation of humanity, and Oakley’s book joins that resistance.
Commending Christianity requires imagination. The poems selected here tell it slant. They tell of a delicious story, another story, that there is more than meets the eye.