Christopher Southgate,Rain Falling by the River: New and Selected Poems of the Spirit

Abstract

The American poet Wallace Stevens once commented: ‘People ought to like poetry the way children like snow.’ Snow came to mind as I read these poems by Christopher Southgate. Each feels like a crocus pushing itself through a frozen and hardened landscape, born in the first thaws of the spirit that his faith and imagination help transition against all the odds.

Southgate has been writing poetry for over 30 years and this is his eighth collection. He is the former principal of the South-West Ministry Training Course and Associate Professor of Theology at Exeter University, with a special interest in the science–religion debate and environmental ethics. He has served in mental health chaplaincy and has published admired work on the problem of suffering in evolution. Alongside bereavement and the sometime desolations of being, in his words, ‘a puzzler-away at God’, it means that he scores his ink carefully into the cold page of experience and won’t allow himself to say more than he can. The poems are measured, usually quite short, direct and deceptively accessible. They are freighted, however, and refuse to be pushed around lightly. Their intimacy is middle-distance. Nothing is being presumed too soon.

How can a poet find a God-language that resonates in a world distrustful or fearful of inherited religious narratives? Speaking of God, he writes in ‘Chaplain’s sonnet’, is ‘Speaking without answers’ (p. 11).

Southgate tells us that his poems ‘deal more or less explicitly with spiritual themes’ (p. ix), and we find the devotional, prophetic, mystical and prayerful lying patiently next to each other in five parts. They are broadly grouped around thoughts on spiritual territory, biblical imagery, place, death and loss, and our response to the arts and life situations. He does not force meaning where it must emerge more hesitantly, nor, when writing about pain, does he add insight to injury:

I try not to evaluate

the currency of moments.

They come as useless gifts

like gold to a newborn.

(‘Grey epiphany, Hungerford Bridge’, lines 17–20, p. 8)

Southgate’s faith feels as assured as a compass in the hand, but a compass that needs tapping from time to time to begin afresh because of a shift of perception, a new doubt or reimagined perspective. He has an:

… acceptance of a space of in-between,

A mountain-land where faith and doubt

Inhabit each other’s shadow.

(‘In memoriam R. S. Thomas’, lines 5–6, p. 14)

Southgate’s poems, though fixed in the cold reality of human existence, move and melt when God is apprehended. Whatever ‘spirituality’ means here it is not a massage while listening to wind chimes. This is much more awful and painful. It seems to be some assault on the ego, a reinforcement of silence as God’s last resort against our idolatries:

I do not know if it is nurture, patience,

Or His long, terrifying suffering of us

That lets elaborate construct fade,

Unseenness stay, as we think on God.

(‘Holly leaf’, lines 8–11, p. 88)

Southgate’s poems are not for a church of the warm shallows. They are serious, sometimes wry, always reverential. In the spirit of St Ambrose, who reminds us that ‘it did not suit God to save his people through logic’, this poet uses his tuned theological reflection and his crafting of words to reach rather than contain, to yearn not conclude. If the endings of the poems sometimes seem to fall a little short, it is, perhaps, because the body and reference of the poem is so rich and immense that to bring it to an end seems a betrayal.

Though the snow has indeed begun to thaw in Southgate’s poetry, fighting both illusion and disillusion through faith, we can still see our breath in the cold air and feel the draw of home. Like the pilgrims to Iona he pays tribute to, readers pick up this collection knowing we are going, gratefully, ‘to borrow misty peace’ (‘Iona’, line 12, p. 48).