Abstract
A Book of Psalms is a worthy companion to the familiar psalms of the King James Bible, each psalm being granted a companion poem that is a work of art in its own right, but also an engagement in conversations with Scripture and the Masoretic text that become part of the afterlife of the biblical texts. Edward Clarke is a very accomplished poet indeed, and his polished and intricate work combines fine scholarship with a witty and often delightfully understated engagement with the business of everyday, family life, as well as the wider world – from war-torn Aleppo in modern Syria, to the natural beauty of Scafell Pike and the River Derwent.
The psalms have been at the heart of Christian worship and prayer from the earliest days of the Christian Church, and long before that in the worship of Ancient Israel. They were once supposed to be from the genius of King David, whose doings as recorded in 1 Samuel and elsewhere are also woven into Clarke’s verses. And, in their long history, the psalms have been highly sociable, discoursing with other texts in rabbinic conversations that have engendered new poems and voices expressive of the range of human emotions, from the depths of despair to the heights of praise. In this new Book of Psalms we encounter a new and quite distinct voice in that chorus, and in it one hears and recognizes many others. These poems took me back to the Sidney Psalter, similar in their intricacy and poetic experimentation to the verses of Sir Philip and Countess Mary. But there are also clear echoes of George Herbert, John Milton, Christopher Smart, David Scott, even Hardy and Yeats, and finally I found myself back with D. J. Enright and his wonderful poems about creation, language and words.
These poems, like the literature of the Bible itself, are forms of interwoven intertextuality, reflective of their own creation, texts within texts, texts to be consumed, a book within which lie other books, although there is finally ‘a nothingness inside the hum’ (Psalm 109). For, like all great poetry, these new psalms have a silence at their heart, emerging finally through all the literary references, and through the daily task of composition in the midst of family life and the world. If Christianity, along with Judaism and Islam, is a People of the Book, then at the centre of everything is also the silence of God, but found in the poetry and the words of the ‘book of books that must be added to’ (Psalm 33).
These poems take us to the strange and wonderful in the familiar and known, as all great poetry should. There is a psalm (a companion to Psalm 23) about the children’s nativity play with all its naive seriousness when ‘she laid him in a shepherd’s song’ (Psalm 23). We also live in the classical world of Hercules, the ancient world of Jeremiah (and the hapax legomenon), and the New Testament world of Gethsemane and the Easter garden of noli me tangere. But it is at the same time the world of airlifts (for the soul), of quotidian messages posted on Facebook, and of the one-click free and same-day delivery.
These are poems, or rather psalms, to be treasured and encountered slowly with the King James Bible (and perhaps even the Masoretic text) alongside them. They are not easy, but they are technically superb and they will infinitely reward patient and close reading.