A Century of Poetry
Right now I am reading and loving A Century of Poetry: 100 Poems for Searching the Heart (SPCK) by Rowan Williams. Besides being a rich collection of poems from the past hundred years, the reflections by Williams on each of these poems are what really set this book apart. This is someone who has clearly steeped himself in poetry, paying attention to poems over many years and letting them do their slow, mysterious work on him.
He makes clear right up front that this is not some compendium of the “One Hundred Best Religious Poems of the Past Century” (as if such a collection were even possible). Nor are these necessarily his favorite poems. Rather, Williams writes, “the principle of selection has been simply whether or not they open the door to some fresh, searching and challenging insights about the life of faith: do they present the language of religious belief, the images and connecting patterns in what people of faith say about their world, as something worth thinking about, worth thinking with, and capable of leaving the reader with an enhanced perception of their humanity and all that surrounds it?”
Employing that “principle of selection,” here we do find a few of the usual twentieth century suspects like Auden and Eliot. But many of the poets here are new to me, and likely will be to you as well. Williams tells us that he intended “to balance much anthologized authors . . . with less familiar names” while being intentional about including non-Western and non-Christian poets as well. His instincts are good.
As I have savored the poems in this book, I’ve thought of Pádraig Ó Tuama’s “Poetry Unbound” project. In each episode, he provides a very brief introduction to a poem—usually some autobiographical tidbit that connects him to it—before reading the poem itself slowly and carefully and with all his Irish heart. He then offers some reflections on the poem, peeling back the layers of the onion, as it were. Finally, he reads us the poem one more time. Always, the poem sounds different to me the second time around. (My all-time favorite episode is this one.)
It seems to me the Poetry Unbound method is a good way to approach this book. To first read the poem, then the reflection, then the poem again. And then to go about our day with the poem as some kind of mysterious companion.
