Rain Falling by the River

By Christopher Southgate

As a spiritual director, theologian, teacher and chaplain, Christopher Southgate's poetry resonates deeply with human experience and has received wide recognition. Here he collects together both his new and his most popular poems on spiritual themes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canterbury Press
• Release date: May 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781848259706

Book preview

© Christopher Southgate 2017

First published in 2017 by the Canterbury Press Norwich

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

978 1 84825 968 3

Typeset by Regent Typesetting

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon

Contents

Introduction

Part One: Points of Departure

Rendering Voices

River

Compline

What if

Grey Epiphany, Hungerford Bridge

Arvo Pärt’s ‘Psalom’ by Last Firelight

Impressions of Faith

Chaplain’s Sonnet

This also is not Thou

Riddle

In Memoriam R. S. Thomas

Palimpsest – a prayer

Part Two: From the Bible

The Fall

Exile

David, Bathsheba and Jonathan

David and Abishag the Shunammite

The Statement of Job’s Comforters

Madonna and Child

Three Deserted Wives

Self-appraisal of a Mage

Interview with Nicodemus

The Upper Room

Pentimento

Dark Relief

The Cup

Gifts

Magdalene in the Garden

Saul at the Stoning of Stephen

The lot fell on Matthias

The Unit

Part Three: Explorations of Place

Patmos

Iona

Lindisfarne

Manhattan: Return to Ground Zero, 2012

Amsterdam: The Beguinehof

Rhodes: Houses of Bread

Montpellier: Cathédrale St Pierre

St Guilhem-le-Désert: Cloister

Torcello: Looking East

Mozambique: Rosetta

Mission Santa Clara, California

Yosemite Valley

Part Four: Songs of Suffering

Funeral Films

Coming to Terms

Crows at a Funeral

Cobalt Therapy Again Today

Slipcatchers

Very tender, with great stillness and serenity

Crying Freedom

Sestina for Karen and Ros and Sue, Richard and Peter and Simon, and many others

Carols at the Mental Hospital

He went out to a deserted place

For C. N.

Funeral Wind

Bearing Reality – for Silke Bischof

Part Five: Longings and Destinations

The Mosaicist

Holly Leaf

Kinds of Faith

My soul like a weaned child

Destination

Leaning on the Spring – a prayer

Eight Steps and an Arch

Masaccio’s Eve

From Annigoni’s ‘Joseph’ in San Lorenzo, Florence

Two Maquettes

Preaching Easter

Doing Church

Sunset over Exmoor

The Reunion

The Fourth Plinth

Mozart’s Requiem in a Village Church

Village Funerals

The Woodworker and the Poet

Beethoven Quartet Op. 132; T. S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’

Prayer

Acknowledgements

We have to become as simple and as wordless as the growing corn or the falling rain.

Etty Hillesum

Introduction

This collection draws together published work from the last thirty years with new unpublished poems. During those years I have been a house-husband, a bookseller, a lay chaplain – first in a university and then on mental health wards in a major hospital – a teacher of theology, and a puzzler-away at God. With my infinitely dear and long-suffering wife Sandy I have also offered and promoted lay ministry in the little village churches where we live on the edge of Dartmoor.

The poems all deal more or less explicitly with spiritual themes. They range from the straightforwardly devotional, such as ‘Compline’, to the politically prophetic, such as ‘The Unit’, and the mystically reflective, such as the musings on the experience of prayer in ‘River’. There are also wry responses to famous texts, as in ‘The Fall’ and ‘Self-appraisal of a Mage’.

The book is in five parts. The first marks out the territory of spiritual exploration for the whole book,