A Century of Poetry
Rowan Williams
SPCK, £19.99, 320 pages
In Rowan Williams’s recent compendium he presents and examines 100 poems composed in the last century on the subject of faith. The poems range from canonical Christian meditations like TS Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” to lesser-known contemporary jewels like Sally Ito’s “At the Beginning of Lent: Ash Wednesday”.
As well as being a prolific poet in English and Welsh, Williams is a sensitive exegete, prying open sometimes-rarefied works like WH Auden’s “Friday’s Child”, a dense treatment of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology. In one of the most exhilarating critical discussions in the collection, Williams draws from Auden’s pithy quatrains a systematic sermon on human and divine freedom, concluding that “if we can indeed see God in the crucified” we have the “freedom to see more than our own embarrassing deceits and confusions, to see what the gift of life actually is”.
