“There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” Gerard Manley Hopkins’s line could serve as a quiet epigraph to the work of Fr Joseph Evans, even when – or especially when – that freshness seems hidden. A priest of Opus Dei and a former journalist, Evans has spent much of his life moving between words and souls: first on local newspapers in London and Manchester, then as a university chaplain, spiritual director and preacher. Now, with his first published collection of poems, When God Hides (SLG Press, “Contemplative Poetry” series), he has added another strand to that vocation: giving crafted, honest language to the experience of searching for God in dryness and apparent absence.
Born in Wimbledon in 1966 and raised in Putney, Evans studied French and Portuguese at King’s College London before a brief spell in journalism and then full-time youth work with Opus Dei. After directing Greygarth Hall, a university residence in Manchester, he went to Pamplona to study for the priesthood and completed a doctorate in Biblical Theology on the formation of the New Testament canon. Back in Britain, he served for a decade as residential chaplain at Netherhall House in Hampstead and Catholic chaplain at King’s College London, alongside chaplaincy work in several London universities. More recently, he has been based in Manchester and now Oxford, where a new burst of poetic creativity has accompanied, paradoxically, a period of spiritual aridity.
When God Hides gathers poems written largely between 2015 and 2023 – years which Evans himself describes as a time of “poetical reawakening” and “spiritual dryness”. The collection moves from the closely observed natural world (“Echoes”, “Tree”, “Leaves”), through journeys and priestly life (“Bridges”, “Rome”, “Manchester Flamenco”), to more explicitly biblical and theological pieces (“Adam”, “Cana”, “Jesus Falls the First Time”). Again and again, one senses the struggle he spoke about recently to the Oxford Newman Society: the sense of God “playing hide and seek”, the feeling of wrestling with a presence that sometimes looks like absence, yet never quite lets go.
If there is confessional material here, it is carefully sifted. Evans is wary of turning poetry into public self-therapy. He speaks instead of “appropriate vulnerability”: wounds shown not for pity, but as testimony. Several poems in the collection are addressed directly to God in the second person, but the tone is more Jacob at the Jabbok than poet of the cosy devotional calendar. Doubt, fatigue and silence are allowed to appear unvarnished, yet always in relation to a God who remains, however elusive, the addressee.
At the same time, Evans insists that poetry is not just about spiritual states but about a way of seeing. In his Newman Society talk, he contrasted much contemporary verse – technically clever but often bleak, self-absorbed or nihilistic – with poets like Hopkins, who “go deep into meaning” and discover, beneath anguish, the “dearest freshness deep down things”. Poetry, for him, is “crafted, insightful language” which tries to register not only concepts but the shimmering of reality itself. It is, in that sense, close to contemplation.
In the conversation that follows, conducted in Oxford shortly after the publication of When God Hides, we spoke about mothers who quote Yeats at their teenage sons, the vulnerability of showing one’s poems to the world, why Hopkins and Eliot still tower over his own work, and how a priest-poet navigates the tension between anguished honesty and Christian hope. Above all, we explored what happens when a man whose job is to preach finds that, for a long season, God seems to be hiding – and discovers that poetry, too, can become a kind of prayer.
Catholic Herald: Father, thank you for your time today, and congratulations on your new book. You are both a priest and a poet — two vocations that share a love for language and a sensitivity to its nuances. How did you find your way to poetry? Was there a moment when you realised not only that you loved reading poetry, but that you wanted to write it yourself?
Fr Joseph Evans: My first encouragement came from my mother. She studied French literature at UCL and loved poetry. There’s a moment I mention in the introduction to my collection: as a young adolescent, I said something vaguely poetic, and my brothers teased me. My mother responded by quoting, “Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams.” I didn’t know the context then, but I sensed that something important had been said — almost a quiet benediction over the poetic impulse.
Another memory: I once used the phrase “pros and cons” in a school essay, and my mother was absurdly delighted. That kind of encouragement stays with you. Later, at the Opus Dei club I attended as a teenager, someone once gave me a blank notebook “for your poetry.” It was probably more significant than they realised. To be taken seriously in your poetic efforts — especially as an adolescent, when you feel terribly vulnerable — matters immensely.
So yes, I think poetry was always there from early childhood.
CH: Does writing poetry come easily to you?
FJE: It comes when the idea comes. I’m very much in the “one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration” school. When a line, image, or rhythm strikes me, I latch onto it like a dog with a bone. Then I work on it. And work on it.
For instance, I recently wrote a poem about the longing of a trainee — a doctor, a craftsman — to move from apprenticeship to mastery. It began with the image of “shadowing” someone. Here’s the opening:
You asked if you could shadow him tonight,
if you could watch him patch and mend and lance;
if you could find some shelter in his light,
could also join him, hands-free, in his dance.
And the final stanza:
You asked if you could take in flesh and blood,
if you could be grown up and leave the class;
if life could now be breathed into your mud,
if you could pass from shadow into mass.
The idea of “shadow into mass” came first, and the rest followed as I worked. I revise constantly. And yes — I unabashedly use a thesaurus and RhymeZone.
CH: Does poetry influence your prayer life — and does prayer influence your poetry? I mean this broadly: lectio divina, the Mass, the liturgy, the rosary.
FJE: Occasionally poetry distracts my prayer! [laughs] But in a deeper sense, yes, the two do influence one another.
I love the Song of Songs. I even have a long poem that is, essentially, a commentary on it — still unfinished. But in general, because I pray the psalms daily in the breviary, they can become more dutiful than poetic.
Still, many of my poems are prayers. The second-person address in them is very direct: I am speaking to God, especially in the poems on divine silence or apparent absence. These came during a spiritually dry period — a poetical reawakening combined with spiritual aridity.
Yet I feel that, ultimately, prayer wants to go beyond poetry. In the New Testament there is very little poetry compared to the Old. My theory is that God draws us toward childlike simplicity: the language of intimacy rather than ornament.
That said, as St. Josemaría wrote, we must “turn the prose of every day into heroic verse.” There is poetry in the tenderness of a grandfather with a child, in a mother caring for her sick son, and in the rhythms of daily life. Many people who would never claim to be poets are far more poetic than I am.
CH: Let’s turn to Gerard Manley Hopkins. We’re in Oxford — his presence is almost unavoidable. When did you first encounter him, and what draws you to his poetry?
FJE: Hopkins and T. S. Eliot are my two favourite poets. What I love most in Hopkins is his genius with language. His control of rhythm, image, and musicality is extraordinary. Of course, like every great poet, he has mediocre poems — Eliot does too. But when Hopkins is good, he is breathtaking.
I remember reading him in my early twenties and not understanding him at all. Then suddenly — I can still picture being on a train — the veil lifted, and I grasped his rhythm. From then on, I was captivated.
Lines like “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things” or “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” express his incarnational vision: God shimmering through the world’s textures. I share his love of faith, his honesty about spiritual struggle, and his refusal to hide anguish. That vulnerability is very important to me.
I don’t write poetry to indulge my feelings — my spiritual director needs those, not the world — but because sharing struggle may help others turn toward God. Hopkins does that magnificently.
CH: Modern poetry often feels ironic, despairing, or nihilistic. Hopkins’ anguish, by contrast, is the anguish within faith. Does a Catholic poet experience or express these dark moments differently?
FJE: A Catholic doesn’t quite despair. Hopkins feels abandoned, but he is always speaking to Someone — even if that Someone seems silent. My own collection is filled with poems about God “playing hide and seek,” but even then, He is not absent.
Modern poetry can be brilliant — I admire Rilke enormously, even in translation — but it is so often bleak, empty, self-absorbed, or trivial. Many modern poets retreat into an ivory tower of obscurity, or write about petty or purely erotic things. When you go “deep” into emptiness, the result is bleak.
Religious poetry can, of course, fall into didacticism. Eliot’s religious verse is not always his best. But religious poetry also has the capacity to ascend much higher, because it seeks meaning beyond the self — into the infinite.
CH: Poetry today often feels inaccessible to young people. How can they approach it without being intimidated?
FJE: Much of the difficulty comes from poor teaching. An enthusiastic teacher can make poetry come alive. But modern poetry also sometimes has only itself to blame — it can be needlessly complicated or deliberately obscure.
There is also the gap of language and time: Shakespeare’s sonnets are marvellous but require guidance. Still, if taught well, poetry becomes a discovery.
The key is appreciation rather than analysis. Let the sound, the rhythm, the image work on you. Meaning can come later — sometimes much later.
And memorising poetry helps enormously. Verses learned young stay with you your whole life, like old friends.
CH: Do you have a favourite line from Hopkins — perhaps one that influenced your vocation?
FJE: Again, “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” That line captures for me the sacramental vibrancy of creation. And “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Hopkins senses God in the world’s very textures — I love that.
CH: Which of your own poems are you most satisfied with — the one that came closest to what you hoped?
FJE: I wouldn’t say any of them are perfect. I’m a good poet, perhaps even very good at times, but I’m not Hopkins or Eliot. Every poem could be improved.
I like Roma, because it captures a difficult moment of my life in Rome as a seminarian. I like Bridges because it says far more than people realise, with biblical layers hidden within. Trees resonates with the experience of priests. And Dank — well, writing a poem about damp, and finding God in damp, has its own charm.
But no — none of them are beyond improvement.
CH: Are you planning to write more?
FJE: Yes. Oxford has been extraordinarily creative for me. Living by the river has given me endless images — especially the geese! [laughs] My first collection gathered poems written over eight years in London and Manchester. But I have enough poems from my first year in Oxford for a full second collection, and many more from my second and third years. Friends advise me to let them sit for a while before publishing. But the poetry continues to flow — after 20 years of poetic drought, I’m grateful for this revival.
