The Singing Bowl
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About this ebook
Malcolm Guite
Malcolm Guite is renowned throughout the English speaking church. He lectures widely on literature and theology in Britain and in North America and is the author of bestselling poetry collections and other books. His poetry blog has many thousands of regular readers www.malcolmguite.wordpress.com
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Reviews for The Singing Bowl
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- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Singing Bowl brings together different themes around spirituality and religion. I found this book to be rich with a great deal of breadth.
Book preview
The Singing Bowl - Malcolm Guite
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Singing Bowl
Part I. Local Habitations
In Bewley’s
On The Great Blasket
Keats’s House, Rome
Saying the Names, Warkworth Harbour
Cowper’s View, All Saints Hartford
Southwell Leaves
York Minster
Hatley St George
Communion Table, St Edward’s, Cambridge
Out in the Elements, Grantchester
The Magic Apple Tree, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
First Steps, Brancaster
Cloud-Hidden, San Francisco
Westward
Part II. The Four Loves
Glances
Must I disrupt my life with discipline?
Lying Alone
Wedding Day
Hand in Hand: Kerouac and Cassady
Midnight
Is it a memory or another dream?
The Daily Planet
An Easter Triolet
Wedding Ring: four sonnets for Maggie
The Ring, 22.07.1984
Anniversary 22.07.2011
Dark Wind
A Renewal of Vows
Be gentle with them, Memory
Lapis Lazuli
Prayer/Walk
Part III. Word and World
On being told my poetry was found in a broken photo-copier
Spell
Hollows
Muse
Salvage
De Magistra
What if …
The Cutting Edge
iOde
String Theory
Which Comes First, the Fish or the River?
Imagine
Part IV. Intimations of Mortality
Holding and Letting Go
Table Talk
Never
Worry Beads
In Absentia
Compass
My Inheritance
Pour out the Wine
Part V. Clouds of Witness
Sonnets for the Saints
Columba
Benedict
Augustine of Canterbury
Cuddy
Hilda of Whitby
Bede
Hildegard of Bingen
Francis
Clare
Julian of Norwich
Latimer
George Herbert
Lancelot Andrewes
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
C.S. Lewis
The Two Kings: A meditation on Thomas Cranmer
Patterns (Tree and Leaf)
We coin the hollows of your beaten face
We Stand to Prayer
Descent
Part VI. Three Sequences
Canon C.26.1
Six Glimpses
1. Steam
2. Rain
3. Fire
4. Earth
5. Air
6. Prayer
On Reading the Commedia
Inferno
1. In Medias Res
2. Through the Gate
3. Vexilla Regis
Purgatorio
1. De Magistro
2. Love In Idleness
3. Dancing Through The Fire
Paradiso
1. Look Up
2. Circle Dance
3. The Rose
Preface
In Sounding the Seasons I concentrated on a single form, the sonnet, and made a journey through the year in a sequence of poems intended to sound and celebrate the mysteries of faith. In The Singing Bowl I range more widely, in subject, style, and poetic form, and faith is as much, if not more, at the roots of the poetry than in its branches and blossom. Indeed the sense of being rooted and earthed is an essential element in this collection. The title poem is not my invocation of the muse but rather her admonition to me:
Begin the song exactly where you are.
Remain within the world of which you’re made.
Call nothing common in the earth or air.
This is her counsel about both poetry and prayer and in the poems that follow I am trying both to celebrate the world of which I’m made, finding ‘Heaven in ordinary’, and also to discern and echo a little of its music.
This collection therefore begins with a section called ‘Local Habitations’, evocations of particular places with their own peculiar virtues, though some of these earthly places are, in their own ways, gates of Heaven.
We love local habitations also for the people who inhabit them, and the second part of this book, ‘The Four Loves’, borrows its title from C.S. Lewis’s exploration of our four-fold loving, from friendship to familiar affection, from Eros to Agape.
Part Three, ‘Word And World’, reflects on the art of poetry itself and more widely on how language involves us with one another, how it both deepens and limits our knowledge. It is also about techne understood both as technique in art and also the technology that has transformed the way we communicate. It closes with the ‘found’ sonnet ‘Imagine’, drawn entirely from phrases in C.S. Lewis’s prophetic book The Abolition of Man, a book which foresees some of the darker places our technology might take us and calls us back to a language and science that might make us more truly human.
Both people and poems become more completely themselves when they find their true form, work within their limits, and concentrate their power within what Blake called ‘the bounding line’. One bounding line, essential to all things abounding here, is the line of death itself, and Philip Larkin rightly warned us against ‘the costly aversion of the eyes from death’. Part Four of this collection, ‘Intimations of Mortality’ offers some unaverted meditation on love and loss.
It is followed however by a section called ‘Clouds of Witness’, for beyond death’s bounding line there is another music, and even as we remain within the world of which we’re made, we can hear, still resonant, the songs of those who went before. In Sounding the Seasons I wrote sonnets for some of the saints, but restricted myself to those named in the Bible. In this section I offer a sonnet sequence celebrating some other saints, especially of these islands, and also those not formally sainted but surely of