In her recent collection A Kingdom of Love (Carcanet), poet and Anglican priest Rachel Mann examines ways in which language (spoken and written, liturgical and secular) works in and around silence to maintain, or perhaps contain, notions of faith and worship. She interrogates both the public role of what might be called an administrator of faith (she is rector of St. Nicholas church in Manchester) and the private, unique faith of the individual; and, particularly in the second of the three sections into which the book is divided, she positions this interrogation firmly within a contemporary UK – the ‘Kingdom’ of the title becoming perhaps an ironic allusion to Brexit Britain as well as God’s Kingdom. This is also a ‘kingdom’ where Greek, Roman, Chaucerian and Biblical myths intermingle with the everyday, complicating the picture but also sharpening Mann’s analysis of who we are and where we are as a nation. The ‘Love’ is not quite as straightforward as it might at first appear either, with Mann several times curtailing the “God is Love” cliché to simply “God is”, the grammatical lacuna paradoxically suggesting everything and nothing equally. But the Godly love which replaces that of platitude is both a mother’s and an erotic love, sometimes simultaneously, and these can be painful, obsessive, bitter, overwhelming, as well as powerful, life-affirming, wonderful forms of love. There is also a suggestion of love lost or rejected I think, shown by the choice of the David Jones painting ‘The Garden Enclosed’ on the front cover and in lines like “If I am raised, I shall not care if you/Will be like unto severed hand/(Forgetful, free) and I the stump, mourning;” (‘A Kingdom of Love (3)’). So, nothing comes easy, but why should faith be either easy or comfortable?
As someone who has always swung between atheism and agnosticism but who has a genuine interest in trying to understand this mysterious thing called Faith, I felt intrigued (entranced, actually, there are moments of great lyrical beauty) but inadequate to review the book properly, so I emailed Rachel and asked if she would answer some questions to help me approach it. To my great joy, she agreed; so I submit this interview in lieu of a full review, not because the book is not worthy of one (it absolutely is) but because in this case I think the poet can provide more insight than the reviewer:
Chris
Rowan Williams calls poetry an example of ‘excessive speech’, meaning, if I understand it correctly, a way of using language which pushes us to see beyond what is immediately obvious and present. And in A Kingdom of Love, with incompletely-predicated constructions like “I am” and “God is” (‘Credo’) you seem to be suggesting an ‘ultimate unknowability’ of not only God but also the human ‘Self’ – or perhaps an acknowledgement of the rightness of Wittgenstein’s silence that must pass over what we can’t express. How does poetry figure in your exploration of your faith?
Rachel
My earliest adult academic formation was in philosophy and, as a post-grad student, I became obsessed with Wittgenstein and ‘Linguistic Philosophy’. At that time, I wasn’t a Christian and – prior to my conversion experience – language was, pretty much, my god. I was simply obsessed with its possibilities: with the ways it gets away from us, forms us, or we imagine we can control it. After I came to faith, that fascination didn’t go away. However, it began to morph into a fascination with poetry as a locus for grace and, crucially, for my feeble attempts to say the unsayable. Without poetry, which is language straining at the edge of sense and remaking sense, I’m not sure God could get at us or we at God.
Chris
I’ve read that Wittgenstein (whom you quote at the front of the collection, and whom I spy in a number of poems) considered prayer to be something closer to ‘deep thought’ than anything like a request. Do you see a connection between writing a poem and praying? You also make a point of distinguishing “authorised words” – is this public versus private prayer? Where does poetry, which is both public and private, fit into this?
Rachel
I’m not sure I can answer that terribly helpfully. One thing that fascinates me, however, is the extent to which (broadly understood) both poetry and prayer have to negotiate (for want of a better term) ‘privatisation’. I hear people say, e.g., prayer, faith, religion are all fine as long as they’re a private matter and kept out of the public square; there have also been times when poetry – especially women’s poetry – has been seen as an essentially private matter, centred on emotions and small concerns sometimes made public. While I think there is such a thing as the expressive or confessional mode in both prayer and poetry, it’s complicated. I find that in both personal prayer and in poetry the making is the creating; there is not a fully formed thought or idea behind the prayer or poem that simply needs to be presented to the world. We make meaning in public, in bodies which are always already in the world.
Chris
Some poems in A Kingdom of Love take parts of the liturgical day for their titles, as Auden did in ‘Horae Canonicae’ – what is the significance of this for you? Do you see any similarity between what you are doing in those poems and Auden’s incredible sequence?
Rachel
Auden has long been on my mind. I certainly wasn’t attempting to mimic his masterful sequence, but I don’t think there’s any way for me to avoid a poet whose Anglicanism was simultaneously profoundly faithful, yet prepared to test out of the limits of orthodoxy. Upon his return to the church in the ‘40s, Auden brought to bear an independent, non-dogmatic intelligence. He was, as he wrote in ‘Horae Canonicae: Terce’, alert to the religious tendency to indulge in our own ‘secret cult’ and I think he resisted that magnificently. I hope I can be even half as successful.
Chris
In your memoir, you use Henry Vaughn’s expression “dazzling darkness” to express, I think, the depths of pain, doubt, horror in life etc. which is not ‘lit’ by the guiding God of cliched metaphor but which your ‘Dark God’ is intrinsically part of. I was struck by some of the dark images in A Kingdom of Love (such as “the frantic dove torn apart”) and some provocative ones too (“Jesus puts a tongue/into my mouth”). How far does this collection represent your own journey into darkness?
Rachel
I suppose the priest who speaks in the opening sequence of A Kingdom of Love both is and isn’t me. The priest on the page escapes my control, as it were. However, I don’t know how this collection could have been possible without a wrestling with my own story, which of course takes in some challenging and beautiful encounters. If by ‘darkness’ we might mean ‘mystery’ and ‘possibility’ and ‘the liminal’ then these poems absolutely are committed to an investigation of the dark. Most of all I hope the poems take language seriously and explore the way it gives up its treasures in juxtapositions, allusions and a kind of tricksy benevolence and kindness.
Chris
A number of the poems also describe, or allude to, the physicality of the mouth and of sound-making. Can you say something about the point at which the physical becomes the non-physical and how important this liminality is to your poetry/faith?
Rachel
I was reading one of Irigaray’s books recently – the one called ‘The Forgetting of Air’ – and your question reminds me of some of the things she examines in that book: the way that European cultures have often been obsessed with air rather than earth as metaphors of life and vitality. With Spirit and Ideas rather than Body. However, in A Kingdom of Love I want to wrestle with ‘breath’ – because breath is always physical, though there is a profound sense in which it is air too. I am fascinated by liminal places – by those places between what is body and not-body, breath and its absence and so on. I think that’s where we live most of the time, if not all of the time.
Chris
In Dazzling Darkness at one point you mention that you don’t “as a rule” write “religious” poetry. What changed your mind for this collection?
Rachel
That’s a good question. I think in order to write A Kingdom of Love I had to come to terms with the deposit of faith in my own writing, life and language. I think when I wrote Dazzling Darkness, I was too obsessed with finding a language that was plausible beyond the communities of faith of which I’m part. I felt like I had to treat with contemporary poetry which, despite its indebtedness to religious gesture and language, is uncomfortable with the ‘religious’ as a mode or genre. As I wrote the poems which comprise ‘Kingdom’ I began to realise that I simply had to address my faith without embarrassment or apology. I had to travel through the features of faith rather than try to circumvent them.
Chris
Again in your memoir, you refer to God as ‘she’ but in A Kingdom of Love you use the more traditional ‘He’ on several occasions, and yet through your milk/mouth imagery you also suggest a mother/child relationship. I wondered whether you have changed your approach to the ‘gendering’ of God (if I can call it that).
Rachel
Not really. A Kingdom of Love is very specifically about wrestling with linguistic and mythic inheritances. Male pronouns are so pervasive in religious discourse that I felt that I simply had to wrestle with them. As you say, there are female-coded references too, but I felt I needed to interrogate the dominant religious discourse.
Chris
In ‘Fides Quaerens’ you say “I don’t know what ‘believe in’ means/In the vast majority of cases”. This gets to the heart of it for me, as it seems to imply a difference between ‘Belief’ and ‘Faith’, two words which have always been synonymous for me. Can you distinguish easily between them?
Rachel
It is a tricky distinction. I guess the line I explore in the poems is between ‘believe in’/belief as a propositional and intellectual matter and faith as a mode of trust and being. Of course, the line between them can be messy and I think that is part of the poetic riches found in both terms. I think it’s rewarding to treat them as concepts with ‘family resemblances’.
Many thanks to Rachel for taking the time to answer my questions.
You can buy A Kingdom of Love from Carcanet here.
You can buy Dazzling Darkness: Gender, Sexuality, Illness and God from Wild Goose here.
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