Jonathan Chan

Jonathan Chan is a Singapore poet and translator whose second book bright sorrow has just appeared from Landmark Books. Born in Manhattan to a Malaysian father and a South Korean mother, educated at Cambridge and Yale, he was raised in Singapore and has returned there after his years at university. His first collection going home (Landmark Books, 2022). was a finalist for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2024. Part of what he explores in that book is the sense of what home is when a single locale may or may not be the home one is going to.

He is Managing Editor for the poetry archive Poetry.sg. His poetry is widely published; I personally have selected his poems for Ekstasis, and for Poems For Ephesians, as well as for a forthcoming anthology of Christmas poems in the Poiema Poetry Series.

Jonathan Chan has said, “matters of faith are integral and inherent to my writing” — while Christian Wiman has said, “Jonathan Chan’s poems are distinctively musical, acutely observed, and existentially engaged at the deepest level. They are bracing to discover.”

The following poem is from bright sorrow.

eternity

after Marilynne Robinson

and so the old man said
eternity is a thing we have

no hope of understanding.
things happen the way

that they do. a note follows another
in a song. a song is itself and

not another. a song is a song
itself. eternity holds space for

all these songs. for a song is
like a life, resounding in a kind

of tune. lives are what they were
and have been. lives are not merely

every worst thing. a mother prays
for her scoundrel son to be taken

up into heaven. Lila thinks this
an injustice to the scoundrels

with no mothers. people try
to get by. people are good

by their own lights. people take
all the courage that they have

to be good. for in eternity,
to eternity, eternity is just

a thing.

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Peter Levi*

Peter Levi (1931―2000) is a poet, translator, novelist, and scholar. He wrote more than 60 books, including fiction, biography, poetry, and travel writing. He was raised in a devout Catholic family, where all three siblings chose a vocation within the church — he and his brother became Jesuit priests, and his sister a Bernadine nun.

He was a classics tutor at Campion Hall, Oxford from 1965 to 1977, then left the Jesuit order for marriage and a literary life. When asked why, he replied, "It was love."

In an interview with the Paris Review around the time he left the priesthood he was asked about his experience and his view of the sermon as a creative medium. He replied,
------"Oh I think it’s very interesting. Donne’s sermons are wonderful.
------An opportunity not open to most human beings of having a captive
------audience. I think it is much unexploited and I think it has
------thrilling potentialities, but of course only if you happen to
------believe what you’re saying. And it so happens that I did. I mildly
------regret not being able to preach any more sermons."

Peter Levi was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1984 to 1989. The following excerpts are from his long poem “Ruined Abbeys.”

From Ruined Abbeys

------Monastic limestone skeleton,
------threadbare with simple love of life
------speak out your dead language of stone,
------the wind’s hammer, the sun’s knife,
------the sweet apple of solitude;
------there is a ninth beatitude:
------a child in his simplicity
------is more than a just man can be.

It is not a poem that is easy to analyse, dwelling in the physicality of abandoned stone structures, and in Levi’s experience of how words take on a life of their own.

------Watching all this in an armchair
------consider what these ruins are,
------desolate spirits in the air
------singing in their stone languages
------what religion is not and is,
------not a museum but a stone
------no man can understand alone:

The stanza I would particularly like to highlight is the following — from toward the end of this 417-line poem.

------It ends in death, the old land.
------Darkness climbs into the sky.
------There is nothing left in your hand.
------It gives you no guide to go by.
------Or nothing that a stinging-nettle
------on a bleak stone will not unsettle.
------You who believe my true story
------are not protected from history.
------What can I say about death;
------their death is hidden from my eyes:
------but I believe that the dead rise,
------having been roused by the strong breath
------of my God who is in heaven,
------when the trumpet tears earth open.

To read the entire poem, follow this link.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Peter Levi: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Toyohiko Kagawa

Toyohiko Kagawa (1888—1960) is a Japanese reformer, activist, pacifist, poet, and novelist. He was orphaned at age four, and was cared for by American missionaries. Once he declared his faith in Christ, he was disowned by his extended family. In 1909 he moved into a slum in Kobe, Japan, in order to serve the people, but found it hard to make a difference there.

He became active in various reforms, frequently facing rebuke from government authorities, such as being arrested twice in 1921 and 1922 for his part in labour strikes. Similarly, after writing an apology in 1940 to China for Japan’s invasion, he was twice arrested for “antiwar thoughts”.

After WWII, however, he was influential as an advisor to the transitional government, seeing such reforms as the legalization of unions, women’s suffrage, and land redistribution.

Kagawa wrote more than one hundred fifty books, including bestselling novels. He was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and four times for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Discovery

I cannot invent new things
Like the airships
Which sail
On silver wings
But today
A Wonderful Thought
In the dawn was given
And the stripes on my robe
Shining from wear
Were suddenly fair
Bright with a Light
Falling from heaven
Gold, Silver and Bronze
Lights from the windows of Heaven
And the Thought was this:
That a Secret Plan
Is hid in my Hand
Big,
Because of this plan,
That God
Who dwells in my hand
Knows this secret plan
Of the things He will do for the world
Using my Hand!

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Katharine Tynan*

Katharine Tynan (1859—1931) is an Irish poet who was raised Catholic, educated at the Dominican Convent of St. Catherine, and married a Protestant barrister. They then lived in England for many years. To call her a prolific writer would be an understatement; she wrote over 100 novels, a dozen books of short stories, and more than a dozen poetry collections. Her Collected Poems appeared in 1930.

Her writing often dwells on matters of faith, concern for the poor, feminism, and the landscape of Ireland. She wrote many poems about the human impact of World War I.

In 1907 the Dun Emer Press produced a limited-edition handmade collection of her poetry called Twenty One Poems written by Katharine Tynan: Selected by W.B. Yeats. The press, in fact, was an ambitious project of Yeats’ sisters and a friend who produced cards, broadsheets, and literary books.

The following is the opening poem in Twenty One Poems. Another poem from this collection is the current selection at my journal Poems For Ephesians.

Sheep and Lambs

All in the April evening,
April airs were abroad;
The sheep with their little lambs
Passed me by on the road.

The sheep with their little lambs
Passed me by on the road;
All in the April evening
I thought on the Lamb of God.

The lambs were weary and crying
With a weak, human cry.
I thought on the Lamb of God
Going meekly to die.

Up in the blue, blue mountains
Dewy pastures are sweet;
Rest for the little bodies,
Rest for the little feet.

But for the Lamb of God,
Up on the hill-top green,
Only a Cross of shame
Two stark crosses between.

All in the April evening,
April airs were abroad;
I saw the sheep with their lambs,
And thought on the Lamb of God.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Katharine Tynan: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

R.S. Thomas*

R.S. Thomas (1913―2000) is the great twentieth century poet of Wales. It wasn’t until his fourth collection appeared from a mainstream London publisher in 1955 that he caught the attention and praise of the influential BBC radio program The Critics. That same volume won the Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Award.

In 1937 he was ordained a priest in the Anglican Church of Wales, where he served in small rural parishes until his retirement in 1978. When he met his wife Mildred, she had already earned a reputation as an artist; this stirred in him the desire to make his mark as a poet.

Much of his poetry is set on the harsh, bald Welsh hills where lone farmers scrape out a meagre existence, or in dark, empty churches where the poet wrestles with the silence of God. A.E. Dyson wrote of him in Critical Quarterly,
------"In Christian terms Thomas is not a poet of the transfiguration,
------of the resurrection, of human holiness.... He is a poet of the
------Cross, the unanswered prayer, the bleak trek through darkness,
------and his theology of Jesus, in particular, seems strange against
------any known traditional norm."

His Collected Poems appeared in 1993, and his Collected Later Poems in 2004 — which gathers his last five volumes, including the posthumous book Residues.

Resurrection

Easter. The grave clothes of winter
are still here, but the sepulchre
is empty. A messenger
from the tomb tells us
how a stone has been rolled
from the mind, and a tree lightens
the darkness with its blossom.
There are travellers upon the road
who have heard music blown
from a bare bough, and a child
tells us how the accident
of last year, a machine stranded
beside the way for lack
of petrol, is crowned with flowers.

*This is the fourth Kingdom Poets post about R.S. Thomas: first post, second post, third post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Mary Oliver*

Mary Oliver (1935—2019) is a poet who encourages us all to reflect upon, and learn from, the things we observe. Her poems are simple, yet profound, drawing us into the natural world through small, specific details — such as in “When the Roses Speak, I Pay Attention” she has them say, “Then we will drop / foil by foil to the ground. This / is our unalterable task, and we do it / joyfully.” There is a calm, submissiveness here, that speaks of her faith in the rightness of the world God has made.

Despite the immense popularity of her poetry, little has been written in the way of critical studies — probably because there’s little that can be said to analyse it, other than to let the poems say what they want to say.

In 2017, Penguin published Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, of which the Chicago Tribune said, “It’s as if the poet herself has sidled beside the reader and pointed us to the poems she considers most worthy of deep consideration.” This would be a worthwhile place to encounter her work, although I am still partial to the very first collection of hers I purchased: Thirst (Beacon Press, 2006).

She remains difficult to pin down, despite being transparent and honest in her self-disclosure. She prays, in her 2008 collection Red Bird —
----Maker of All Things…
----let me abide in your shadow—
----let me hold on
----to the edge of your robe
----as you determine
----what you must let be lost
----and what will be saved.

After having lived for over forty years in Provincetown, Massachusetts, she moved to the southeast coast of Florida; she died there in 2019. The following poem is from Thirst.

Gethsemane

The grass never sleeps.
Or the roses.
Nor does the lily have a secret eye that shuts until morning.

Jesus said, wait with me. But the disciples slept.

The cricket has such splendid fringe on its feet,
and it sings, have you noticed, with its whole body,
and heaven knows if it ever sleeps.

Jesus said, wait with me. And maybe the stars did, maybe
the wind wound itself into a silver tree, and didn’t move, maybe
the lake far away, where once he walked as on a blue pavement,
lay still and waited, wild awake.

Oh the dear bodies, slumped and eye-shut, that could not
keep that vigil, how they must have wept,
so utterly human, knowing this too
must be a part of the story.

*This is the fourth Kingdom Poets post about Mary Oliver: first post, second post, third post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Jeremy Taylor

Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667) was born in Cambridge and educated at the university there. He was a writer, and cleric in the Church of England, who benefitted from the patronage of William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury and chancellor of Oxford University. Through these connections Taylor became a chaplain to Charles I, and during the Civil War in 1642 moved to Oxford along with the king’s court. All this led to his being imprisoned several times by the Parliamentary government, after Laud was executed.

His devotional books: The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (1650) and The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651) are among his most influential writings.

After the Restoration, Taylor was made Bishop of Down and Connor in Ireland, later becoming Vice-Chancellor of the University of Dublin.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge ranked the work of Jeremy Taylor extremely high, placing him as one of the four great writers of English literature along with Shakespeare, Bacon and Milton — and wrote that few days pass in which he does not read and meditate on Taylor.

The 1991 collection Jeremy Taylor: Selected Writings (Carcanet) was edited by poet C.H. Sisson.

The following original poem was also successfully revised, for use in the Sarum Hymnal according to Arthur E. Gregory in his study The Hymn-Book of the Modern Church.

Hymn for Advent: or Christ's Coming to Jerusalem in Triumph

---------Lord, come away,
---------Why dost Thou stay?
Thy road is ready: and Thy paths, made strait,
---------With longing expectation wait
----The consecration of Thy beauteous feet.
Ride on triumphantly; behold we lay
Our lusts and proud wills in Thy way.
Hosanna! welcome to our hearts. Lord, here
Thou hast a temple too, and full as dear
As that of Sion; and as full of sin;
Nothing but thieves and robbers dwell therein,
Enter, and chase them forth, and cleanse the floor;
Crucify them, that they may never more
---------Profane that holy place,
----Where Thou hast chose to set Thy face.
And then if our stiff tongues shall be
Mute in the praises of Thy Deity,
----The stones out of the temple wall
---------Shall cry aloud, and call
Hosanna! and Thy glorious footsteps greet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.