Something fresh and new for Christmas. Could I really deliver that? Well, the reaction I’ve had to Star: Poems for the Christmas Season is encouraging on that score.
I thought I had the measure of Christmas – sure, haven’t I a lifetime’s experience of it? But a 900-year-old carving showed me that I’d only scratched the surface.
In about 1120 work began on a new cathedral for the town of Autun in Burgundy. The man in charge carved his name prominently into the frontage: GISLEBERTUS HOC FECIT (Gislebertus made this). He was the architect avant la lettre and a brilliant sculptor. He decided to use several of the stone capitals surmounting the cathedral’s main pillars to tell the story of the “three wise men from the east” who, in the Gospel account, arrive in Jerusalem looking for “the infant king of the Jews”. But he doesn’t start where that version begins. Boldly, he goes back to the point before the story gets underway.
His carving known as The Awakening of The Magi, and sometimes as their Dream, gives us his vision of how the quest of The Three Kings began. It’s the vivid spark behind my new collection, Star: Poems for the Christmas Season.
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AUTUN CATHEDRAL, MAGI
Does the sky have tent-poles?
And some cathedrals are forested.
God walks in their depths on a December afternoon
while the topmost branches brush the undersides
of planets fixed mid-orbit
– those stained-glass windows fruiting overhead.
Here no one thinks of weight, of downwardness
and how the roof desires it.
God pauses among the pillars
at a carved capital that always lifts his heart:
an artist like himself, from this blunt-cornered oblong stone,
gives us a bird’s view of a bed
draped in a ruched counterpane, three kings tucked in,
but the eyes of one, popped open, register
Why? Who? still unaware
of the angel at his shoulder, stroking his hand,
whose other index finger points at a star.
God sighs, at the weight borne by the moment
after such a moment; at how he waits
for a man to look up at the sky
and recognise and seize
the chance of joy.
Emboldened by Gislebertus I thought back beyond the story as I know it. I wondered who the wise men… magi… kings… left behind when they set out westward. Immediately I “met” The Three Queens − women in the story. At the core of Star is a set of six poems, one for each queen and king. Each couple has its own dynamic, taking us into the future of the kings, and beyond.
The Adoration of the Kings by an unknown Netherlandish painter from about 1520 helped me flesh out the male protagonists. The tradition was already well-established of portraying the trio as a young Black King called Balthasar and two White Kings: a middle-aged one called Melchior and the elderly Caspar. “My” Balthasar owes something to the solemn young king in this painting, while the tender gaze of the central figure and the homage of the lower one inflect my portrayal of the other two.
My kings and queens are prefaced by poems about familiar aspects of Christmas, the warmth of family gatherings, the decorations, presents and wonder. They are followed by the politics of what I call the Season’s “dark hinterland”: the contrasts of cunning and naivety; the brutality of slaughter, flight and exile. But we emerge, in hope, to a New Year.
Gislebertus, so many centuries ago, dared to imagine, and then render, in rigid stone, an instant of action which is silent, psychological, internal. The drowsy king is gently invited, but not compelled, to turn and look. He will choose how to respond. He could go back to sleep; or he could look up, leap up, rouse the others − and the story will be underway.
And this image speaks of poetry, which can’t stop a tank but penetrates a territory no tank can reach − our inner world. Poetry connects, rouses and invites. It’s an agent of change, working powerfully from within, where all the actions start.
Star: Poems for the Christmas Season is published by Culture And Democracy Press and can be ordered here, via any bookshop and from Hodges Figgis and Waterstones in Drogheda and Cork; No Alibis, The Secret Bookshelf, Little Acorns in N. Ireland or Amazon.
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