The BBC are currently gearing up for a series of poetry-themed programmes over the next few weeks. I don't know what prompted it, whether it was the appointment of the new Poet Laureate or whatever (Clive James has written a superb piece in the light of Carol Ann Duffy's appointment for Radio 4/BBC Magazine ), but I look forward to tuning in to a few of the programmes. I'm partial to a bit of poetry, particularly where it reflects a spiritual engagement with the world: be it the dense metaphysics (combined with sexual frisson) of Donne, the surreality of Blake, the interweaving of modern Irish interests with classics to be found in Heaney, the earthy spirituality of Woodbine Willie in the face of the horrors of the western front, the more contemporary and popular, yet no less potent work of Stewart Henderson or Godfrey Rust, or, of course The Psalms... I have often used poetry to reflect on different issues myself, from the years when teenage angst overflowed in pages and p...
Dialogues, monologues, sketches, poems, rants, theological and liturgical bits and bobs and miscellaneous other verbal doodles...