“Soul’s very edge and promontory”: Exile and the Kingdom. Hilary Davies.

Enitharmon Press, 2016.

 John Robert Lee

The back-cover blurb on Hilary Davies’ Exile and the Kingdom says: “In her fourth collection…Davies embarks on pilgrimage – poetic, religious, psychological. Using a dazzling interplay of narrative and lyric line, she travels through real and imagined territory in search of answers to the great questions which preoccupy us as human beings.” I would have also alerted potential readers that the love poems to her dying husband must be among the most truly felt in any poetry.

In an interview with Martyn Crucefix for his blog (March 14^th, 2017), Davies says of this book that “our pilgrimage through life is in a very real sense an exile but how we approach it, are changed by it and by those we meet and love is also how we may approach the kingdom.” She added, “the central sequence of the book is about the loss, confusion, terror and celebration that the death of one we love occasions.” Concerning the sequence form, the poet remarks that she “found that discrete lyrics, unconnected to any wider context, were no longer sufficient by themselves to allow me to address the themes I wanted to address. I began to think in terms of a broader architectonic for the poems I wanted to write…”

Speaking to Terence Handley Macmath of the Church Times (January 5^th 2018), Davies comments on the audience for poetry, “the reader I have in mind is anyone who loves how language structures itself into poetry, and who also believes that this can say something redemptive about the human condition.” Of the religious tenor of her work (she is a practicing Catholic) she says “much of my poetry is a spiritual exploration and more and more so over the years. This, of course covers every aspect of life…and how all this relates to faith in a personal God….the fact that I’m a Catholic influences what I choose to write about. And my writing infuses my faith...”

With reference to a world that can overwhelm with its secular, consumerist indifference to the spiritual dimension, – an editor of an anthology of contemporary Christian poetry states: “some may still question any poetry of religious transcendence in a postmodern age..” That editor, David Impasto, notes on the section he titles “Wayfarers” in his anthology Upholding Mystery (1997): “by circumstance a pilgrim, it seems the Christian not only is rejected as an irksome countersign but is torn by love for a transient world that is both home and not home.” Hilary Davies’ poems are set in her home landscape of the Lea Valley, as well as that of Wales, France and Germany, a Europe for which she confesses great love.

Exile and the Kingdom was one of the best poetry collections I read in 2018. Substantial in content, images and shaped experience, finely observed, unpretentious, she maps her travellings to and through faith, her long love for Europe and her grief at the loss of her husband the poet Sebastian Barker (1945-2014) to whom the book is dedicated. The poems are heart-searched, sincere without proselytizing showiness. In the words of a review of her first collection The Shanghai Owner of the Bonsai Shop (Enitharmon, 1997), “Her language reveals true lyric gifts, while sustaining clear, lucid argument. Out of these poems comes a vision of brokenness transformed.” Indeed.

Her love poems to her late husband are moving, tender-rooted in their grief, even as she seeks to traverse the dark places.

“Grief is orphan, where once there was companion,

The turning to, the gesture, the shared, created world

Staked like a dull rag upon a picket,

A cage of longing hung beside a road.

Grief knows. She is the death in life,

Closer than our own bone.”

She is a fine poet of faith and transcendence in a materialist world which seems largely uninterested in such writing. Her work needs to be better known.

 

Across Country

“Across Country,” the first sequence of poems in seven parts, traces the beginning of the journey of faith, from childhood to adult resolutions. While Davies describes real journeys through real landscapes, the visionary and transcendent ‘etch the first surfaces of particularity/and settle in our souls.” Going west (to Wales?) “the streets were hollow and strange…The city tipped and hinged, And we crossed over the frontier into a translated land.” The opening lines are reminiscent of Dante’s classic opening of Inferno “Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself/In dark woods, the right road lost…”(Robert Pinsky). “Across Country’s” opening is resonant:

“How it all begins: this is what gets forgotten,

Unwilled and inarticulate, the dark start in the morning,

Being carried by gods out into the starry night.

We are silent to ourselves: no familiar landscapes,

No lintel, inglenook to shape or stable space,

Just the road and its rhythms.”

As with Dante or Bunyan, this journey begins with dark and an image of wilderness.

Like cinema montage, her scenes change from early morning car journeys to a boat crossing the channel to French countryside, “This fugue of difference, this rosary of place,” to “bars and hostelries” near rivers. One of her strengths is her delineation of detail which brings a dramatic quality to the unfolding narratives, and that with reference to both external and internal descriptions.

Martyn Crucefix, in his review of Exile and the Kingdom found there were “passages that stand comparison with the Eliot of the Four Quartets.” Section III of Across Country is one of those where Davies makes a typical Eliot transition of image and thought to offer a meditation on the movement from “fallacy and self-belief” to faith:

“How to distinguish the horizons of vision from our own folly’s chasm?

A book in a bookshop can wring the spell.

I held it there a year, a decade,

Sucked on the arguments of polity and governance,

Sedulous in the maze of fallacy and self-belief.

Very sweet are the seductions of the lamplit room

Whose geometries, unchecked, autarkic,

Unhouse humanity; and luscious the meretricious fruit

Of the ideology tree. A man may squander

His whole birthright in those dark woods.”

 

An assertion follows with unambiguous clarity:

“The lords of existence

Are neither economist nor philosopher

The Lord of existence

Shows himself not in systems

The Lord of existence

Is the sound behind everything

When everything is still.”

 

‘Across Country’ is so finely drawn, it could do with a close-reading of its own. The poet searches the tentative beginnings of conversion:

“When does the door open?

How does the ear prepare

For what it does not even know

It cannot hear?”

 

Love is the Hound of Heaven that pursues this pilgrim:

“So I crossed into church after church that summer,

Thinking of erudition, but beside me trod Love.”

 

Love, who will show

 “…with open palms the forms

To piece together to learn the inlay of faith.”

 

With this spiritual experience, the convert will face guilt that “builds a grim tunnel in the soul, Its starting point irretrievable, its end unattainable”; will experience the full weight of self-realisation before a new awareness of the presence of God: “The only way out now is on your belly Under the weight of heaven”; and the course across landscape and ocean and spirit leads “into the absolute inefficacy of anything but faith.” After all is said and done, “Only perdurance delivers. Not one night of weeping, nor the taverns of despair, Nor even the grandiose claims of conscience Suffice in the end.”

As traumatic as the new birth has been, “We are astonished as we turn to rest At the plains and forests and rivers over which we have come,” the pilgrimage is just begun. But like Bunyan’s Christian, there will be companions. This first sequence ends with love: “You came to me as in a waking dream And I knew instantly I had to go the hard way with you To learn how to love better.” So, they proceed: “Out of hope’s slaughterhouse, history, We pilgrims forever come.” This personal travelling with its topographies, is a palimpsest of all holy quests.

 

Songs from the Lea Valley; In the Valley of the Lot.

At the heart of Exile and the Kingdom are these sequences of poems which present the nitty-gritty of the mundane of the life of faith. Later, in Rhine Fugue, Davies will give attention to episodes of European history and in the final title sequence she will turn to psalms and prayers of her pilgrim’s progress using the form of liturgical or canonical hours, the offices of the church.

Hilary Davies has made her home for almost 30 years in the Lea Valley, on the eastern edge of London. In her interview with Martyn Crucefix she speaks of the cosmopolitan nature of the area, its historical significance to London, its ‘green’ beauty and the atmosphere provided by the river.

While the poems describe the landscape, she finds signposts to faith and its practice everywhere. She hears “prayer’s cadences out of a thousand mouths”; on Stamford Hill, her Jewish neighbor “sits in his garden: Orotund as butter he intones his Torah”; “the geese drive south Trailing hosannas over the estuaries”. Alert to annunciations and manifestations, she sees “Unnoticed under the buzz of our lives Beggars and saints sweep over the land.’ And in Abney Park, the stone “angels are praying.”

Following the best of Francis Thompson or T S Eliot, she provides an immediacy, a familiar recognition, of a contemporary English neighborhood.

 

“In the Valley of the Lot” is the longest sequence at the heart of the book. It is a “valley of the shadow of death,” a wilderness passage of grief at the dying of her husband, a dark night of the soul where doubts of the promises of faith and hope regarding the after-life are “mighty shadows,” a “dark tide which brings no tomorrow: Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow, sorrow.”

But this mournfulness has produced from its stricken memories some of the most moving and genuinely wrought love poems I have read anywhere.

Hilary Davies’ husband was the poet Sebastian Barker who died in 2014 after a sudden diagnosis of cancer. This love poetry is sharply etched with his dying and death, loss is the boundary she can already see with an acute, impossible desolation: “Ah, that I could fold my arms around time And so enchant her, She would not take you.”

This love is not some idealistic, mystical love between pious fellow-travellers, but sings in the frank, plain statement of the erotic, even as hovering “night’s cloak is cold and everlasting.” No Donne conceit here:

“Do to me with your broad hands

All the things that I would have you do.

I wish you delight from my breast

Arcing through your fingers.

I wish you succor from my thighs

As they learn to bear you. May our mouths

Feed on each other as on bread and apples.

Sweet, salt love, come away.”

 

The loneliness of sorrow, memories that are still fresh, the unbelieving transition between presence and absence, are not avoided:

“I said to myself, no matter, it is just the sunset

Over the perfect lawns making you melancholy;

Soon he will be by your side again

And all shall be well.”

 

But the hard reality of separation confronts her:

“Then abrupt on that sea path I noticed the air grown cold;

Like a swift ghost against the wall I knew

That here was an end to dreaming,

That you had done with discovery of what lay ahead of us,

All that we had been was rolling in on the shingle

And the road away from this headland

Led for me only out along its darkening foreshore

Where your love’s face scattered into farewell against the coming stars.”

 

The images in these poems, drawn from familiar and loved landscape and seascape, echoing classical metaphors, are the shaping forms that hold the love, melancholy, loneliness, despair:

“We are never prepared for this –

Never prepared for the dark lake,

For the boat with its sharp wake

Skimming across the water towards us,

For the immovable sorrow at the land’s edge

Where the waves flicker,

Where at the two worlds’ crossroads

Two mighty shadows meet.”

 

The notes sounded here to mark grief are true and without self-indulgent discord: “No one told me how like fear grief falls,”; “Grief takes the dearest intimacies you had And hangs them in a row marked never more-“. Despair overcomes faith: “Forward or back mean nothing Since not in this life nor anywhere Will they ever lead home to you.” “The pointlessness Of all that was. This simple thought destroys.” Dante-like, she cries out:

“There are not words to say

What this dull plain is like:

No water, ever; the stones like scurf

In a wind that frets with an unending cold

The stumps of happiness.

What moan breathes from the canyons,

What monstrous understanding

Paradise gives as she withdraws.”

 

But, lest we forget, as painful as these experiences are, this is a pilgrimage, and the sojourner does not lie down in Castle Despair. She will rise from the Slough of Despond. An ultimate darkness is not the end of the faithful: “How can the bowstring of my being snap When all this was ours?” And slowly but surely, grace comes to soothe:

“Only in this room when I lie on our bed

Can rest from these wild thoughts come – grace’s gift

Greater than flood or vanished continents:

Love of you matchless ever and darling in the palm of my hand.”

 

Rhine Fugue, Exile and the Kingdom

In her earlier collections, “In the Valley of the Restless Mind” and “Imperium” Hilary Davies had shown her deep interest in European history. In Rhine Fugue she casts a “taper of memory” over her first childhood visits to Germany, the history of Blucher’s crossing of the Rhine in 1814, the Jewish Quarter of Worms and the printing of Tyndale’s New Testament in Worms in 1526. Practical Jewish and Protestant faith under pressure of various persecutions are the inspiration for the narrative poetic meditations here:

“What kind of strength does it take

To cultivate roses in a time of war?

What kind of pilgrimage, to wait?

To kneel against the darkness in a blacked-out room?

To tend, invisibly, the roots of peace?”

Rhine Fugue is the most dramatic sequence of these poems which draws on historical events at the heart of European history. She has a gift for dramatic narrative and this is apparent in descriptions of her personal voyages as well as recreations of the past.

 

The final title-sequence, in 8 poems, uses the format of the liturgical hours or divine office, often referred to as the Breviary. “They mark out the day and the night, and are thus associated with different states of the soul, different spiritual aspirations, different signposts on the journey of life…canonical hours mark the divisions of the day in terms of periods of fixed prayer at regular intervals.” The present canonical hours, observed from Matins at 2 am through to Compline at 7 pm, used by the Roman Catholic Church, consist of seven, ie, Matins, Lauds, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline. While Davies starts with Nocturns, (and includes the other seven,) these as a term ceased to be used with Paul VI. Nocturns were sections into which the Matins were originally divided. Prime, one of the early hours, observed at 6 am, was also suppressed after Vatican 2.

So these liturgical hours are essentially times of prayer for the observant. Given all that has gone before, what are we to make of this poet/pilgrim’s version of a Breviary? How has she shaped this traditional religious form to her literary purposes?

In her 2017 interview with Martyn Crucefix, she reveals that this section of the book was first to be written. She also says that she ‘wanted to write something about the stages in my spiritual life up till then, including my conversion to Catholicism.” The structure she chose was “the liturgical hours or divine office…what was especially interesting to me was their symbolism, which is a dual one. They mark out the day and the night, and are thus associated with different states of the soul, different spiritual aspirations, different signposts on the journey of life.”

For this devotee, these closing poems are confessional prayers of self-revelation, anguished contemplation on the lived and suffered coordinates of experience that have taught and shaped faith; they are laments of a modern-day psalmist, marking the hours of “one who, from his night sweats Wakes in the livid hour before dawn and is afraid.” I agree with Martyn Crucefix that they bear comparison with the poems of Four Quartets and I would add, with the best religious verse, ancient and modern. The settings are contemporary, framing a common, recognizable human heart-searching that makes these meditations accessible.

The NOCTURNS section is divided into two. The first opens with the supplicant (kneeling, we imagine, if not prostrate), without dissimulation, pleading in the dark before dawn:

“Lord, let me come again into your presence.

The times are difficult, and night after night

Beneath the door curls the thin smoke of hypocrisy.

Sleep brings no respite but a throng of fretted images:

The rostra talking to the multitudes,

War’s insect engines on a desert wall,

The bulldozed coffins.”

 

“Doubt’s unlit well” tempts, the seeming unimportant smallness and inevitable end of humanity overwhelms: “What difference does the beetle, struggling with his dungball, Make, when the world’s willed to dissolution and the solar fire?”; the night-time confessional goes deeper into a kind of existentialist absurdity:

“…Then there’s the heartache

At the core of things: attachment, the blank certainty

Of letting go, the arbitrary wing of accident,

Wrong gene or partner, a lifetime bled into the dusty ground

Of non-fulfilment…”

Even the possible answers and solutions to the dilemmas of mundane existence, “the days go in and the days go out The cars and the buses and the trains round about All our doings…The daily bread and the weekly shop” – even those are overthrown in:

“.that night which throws us on our knees

And we lean out, retching, over the abyss.”

 

And out of the depths comes the cry: “Lord, do not leave me in this dreadful place.”

This is religious verse, well-conceived, well-wrought, of a high order.

 

I am not convinced that the second part of this section fits well here. It is a reminiscence of a “favourite, mercurial uncle” who may have died tragically. It seems to be an illustration from personal experience that teaches an important lesson, ie “the impossibility of loving begets despair, And despair kills.” But it does not seem to me to carry the momentum of the first section.

The other “hours” develop the theme of confession and contrition, expose “Those innumerable little capitulations to self-love.”, the weeping recognition that “mind, body, soul (were) So penetrated with duplicity we could not even see The canker in our face.”

These confessions are very Augustinian in their frank record of the “road of transgression.” But light breaks over the hours as dawn nears and “Grace falls like rain on a late summer afternoon.” “The travail of the contemplative” is blessed by insights and the opening of the soul’s eyes to miracle: “What miracles In the hedgerows do we pass by, unsaluted?” Indeed, from her cell, keeping the Book of offices, one given to prayer learns that “miracles are a conversation And do not proffer themselves to those who cannot hear.” And while, as the journey completes a cycle and the pilgrim ruefully admits “Hosanna’s the hardest, not the easiest, thing:”, Compline, the last office of the day, brings a certain calm and peace:

“Lord, let your servant at the soul’s very edge and promontory

Walk where the chapel of the fathoms grows

And saints lean from her windows against the night.”

 

Hilary Davies, in her Exile and the Kingdom has written some of the best poetry of our time. In the words of a blog commentator, responding to a review, she is a “much-neglected poet.” Her work deserves to be better known. Much of this book needs a close, annotated reading, so full it is of deep thinking of faith’s route, weaving of images, dramatic narration, insights into contemporary life and a reach beyond time and place to common human travailings, mediated by struggling ups and downs of this exile. Through such sojournings, the kingdom is built.

 

I don’t think that many writers and readers today would dispute the statement by the editors of Religion and modern literature: essays in theory and criticism (1975) that a common critical position today holds that “the religious dimension of literature is irrelevant.” In the same book, J. Hillis Miller, in a 1967 essay, proposes that ‘The poets of most value to us are the poets of today, those who can speak to us of our own experience.” Hilary Davies is a contemporary poet who speaks with skill and a true poetic gift about our shared experiences of faith, in a largely agnostic and secular world. She is not writing a tract to proselytize, but through her own journeys, her pilgrim’s progress, which include grief and loss, she shows how belief in the supernatural is possible and indeed necessary if we are to fulfil our human potential in a world of sacramental presence. As derided as this may be by critics, there is something to be considered in the words of Philip Sherrard (The Sacred in life and art, 1990): “But whatever his course, of this the artist must be sure: that only when his art possesses a sacred quality will it present a positive challenge to our technological world and to the degradation of human life which is endemic to it..”. Hilary Davies is a poet who recognizes that there is a “deeper world than this,” and is on a frontline of current poets and artists carrying the banner inherited from many who have gone before and left their pilgrim testimony with us. I am pleased to have found her work and this book.

 

 

 

Hilary Davies’ other poetry publications are The Shanghai Owner of the Bonsai Shop (1997), In a Valley of This Restless Mind (1997) and Imperium (2005), all published by the Enitharmon Press.

John Robert Lee is a Saint Lucia writer. His Collected Poems 1975-2015 (2017) and Pierrot (2020) are published by Peepal Tree Press. His Saint Lucian writers and writing: an author index is published by Papillote Press, 2019