RACHEL MANN is a volcano of a priest: a majestic and inspiring part of our landscape, yet able to pour out a literary lava. Her restive and burning depths are such that we are quickly forced to leave our ideological settlements for a better place to inhabit. Her thinking is channelled through many forms, from theological treatise to novel, but her pulse is purely poetic.
In her second collection of poetry, rightly shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, Mann engages with the disputed story of Eleanor “John” Rykener. Rykener was a 14th-century seamstress, embroiderer, and sex worker, who has been claimed in recent medieval studies as an example of someone who was “transgender-like”. Mann, as a trans woman, is drawn to Eleanor: “she invites mythologising.” Mann takes up the challenge.
The collection is suitably transgressive in its linguistic play, imaginative spaces, and ability to disturb identity, system, and order with a queer joy that invokes a resurrection. We find Eleanor in conversation with St Catherine of Siena, St Katherine of Alexandria, and St Perpetua. We encounter her as Mother Julian and Margery Kempe. We are led through the absences and impossibilities of those who are deprived lives lived on their own terms. The volcano has erupted.
Martyn Halsall lives in west Cumbria and was formerly poet-in-residence at Carlisle Cathedral. His latest collection, The Weather Door, is of a different enterprise, but no less fearless in its belief that poetry is a borderland of secular and sacred, of outer and inner landscape. His poems live with the liminal, with coastal strands, cries of recognition and loss, the desire for detail in the barren terrain, for meaning in the loneliness of the human heart.
The collection is, among other things, a rich journey following the weather round the British Isles, and is rooted in a deep understanding of land and water, belief and reticence, folklore, wildlife, and changeable skies. In “Peninsula”, the poet stands in a ruined chapel and imagines: “medieval monks who turned this ground, / psalm by psalm, into a benediction”. Both the precision and evocative lure of Halsall’s language enable these poems to do the same.
The Very Revd Dr Mark Oakley is the Dean of Southwark.
Eleanor Among the Saints
Rachel Mann
Carcanet £11.99
(978-1-80017-381-1)
Church Times Bookshop £10.79
The Weather Door
Martyn Halsall
Book Mill £10.99
(978-1-9164750-9-0)
Church Times Bookshop £9.89
