RELIGION is complicated for Pádraig Ó Tuama. “Sometimes, I try to object to the idea of being a religious poet, and then I find myself writing a sequence like ‘Our Lady of Desire’. I’ve stopped trying to resent that my mother tongue is religion and see what a vehicle it is to take me into other places.”
He has two new books just published, and is “on the road”, as he terms it, to promote them. The journeys mean that he is zigzagging across countries and cities, away from his usual berths in New York and Belfast. A cradle Catholic, raised in Northern Ireland, does he still go to church? “I went to mass a few Fridays ago, when I was on my way home in Hell’s Kitchen and called in. I spend a lot of time in churches, in the silence,” he says. “But ‘the burden of belief isn’t on me any more’, I would say,” as he quotes from a character in his latest collection, Kitchen Hymns.
Ó Tuama speaks of religion in his life as “a mother tongue, an empty tongue, a hell tongue, a yearning tongue”, stringing images and emotions together. His backstory contains a possible call to ordination, and, within that, a mix of disappointment, frustration, and redemption. “It’s so interesting to know how to think about this. In some ways, I think I still do have a vocation, and I’m doing it. In the way I understand what priesthood means — the call to sacrament and incarnation and narrative — I think I am still doing it.”
It stirred in conversation with a bishop in Belfast some years ago when he was undertaking ecumenical work on conflict resolution and dialogue. He was also studying theology with one of the pontifical universities. But, during his first year as pope, Benedict XVI made it official policy that men with a homosexual orientation were not admissible to the priesthood. “I was devastated by this,” he recalls. “I said I would take the vow of celibacy, but I wouldn’t take one of lying. It is insulting to the self to belong to something that fundamentally rejects you.” Sexuality and identity are crystalline themes in his work.
He still reads Meister Eckhardt each morning, and describes Catholicism and sacramentality as “my mother tongues, but I am not under that roof any more”. This chimes with his background in conflict resolution, the acknowledgment of trauma, and his surviving faith. He speaks of how poetry and liturgy can both be “language to circle around the void”. In addition to the “Kitchen hymns” section, there are “Do you believe in God?” and “In a garden by a gate” — which present Jesus and Persephone as conversant characters who have “both been to hell and back”, finding common ground through the overlap of Hades in their stories.
Even the choice of Kitchen Hymns as a title is layered and ambiguous. “It’s a loose phrase from the north-west of Ireland, and they are the songs you sing at home,” he explains. But they are distinctly not religious poetry — a category that he considers to be “understandably suspect, because it so often has an agenda like devotion or recruitment”.
HE IS clear about how Ireland has moulded his poetic landscape. “Growing up in Ireland, and reading its poetry, it was never not political as a discipline. So many of those who were executed because of their role in the struggle for Irish independence were poets. Poetry has a long tradition in Ireland.”
Likewise, its language. “When I get to know a poem, I sometimes ask myself how it would sound in Irish [which he speaks]. At an auditory level, the Irish language is an influence for me. There is much assonance, in the way a river rhymes with itself, with its own sound. Then there’s the pitter-patter from time to time, reminiscent of this, and it makes for an informal beat throughout the poem.”
Then religion again. “My mythological imagination is shaped by the formal and folk Christianities of Ireland. They’re always the first door I push through, and I’ve entirely accepted that now. Pushing through the door of hell led to Persephone for me. With our Lady, it has been Freudian and Lacanian writings on desire.”
James PolleyPádraig Ó Tuama at Southwark Cathedral, in February
The body of work that is Kitchen Hymns formed part of his Ph.D. at the University of Glasgow, and Ó Tuama frames his “deepest interest in religion as literary”. He previously took a Master’s degree looking at a literary reading of characterisation in St Mark’s Gospel. “The narrative experience of theology is all about close reading of the text. Religious communities are ultimately literary communities. There is a longstanding association with taking a text so seriously that you might even want to live your life in conversation with it.”
He says that it “felt natural to go from the Hades of Jesus to Persephone, to find a creative conversation between these figures. Jesus and Persephone are both survivors of hell.” He has always been fascinated by hell, and by Dante’s Inferno. Some of these thoughts came to him during the pandemic.
“It’s about isolation. Jesus of Nazareth is filled with rage: why have you abandoned me? I wanted to take the character of Jesus seriously, along with hell, and my own character.” In another overlap, he speaks of “the atheistic Jesus”, and refers to this dialectic approach as “pushing the realms with the electricity of difference. There’s no final resolution in the dialectic.”
Ó TUAMA’s other new book is the second Poetry Unbound collection: 44 Poems on Being with Each Other, flowing from the immensely popular podcast of the same name, set up initially with the American writer and broadcaster Krista Tippett, whose mission since studying theology at Yale in the 1990s has been to enable “intelligent public conversation about what the religious, spiritual, and moral aspects of human life might be”.
Her weekly radio show began as Speaking of Faith, and is now called On Being. Out of this grew Ó Tuama’s podcast Poetry Unbound in 2020, which analysed one poem each week in a 15-minute presentation. Both expected the project to be small, but the first season had one million downloads. That number has now climbed to more than 16 million.
“Treat every poem as a text that’s worthy of such attention,” he explains, describing the programmes as “a joy, not a demand”, which is evident in the way in which he reads and reflects on each work with grounded honesty and personal meditation. “Don Paterson says poetry is a little machine for remembering itself — a way of looking, a way of seeing. That includes emptiness, too: the inhalation of breath, the line break or stanza break.” He also reflects clearly on form and technique without becoming too detailed or opaque. With thought, he interprets the T. S. Eliot “objective correlative” moment as “items with emotional weight”.
“I’m not a fan of thinking [that] poetry always has a purpose — people write them all the time, and it’s a form of a personal liturgy sometimes, and some of them get published.” He can say this because he knows it himself. He had contributed some poems to an anthology on urban theology almost 15 years ago, which caught the eye of Christine Smith, then publishing director of Canterbury Press (News, 31 May 2024).
“Christine asked if I’d thought about publishing a collection myself. She gave me her card, and told me I had a publisher for whenever I wanted to.” As a result, Canterbury Press brought out his Readings from the Books of Exile in 2012.
He talks about poetry in the prophets: “Jeremiah and his laments, his wisdom and pain. There was no purpose in that, but he shaped language around it and it bears witness.” He links this to Ireland again, where “poetry and witness and art all interacted — pain and lamentation, it’s giving sorrow words.”
His own version of E. M. Forster’s “Only connect” means being able to see in order to do that. “The Irish word file translates as ‘poet’ but also as ‘seer’. I’m hesitant to imagine that poets have special insight, or particular powers of perception. We don’t. We just work damned hard to see, remember, write, see again and write more,” he suggests in the introduction to 44 Poems. “Poems are recipes for happiness and prayers for when no other prayers will do.”
He has given himself time off what he calls “big projects” during these book tours, but he is still writing and reading throughout. Another new collection of his own work is coming together, and a third Poetry Unbound volume is in the pipeline.
As part of the promotional tour, Ó Tuama appeared at Southwark Cathedral for a public event with the Dean, the Very Revd Dr Mark Oakley — another connector of poetry with spirituality. The itinerary, overall, will take in bookshops, poetry groups, colleges, and more flights. Here is a man on a mission, living out his vocation, true to the calling that he has found, with all its complications.
Kitchen Hymns is published by Cheerio Publishing at £12 (Church Times Bookshop £10.80); 978-1-7394405-7-2; and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other: A Poetry Unbound collection is published by Canongate at £20 (Church Times Bookshop £18), 978-1-80530-258-2.
