The back page column of the Church Times, famously occupied for
many years by Ronald Blythe, continues to be a breath of fresh air
in the hands of poet and priest Malcolm Guite.
His acute observations of the local, the everyday, moments of
conversation and life's simple pleasures are doorways into a bigger
reality of a world suffused with the meaning and beauty that lies
beneath surface appearances.
His lucid, perceptive and imaginative musings follow a similar
pattern to the sonnets for which he is so renowned. In his own
words, he treats these 500 word essays 'a little in the spirit of
the sonnet, with a sense of development, of a 'turn' or volta part
way through, and a sense that the end revisits and re-reads the
opening'.
These draw together everyday events and encounters, landscape,
journeys, poetry, stories, memory and a sense of the sacred, and
fuses them to create richly satisfying portraits of the familiar
that at the same time opens the way to an enchanted world.
9781786225399 £12.99 Canterbury
Press 30 November 2023
Malcolm Guite is renowned throughout the English speaking
church. He lectures widely on literature and theology in Britain
and in North America and is the author of bestselling poetry
collections and other books. His poetry blog has many thousands of
regular readers www.malcolmguite.wordpress.com