I notice that I’ve added nothing to this blog since 2023. It’s hard to put writing out into the world in the face of all the deepening horror that surrounds us. Not just the war in eastern Europe and the genocide in Gaza, but the steady erosion of fellow-feeling and human dignity in England. A policy conducted by a political party and their media supporters for which the only real definition of human value is successful engagement in productive “economic activity” and the consumption it enables. A party whose leading ideologues have been asset-stripping the country for their own and their friends’ benefit while the poor, the sick, the disabled and the young are driven to the wall.

Some people pray as a way to address their own and the world’s distress. I’ve not done so since my early teens but, since the beginning of the covid lock-down, I’ve increasingly turned to the work of poets – in particular Paula Meehan and Denise Levertov.

The best poetry seems to me to be a bulwark against the tide of self-interested dehumanisation that is threatening to swamp the country. A quiet gathering-up and platting-together of strands of past and present human experience into a whole that touches and sustains. Of course there are all those who, following Auden, insist that poetry – indeed art more generally – “makes nothing happen”. But as Paula Meehan writes, it’s possible to read that: “nothing” as something positive. She writes:

‘If poetry makes nothing happen, maybe it stops something happening, stops time, takes our breath away. Though, strange that taking our breath away , being breathtaking, is associated with achievement, accomplishment. Maybe it’s like the negative space in painting by which what is there is revealed, to be apprehended by human consciousness’.

Paula Meehan Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them, 2016:19.

What this brings to my mind are statements by those who speak of prayer, not as a speaking to the Divine, but as a silent open listening. Perhaps listening to the poet’s “voice”, whether on the page or in a poetry reading, is a way of touching and being touched by that all-inclusive “negative space” in which everything, past and future, is held? (What relationship that may have to what is named the Divine is beyond me). Whatever the case, such poetry seems to provide the best counter to the threat of being overwhelmed by despair that is available to me just now.