Malcolm Guite

The singing bowl

ISBN: 9781 8482 5541 8

Canterbury Press, 2013, 124 pp, £10.99

and

Kenneth Steven

Coracle

ISBN: 9780 2810 7209 5

SPCK, 2014, 49 pp, £9.99

These two books of poems offer reflections from a Christian perspective that is more obvious in ‘The singing bowl’. In that collection, poems are grouped under titles: Local habitations (many are churches), The Four Loves, Word and World, Intimations of Mortality, Clouds of Witnesses, and Three Sequences (on saying the daily office, of events or news items of the day brought into prayer, and On reading the Commedia). Many of the poems are sonnets; both poets show a discipline of form and use of words which is a pleasure to read.

The poems in ‘Coracle’ intertwine observations of nature (Horses, A green woodpecker, Otter, Glenlyon) with memories or people – real or imagined: George (a soldier), being bullied at school, the gathering for a funeral (After all). Both books provide poems to keep to hand to re-read and enjoy.

Maureen CSF