Cherubims: Poems, by Edward Clarke

Review by Jonathan Wooding

If you’ve ever sighed with relief when the children leave Meeting and go their own fidgety, smirking way, then shame on us all. Take a look at what we’re missing. Edward Clarke is happy running the Children’s Meeting, even when the kids are having tantrums, or interrupting his best efforts to compose a new poem. Here he is diligently composing in the early hours of the morning – what discipline!

These days I write on my couch and hear the noise
     Of living creatures above as they
Awake and call to me and sneeze and stretch.
But I know that after breakfast they’ll play
     The doxology I crave: my boys
Who make me rise as if I’d my harp fetch.

Clarke expects a lot from poetry, and gets a lot out of it. His verses are full of light, and enlightenment, but decidedly not what you’d call light verse. In his thrilling book on the art and function of poetry, The Vagabond Spirit of Poetry, Clarke outlined the discipline and ambition of his craft: ‘a poet can make language perform significant work for us in the world: because God is awakened in the hearts of receptive readers of great poems’. Here in ‘The Parable of the Vineyard’, Clarke’s ambition is clear: ‘wish the flèche-consuming Holy Ghost, / The flames of Pentecost, / Would fuel my utterance too.’

Clarke is raising sons, moving house, mourning loved ones, teaching literature, falling off his bike, and travelling to his Italian relatives for Christmas, even feeling despair with our broken world. But none of this, it seems, gets in the way of his poetic piety. Brilliantly-engineered poetic forms effortlessly raise and shape the ‘time redeemed’ of childish, cherubinic mischief and mayhem and mystery: ‘Can it be that they’re charmed / And magically upraised / To speak the idiom of the Psalms? / They seem to live, like trees, at the height of praise, / These boys’.

The silence and stillness of Clarke’s composition time is ever present, despite toddlers busting into his deftly-delineated stanzas. His poems are songs of such innocence, each poem containing intimations of immortality. Clarke is our cherubinic pilgrim: ‘And a neighbour standing next to me says, / Write a poem about this, / The radiant bums and heads above our heads / And all our garden sheds’.

The original cherubinic pilgrim was Angelus Silesius, a German mystic and religious poet. Clarke’s ‘Annette’s Version’ invites us to consider some words in German by him, while his boys are tumbling on a trampoline – feel the bounce in these rhymes: ‘A curly cherub of mine / Tumbles from the trampoline / With singular intensity / To make his harshly supplicating hymn / For me to tickle him’.

In this comedy of concern and exasperation, Edward’s neighbour is also dealing with a screaming daughter while translating Silesius’s mystical, gnomic words. Edward takes note: ‘Beyond gnosis / One has to strive’. Against this his son ‘jumps to a chair’ – ‘A boisterous form who straightens out my soul’. Edward Clarke, child-minding mystic.

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