One of the things that seems to have happened in the poetry world over the last few years is the adoption of religious and liturgical forms and ideas for authors’ own secular ends. Laura Walker’s Psalmbook from a few years ago reimagines the Biblical book of Psalms as a series of meditative prayers addressed to the world around her. The poems focus on presence and the present, work to try and capture moments of wonder and incidental thought as the author walks and tries to remember. The detailed observation is in tension with the abstraction of seeking, and the absence of, the ‘you’ the poems address.
Megan Pinto’s poems in Saints of Little Faith feel much more spiritual but is also more earthbound, with parts of the book dealing with the familial, including the author’s father’s illness and decay. Overheard sex, a flasher on the night train, and hospital food, smells and routines are contrasted with more abstract ruminations on wonder, love, heaven and ‘the vastness of space’. There is a sense of dreaminess overlaid upon the realities of human life: the author prays – to ‘a female God, a kind of God // who radiates light / that does not blind’ – and knows she ‘must learn to live in this world’, but remains restless and uneasy throughout, aware that ‘Obsession is a godless place. I go there every day.’ In the final poem, ‘Harvest’, Pinto turns her spiritual and human desires inside out, regarding herself as desired rather than desiring:
I think of those late summer walks
through the meadow and the neighboring
meadow, where I
was not longing but the one
who was longed for.
Vespers are evening prayers, and in her book of the same name, Jane Lewty turns these into reflective poems about creativity and making within daily life. Getting up times, routine (or lack of), make-up, worries and ecstatic moments are woven into poems full of both abstract questioning and stream-of-consciousness memories and moments. I would have liked the poems to have been more rooted in the world around the author, soon tired of the nervous engagement with the world and self-negation. In ‘Vesper #1117: Triptych’ she contradicts herself, saying
I think you should not
say or write a single word until you have made some terrible mistake.
as if only error or wrongdoing can provoke a poem, which seems as questionable to me as sitting around waiting for a fictional muse to inspire. Although the final poem, ‘Oxen’, self-consciously references ‘these gross nightletters, this vespers, husssh’, there is little quiet or contemplation here, only restless, fidgety self-awareness and doubt.
Keith Jarrett’s book, Hide Me Under the Blood and I Shall Be Satisfied, is the book I most enjoyed reading here. He lives in a world I know, a rough and tumble urban environment, and struggles with a gospel background derived from a church upbringing. Despite the fact he is
bored of God and his insufferable mother-
in-law jokes his magic tricks clumsy
sleight of hand we laugh because if we didn’t
hell would break loose
he is ultimately ‘thankful to be spared / another day’. These poems are tough, taking faith and doubt, colonialism, being black and queer in their stride, whilst drawing upon performance poetry alongside the mystical, experimental and canonical. There are poems after Edwin Morgan, Walt Whitman, William Blake and John Latham; songs of praise, anger, resistance, love and lust; family stories, ‘origin stories’ and lists (‘partial index’s) of ‘Some Gods’; contemporary fascinations, prophecies, warnings and addictions. The remnants of spiritual engagement underpin Jarrett’s poems, yet he is weary and resigned:
If we must pray, then let this be our prayer:
If we must live, then let us live sincere.
There is sincerity by the bucketload in all these books, each author struggling to shake off and abandon, or appropriate and make use of, religious forms and concepts that were once everyday. Sometimes, the notion of prayer, praise or deity sits uneasily within the work, at other times a sense of wonder, attention and love underpins and informs the writing.
Rupert Loydell 24th September 2026
