A candle is a powerful instant symbol that communicates across cultures and languages with associations of light, imagination, remembrance, renewal and hope, but also connects with transience and mortality for, in the process of giving light, a candle flame, as Gaston Bachelard describes it, ‘dies a good death; it dies in its sleep.’ Seán Street draws on all these symbols and more in Candlelight, going deep into human conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings, accessing the ancient and the elemental.
Fire is an element at the heart of the poems with their images of flames and the sun. Saxon men and women, with their love of riddles and kennings, saw the sun as the world’s candle and the poem ‘Dawn Chorus, Evensong’ depicts a world where Earth will be ‘deserted by sun’ if the dark is not kept at bay. Here is an ongoing struggle, a paradox of ‘flameless fire’ with a million suns blinding the narrator as he imagines journeying to ‘worlds past dreaming’, to a light that is ‘past metaphor’ (‘White as Jasmine’).
Water and Air are almost synonymous in Candlelight. Both represent the inner self even more than the outer. Rain provides a motif for several of the poems, often, like a low mood, doing no more ‘than drizzle’ or being grey or resembling glass or tears. ‘Prelude’ references Chopin’s Opus 28, No 15, usually known as The Raindrop Prelude’. Here, in an atmosphere of rain and ‘white silence’, is the impression of a bell being played ‘under the water’ of a pewter lake. Outside, there is no rain.
There are spaces in the air of Candlelight, spaces for the slow emergence of things. In the visionary poem ‘Newsham Park, Evening’ the reader becomes aware of
A narrow
still moment,
air before
the air knows
itself, faint
whispers round
the bandstand
and the lake,
places where
an almost
poem can
hang on space
between things
happening,
existing
but not yet
ready to
be written
or spoken.
Spaces, silence and stillness – but there is sound as well, the music of memory or ‘the noiseless noise’ of an aeolian harp which tells the self to create a garden with ‘earth, pen, paint, song’ and ‘plant something through which responses can sing.’ (‘Wind Harp’).
There are several elegies in Candlelight – tributes, memories, nostalgia, a sense of being ‘speechless in the face of mortality’ and a feeling that ‘The world’s layers peel off one by one,/coming to the edge of a thin place’. ‘Viewpoint’, the first poem, uses the metaphor of the path as journey but the poem’s ending is inconclusive – not hopeless but not hopeful either. Distant hills, with their promise of arrival and attainment, are invisible in the fog and seem to offer only ‘a blankness of possibilities’.
Yet in this beautiful, deeply moving collection of poems there are small portals, thresholds and open gates, there is colour and starlight and candles that lit ‘sparks in a pool,/a movement bright in deepest dusk/with beads down the rich glass searching.’ There is gratitude and joy for every moment of living, for ‘being a part/of the whole green flickering thing/while it lasts, for now.’ (‘Q &A’)
Mandy Pannett 3rd August 2026
