Divinity in poetry

by Michael Shackleton · October 15, 2008

THROUGH THE UNKNOWN REMEMBERED GATE by Margaret Blackie. New Voices Publishing, Cape Town. 2008. 145pp.

AGE IS A BEAUTIFUL PHASE by James Matthews. Realities, 2008. 48pp.

Reviewed by Michael Shackleton

Both authors of these two books of poetry reflect on life and living, and both use the poet�s tools�to explore and express the profound and personal human awareness of�the divine�reality in the world.

Margaret Blackie is an academic with degrees in chemistry. She felt herself drawn towards Loyolan spirituality after having taught at St George’s Jesuit college in Harare, Zimbabwe.

The poems are presented in chronological order, which allows us to�follow her growth as, in the Loyolan manner, she searches to reform what has been deformed by sin and transform her life into a love relationship with God and his creation.

Each poem is a real and practical meditation that would benefit others in meditative mood, a kind of overflowing of her emotions�in response to�what she finds in her daily path, for example, very tellingly when she reacts to the atrocity of the attack on New York’s twin towers in 2001.

James Matthews, an anti-apartheid veteran who has just turned 79,�breaks somewhat new ground in�his poems, all of which as he says, pay homage to senior citizens. His verses display the wisdom and tolerance of a man mellowed by the years who finds, as Robert Browning put it: �The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made.�

He writes, for example: �Age is not an omen of fear terrifying in its presence announcing the imminence of death/it is the realisation that winter�s sun has a vestige of warmth that will pleasure my days.�

A reflective read of his well crafted verse may repay the reader with appreciation of the preciousness of living in the here and now.