After Prayer: New sonnets and other poems

By Malcolm Guite

This major new poetry collection from bestselling poet and priest Malcolm Guite features more than seventy new and previously unpublished works. It includes a sequence of twenty seven sonnets written in response to George Herbert’s exquisite sonnet 'Prayer', as well as forty five more widely ranging new poems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canterbury Press Norwich
• Release date: Oct 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9781786222121

Malcolm Guite

Malcolm Guite is renowned throughout the English speaking church. He lectures widely on literature and theology in Britain and in North America and is the author of bestselling poetry collections and other books. His poetry blog has many thousands of regular readers www.malcolmguite.wordpress.com

Book preview

Also by Malcolm Guite

In Every Corner Sing

Love, Remember

Parable and Paradox

Sounding the Seasons

The Singing Bowl

Waiting on the Word

Word in the Wilderness

After Prayer

New sonnets and other poems

Malcolm Guite

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© Malcolm Guite 2019

First published in 2019 by the Canterbury Press Norwich

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

978 1-78622-210-7

Typeset by Regent Typesetting

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd

For Maggie

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Part I. After Prayer: A Response to George Herbert

Prayer – George Herbert

1 The Church’s Banquet

2 Angel’s Age

3 God’s Breath in Man Returning to his Birth

4 The Soul in Paraphrase

5 Heart in Pilgrimage

6 The Christian Plummet

7 Engine Against The Almighty

8 Sinner’s Tower

9 Reversèd Thunder

10 Christ’s Side-piercing Spear

11 The Six Days World Transposing in an Hour

12 A Kind of Tune

13 Softness

14 Peace

15 Joy

16 Love

17 Bliss

18 Exalted Manna

19 Gladness of the Best

20 Heaven in Ordinary

21 Man Well Dressed

22 The Milky Way

23 The Bird of Paradise

24 Church Bells Beyond the Stars Heard

25 The Soul’s Blood

26 The Land of Spices

27 Something Understood

Motes

Amen

Seven Heavens, Seven Hells: A Sequence for the Spheres

1 The Moon

2 Mercury

3 Venus

4 The Sun

5 Mars

6 Jupiter

7 Saturn

Part II Lost and Found

Shed-Fever

Preliminary Ritual

Emily Dickinson’s Desk

17 Gough Square

Dactylics

A Little Contraband

Revisions

How to Scan a Poet

Photo-graphy

Half-life, an epitaph

Lost and Found

Questions for a Painting by Giovanni Bellini

O Virgo Virginum

First Christmas

The Song of the Hart

Aubade

A Villanelle on Easter Day

A Lens

Strange Surprise

Iona Song

St Francis Drops in on My Gig

St Augustine and the Reapers

Four Voices

A Rondeau for Leonard Cohen

Invitation

Nothing Said

Discomfited

Different Trains

A Wealth of Images and Memories

A Song Remembered

Out for the Count

The Last Waltz

Mistakes

Advice to a ‘Statesman’

Distant

Observations

Empty

Earth to Earth

To Make an End

November’s Song

Remembrance Sunday Afternoon

Two Sonnets

The Great Physician

Seven Poems from Ordinary Saints

1 Ordinary Saints

2 A Portrait of the Artist

3 A Shared Motif

4 A Portrait of Scott Cairns

5 Portrait of the Artist’s Father

6 Portrait of the Artist’s Mother

7 Sitting for Bruce

Prepared

Abraded

Finished

The Seasons’ Benedictions

Spring

Summer

Autumn

Winter

Preface

The title sequence of this collection was begun on a retreat in May of 2018 and completed in January of 2019. I had been reading Herbert’s beautiful little poem ‘Prayer’ for over 30 years, still finding new depths and new insights as, over the years, the little seeds of his 27 astonishing images and emblems of prayer took root and grew in my mind. I published a brief interpretation of the poem in my book Faith, Hope and Poetry in 2010, and in the last decade I have been leading retreats and quiet days drawing on ‘Prayer’ as a template and a compendium of emblems for exploring what prayer is and for discerning where we are and where we might be going in our own prayer lives. I had sometimes suggested to retreatants that any one of the images in this poem might be seen as the seed, kernel, or starting point for a new poem, and then finally,