Summer Harvest: New & Selected Poems

By Brian Brock

'With Summer Harvest, the Australian poet Brian Brock has offered us a feast of issues and moments worthy of serious consideration. His poetry is a conversation, a correspondence, a way of talking about things that truly matter; the paradoxical decay and drift of natural habitats beside human rights violations. We learn about the poet t

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debbie Lee
• Release date: Jul 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781760419578

Brian Brock

Brian Brock is Professor of Moral and Practical Theology at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture (2007) and Christian Ethics in a Technological Age (2010), and editor of Theology, Disability and the New Genetics: Why Science Needs the Church (2007) and Disability in the Christian Tradition: A Reader (2012), both with John Swinton. Interviewed by Amy Erickson Amy Erickson: Both of you are systematic and moral theologians. How come you have turned to writing a biblical commentary, and how did it feel to be working outside of your usual habitat, so to speak? Bernd Wannenwetsch: It felt absolutely great. In fact, I don't remember I have ever had so much joy working on a project. In the end most of what made the process so satisfying came from constantly being pushed out of our normal academic comfort zone. There is a sense of intellectual adventure that comes with the challenge of having to find one's feet in unknown territory. The mental and practical preparation necessary for writing a commentary is very different than what is demanded by a monograph or scholarly article. What we found liberating about doing theology in a different literary genre is the way it pushed us not only out of the routine working patterns in our normal area but also made us take a step back from the tried and tested intellectual approaches we have found to work well enough to be repeated over and over again. At the same time we were also surprised at the extent to which working directly on a biblical text felt like a homecoming. We really shouldn't have been surprised by this because, historically speaking, the attempt to try to understand Scripture for oneself and then help others to see what you have seen is the very impulse that gave birth to the intellectual praxis we call theology. There is no doubt that we had both been usefully prepared for this task in long having been convinced that Christian ethics, if it is going to be genuinely theological, has to be rooted in biblical inquiry. No matter how novel or "unprecedented" it may appear, every subject we think about in theology demands a fresh look at the biblical tradition in order to be understood more fully and truthfully. We discovered again that when we take ideas and dilemmas we feel to be novel to Scripture, what we discover anew that it is Scripture that is always new and fresh. AE: What made you chose 1 Corinthians? Bernd Wannenwetsch: The suggestion initially came from a publisher, but the fact that the letter is so rich in discussions of concrete moral problems made the invitation immediately attractive. What we discovered not long after is that this was also a real temptation--to read Paul too instantaneously as a "fellow ethicist". We only discovered this as a temptation when it became clear that if we were really to get to grips with Paul's approach to the moral questions he discusses, we were going to have to dig deep into the doctrinal convictions and discourses that undergird his explicit moral exhortations and arguments. We often found that it was only when we resisted moralizing modes of interpreting Paul that a window swung open to a different, more exciting and ultimately more truthful understanding of what he has to say. Brian Brock: What was illuminating about this process is that through it we made the unexpected discovery that the letter is organized by an unexpectedly deep theological unity. Despite the fact that biblical scholars consider the letter to be largely free of textual emendation and genuinely Pauline, it is nevertheless in practice almost always read in a manner that firewalls the doctrinal and moral passages in the letter off from one another. We discovered that the letter really is not made up of separate discussions of ethical problems and worship practices that are set within some theological prefatory remarks. It is an integrated theological investigation of all these problematics at the same time. Attempting to understand Paul's moral exhortations, we were continually being drawn more deeply into his theological vision of the whole of creation and the salvation economy--which exposed the superficiality of the very common practice of dividing the book up into parts devoted to decorum in worship, sexual ethics, and a theology of love. AE: Another unusual aspect of this book is that it is co-authored. How did you make this work for you? Brian Brock: We ended up developing a nice working routine, which we describe in more detail in the introduction to Malady. We wrote the text line by line sitting together at the same desk. It ended up being those hours and hours of conversation around the text that sustained our energy for what turned out to be a pretty monumental project. We usually met twice a year, at each meeting typically managing to draft up a prose version of the commentary on one chapter of Corinthians. Afterward we each separately went over this prose draft multiple times, but the beating heart of the project remained the hours spent sitting with the text, with the Greek text and several translations spread out around us. We really came to look forward to those meetings a great deal. AE: Did you feel that the differences between your respective cultural and ecclesial upbringings, one as a German Lutheran and the other as an American from a missionary church background, shaped the way you were approaching the biblical material? Bernd Wannenwetsch: Absolutely. Realizing how deeply these differences affected our respective perspectives was one of the surprise realizations that came to us on route. At the most superficial level, these differences in cultural and ecclesial background forced us to articulate ourselves in ways that took into account a wider and more diverse audience. Readers will no doubt notice how often passages in the commentary address questions that are most lively in the North American context while others are more pressing for European Christians. At a deeper level it then began to become clear how these geographical and cultural differences were often linked directly to sensibilities we had inherited from noticeably different ecclesial traditions. By coming face to face with these different sensibilities we were learning to speak to each other not only as individuals but also as representatives of different church traditions. To be aware of this "ecumenical" moment in our reading fellowship was helpful in allowing us first to see and then formulate more precisely what it was in our respective ways of having been traditioned that would attract us to particular readings of 1 Corinthians, for better or worse. In the process we began to "see" the specific blindfolds our traditions have put on us but also where they have equipped us with particularly sharp lenses. Having to become more self-aware of ways in which our respective church experiences were organizing our perception in the end helped us better to make contact with the sensibilities that are visible in the Corinthian church to whom Paul first wrote. The joint writing thus helped us detect the "Corinthians" in us, the European Lutheran the North American Congregationalist, with our respective tendencies to think and act like the factions in Corinth who assumed their way of "doing" Christianity was superior to others. AE: How then did you deal with these different viewpoints? How did you engage them in the process of reflecting and writing together? Bernd Wannenwetsch: The mutual trust we have in each other's judgment allowed us to explore exegetical disagreements in a manner that never had to be settled by having a battle ending in either one interpretation "winning" or us having to agree to a compromise reading that neither of us really supported. And we never allowed ourselves the co-author's escape clause: "here we present two equally possible ways of understanding the passage"! Instead, we took disagreements as a challenge and an opening that promised to lead us to taking a fresh, deeper look at Paul's argument. After having discovered ourselves defending deadlocked rival readings we regularly found ourselves forced to start over from scratch. Often it was as we were taking this second look at the text that we felt new insights really "came to us". Because we both knew our initial readings were not really going to work we were prepared for this experience of hearing the verbum externum, that "alien word" that can only be heard but not predicted. This being stripped of our initial readings became such a familiar process that we finally felt we needed to give it a label. We called it "reading Paul against ourselves". AE: Where have you been surprised by your own reading of this epistle? Brian Brock: It was rare that a chapter did not offer us substantial surprises, for the reasons Bernd just suggested. We knew that once we began to look at a passage in earnest, we were likely to end up with a different reading than the one that initially seemed obvious to us. To take one example, when in chapter 8 (v. 7) Paul says that he would rather not eat meat than to defile the conscience of brethren who feel nervous around meat offered to idols, his aim is to confront those who believe themselves to have strong consciences. In this first discussion of eating idol meat he uses the language of "weak conscience" to suggest that those who claim to be strong are in fact devoid of a social conscience. That makes you think about what conscience is, theologically speaking. Is it a little moral judge in your head making sure you keep the universal principles of justice, or is it supposed to connect you to other people? Paul obviously presses us to conceive of conscience in the latter sense, but this is not at all how moderns are used to thinking. To think with Paul resituates the place that our brothers and sisters occupy in our self-identification and our identification as Christians. He is offering us an unfamiliar, but deeply theological and ecclesial picture of the conscience. AE: This book ambitiously engages a wide range of scholarly domains--biblical studies, systematic theology, ethics, and philosophy. How did you handle the risk that in the process one or several of these domains is getting short-changed or watered down? Brian Brock: In the end we felt that to take Scripture seriously was to be forced out into disciplinary domains that the modern academy has artificially walled off from each other. Sometimes it seemed obvious to us that a received reading was based on a philosophical mistake. We had to discuss philosophical problems if we were to free the text in question from an interpretative framework that we believed was obscuring a point we felt Paul to be making. In other cases we found that contemporary biblical scholars and translators were paying very close attention to the text but in a manner that we found either breathtakingly non-theological or to be driven by questionable theological parameters. Similar challenges arose when we discussed pastoral and liturgical issues, taking us again into different types of debates and literatures. In the end we embraced this as the great wonder of the project, and why it differed so greatly from our usual practice as Christian ethicists. It was not our problems we were taking to Scripture, but the other way around: Scripture was creating problems for us--ones that were simultaneously exegetical and existential. Who do you hope will read this work? Bernd Wannenwetsch: While we would love to see this book being read and discussed by members of our own guild--that of academic theologians, including, dare we say, the odd theologically interested biblical scholar--our main hope is that it will be attractive to those who engage with Scripture in the context of ecclesial proclamation, those pastors who might find some of our suggestions illuminating as they prepare sermons. We would also be delighted if the book finds its way into the hands of some Christian laypeople who have not yet given up on academic theologians but remain hungry for works that offer them some meaty yet accessible food for thought that helps them grow as Christians and as human beings.

Book preview

Summer Harvest

Summer Harvest

New & Selected Poems

Brian Brock

Ginninderra Press

Summer Harvest: New & Selected Poems

ISBN 978 1 76041 957 8

Copyright © text Brian Brock 2020

Cover photo: Matthew Hunter

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All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. Requests for permission should be sent to the publisher at the address below.

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First published 2020 by

Ginninderra Press

PO Box 3461 Port Adelaide 5015

www.ginninderrapress.com.au

Contents

Foreword

Summer Harvest

Catharsis

May Day!

The Fourth Quarter

Autumn Peonies

Spring Gleanings

Hunters’ Place, Smith’s Road, Tharwa

To John, Angus, Peter, Beth, Margaret and their families.

Foreword

Brian Brock’s opening poem, ‘Soliloquy’, brings to me so many elements of the themes that will come again and again throughout this collection of his poems. We know the place, White Cliffs. So often we will know the place he loves. And chooks. He begins with chooks. Makes them human. Hears their wake-up call in the dark. Identifies the stars. Comments on changes from the past – exotic peppertrees where ‘once mulga’. He is up before dawn. So often he will be up early, maybe with a cuppa. This time coffee, to look into the sky, see the stars, name them, worry if he misses one. See in ‘Backyard Astronomy’ ‘more than this world dreams of’. (He loves Venus, calls her the Diva.) But here before dawn, he is calling.

Come sun

pink those breasts.

Galahs. The sun will pink the breasts of all the birds with the colour it brings at dawn. And look at it. ‘Pink’ is no longer an adjective. It is now a verb. How often that will happen in this collection is one of the delights I find. Laconic. Succinct. See how it works in ‘Light’. But, now, as dawn comes, he has ‘pink at last’. Now a colour, a noun.

Sharing what he knows, he sees green, not the ‘green flash’ that I have seen. That touch of physics that is magic. This is what every child can know when he and she bring the colours of blue and yellow together. I know the wonder he shares of that moment and the wonder of making a new colour by mixing two different ones.

In the next poem, ‘Worry Stone’, he names the member of the clan, ‘Ngurna Man’. He has moved from the connection with the past, in the changing landscape of trees, to the human being in a human past, before copper was brought from the mines via Mintaro to the Wakefield River. He has brought in colonisation. He speaks to him. Asks the question, ‘Were you the knapper?’ We could pass over this technical term or find out what it means and discover he has taken us into the language of archaeology and the human actions needed to make this worry stone. The questions he asks take us to what might have happened, very human actions – but now skimming stones to make them skip across the water – since ‘white kids’ got here.

He feels all the changes from this memory of the Ngurna to the sailors loading, the muleteers bringing the copper to the vessels. And now the ‘ketches have gone’. We have felt the changing times. No words wasted in the process. Again precision. ‘Ketches’ not just boats. Leaving behind ‘stone skippers’ and ‘developers’, he returns to Ngurna Man.

You've told me your story

through your knapped-edged worry stone.

Perhaps that is enough.

Perhaps it is and perhaps it is not. Brian will come back to the past a number of times. He will be more explicit. We find in ‘Adelaide Reconciliation Day, 12 June 2000’, he is up early again, wondering where Venus is. He decides this is ‘A good day for attending to dirty linen whether national or personal.’ It's there for us to take in or not take in. He goes on,

I hang it at dusk

Graham Rowlands’s assurances in my ears:

‘It will dry;

if not today,

tomorrow.’

Reading all Brian’s poems, I feel the quality of his precision and wish I had it. I know I am repeating myself but I love the precision in his verbs, sharing his close observations of movement. This precision is there in each poem. And with it shared humanity. And his sense about the depth of the connection. In ‘Broken Hill’s Monoliths’, we feel the dynamic geological past in

ancient ocean grindings of

primordial mountains.

Then grandfather. Such a seventh birthday party for Maya. Grandfather. Family. Son. Colleague. And that Scottish inheritance. But often, he is friend. Read the letters. One to a friend who has died. He is very much a country boy and country man. (The city has little place in the collection. Except when he is in Wellington, Oxford, Vienna and ‘grey Paris’.) In ‘Neale's Funeral’, he is talking to a fellow poet, telling him what he would have liked about his funeral.

Your grandchildren played on the pile

and helped fill in the grave

commenting,

‘There's room for us too.’

This conversational tone is often here. With it, his wry humour. A dry humour most of the time. But he can be angry. His anger is there when he speaks of our actions in ‘Clever Fellas’.

We

are very clever.

We can deliver

seven-ton daisy-cutters

with precision

for the excision

of friends and foes.

Feel the indictment. We are made to feel all we are capable of. Our complicity in it all. What we can do with artillery shells, nukes, machetes, ICBMs. All we can do. His anger is palpable. We can deliver