Contemporary poetry (to misquote Blackadder), is a lot like sex. Tons of it about, but I just don’t get it. So I was a little nervous when I gave Apocrypha a go. But I’m happy to say I quite liked it (I seem to remember the same thing about sex, come to think of it).
Apocrypha is an entertaining collection of poems about those twilit zones of the modern imagination where the sacred meets the mundane. It’s about the experience of living with religious stories we no longer believe in literally, but which we can’t forget.
Its best poems drop biblically named characters into the less glamorous corners of the British way of life; “Adam lay miraculous,/ unconscious with drink”; “Barabbas came to Butterstone,/ found his chalet, unpacked”; “Abraham wielded a watering can”. Many of these poems open with familiar Old Testament images which reminded me of stained-glass windows in serious Victorian churches (especially “Moses horned, lantern-jawed/ down from his mountain”).
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