The Poems of Rowan Williams

Overview

Rowan Williams's first collections of poems, After Silent Centuries and Remembering Jerusalem, along with a selection of new ones make up this new collection. It displays a poetry that embodies abstract ideas in vivid sensual images. The subject matter ranges widely: the natural world, works of art, recollections of a visit to the Holy Land at Easter, thoughts arising from fragments of the ancient Celtic world, and reflections on modern Welsh life. A group of poems expresses meditations on death, arising from Williams’s experience of grief at the loss of loved people including his father and his mother, and widens to include the last days of Tolstoy, Nietzsche in his madness, Rilke, Simone Weil, and Thomas Merton. There are translations, three from Rilke, and several from the Welsh, where the translator succeeds in his professed aim of writing a real poem in English, which conveys the imagery and energy of the original.

Reviews

“His poetry opens windows on a rich and restless imagination.”  —Boyd Tonkin, Independent

“Reading this poet, at such a period in our history, is like feeling the first drops of rain after a long season of drought.”  —A. N. Wilson, Daily Telegraph

Author Biography

Rowan Williams is an Anglican bishop, a poet, and a theologian. He was the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford and served as bishop of Monmouth from 1992 and Archbishop of Wales from 2000. He was the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, from July 2002 to December 2012 and became Master of Magdalene College at Cambridge University in January 2013. He is the author of Honest to God, A Silent Action, Where God Happens, and The Wound of Knowledge, among others.