Making the known world new

Making the known world new is a slim, but powerful book of poems and prose reflections by Kenneth Steven, inspired by the garden of his former house in Dunkeld.  The author is a Scottish poet, novelist and writer for children; though his faith is seldom explicit in his writing his entire output is imbued by Christian vision.

Kenneth Steven’s outstanding gifts as a poet are evident in these pages, which include lines like these, about a skyfull of  tumbling swifts -

Little things that have in their wings

A whole flight to Africa

and like the following, which capture in a few words the essence of daybreak after a night of wild wind

The morning after the storm

Was like the day a child wakens after fever

But Steven’s prose is clearly a poet’s prose, deploying powerful images as where he likens a poet’s quest for a perfect lyric to the pearlfishers in Perthshire’s rivers in time past.

We see in poetry and prose his affinity with nature, as he expresses his engagement with the natural world in words which often universalise his experience – such as where he writes about the inevitability of winter, its apparent endlessness, and the certainty of coming spring.

I read this book as Kenneth Steven’s manifesto as a poet. His key idea is that the poet’s task is to open the eyes of readers and listeners to the true glory of the natural world, a glory which many of us have lost sight of through cynicism, busyness, engagement with the virtual rather than with the real or obsession with darkness. Good poems, good writing open our eyes to see things as the truly are, to discern the beauty while not denying the brokenness, to find beauty in the midst of brokenness, signs of spring in a still-wintering world.

Poets should not subvert their mission (as Steven feels some do) by playing intellectual games, but rather seek the power of simplicity. He briefly discusses power and simplicity in poets Robert Burns, Robert Frost, Edwin Muir, Wilfred Owen, George Mackay Brown, but curiously not Gerard Manley Hopkins, with whose intense love of nature one might have expected Kenneth Steven to find affinity.

Kenneth Steven  describes his work with local school children through the Poet-Tree project, helping them reconnect with the natural world around them, encouraging spring’s awakening in wintering imaginations. He is also eloquent about our responsibility to care for the environment. It concerns him that not just politicians of various hues but also some fundamentalist Christians seem to regard the planet as an open treasure-chest to be despoiled. He calls readers back to a biblical vision which sees humanity as the trusted curator of a fragile ecostructure of incredible beauty. There is a responsibility  ‘to be globally aware and locally active.’

I love Kenneth Steven’s description of a printed poem as being like a butterfly pinned like a specimen to the page, which only comes alive when read by the human voice. He has written of finding God in small things – his butterfly image makes me see real butterflies in nature as utterances of the creative voice of a never-silent God.

A wonderful book, then which repays reflective reading, and contains much which lingers long after you have put it down, Each insight is, as Steven puts it ‘a little flicker of light.’  And he reminds us that

spring is the small things

That come from the darkness.

(A review of Making the known world new by Kenneth Steven, Edinburgh, St Andrew Press, 2009, 9780715208823)