With Our Great Pleasure

'The Journey of the Magi' is inseparable from the memory of my small hand in my Mother's as we would walk in icy fog and stillness out of Harriet St, down Hollings Road, left into Thornton Road, past the mill where she worked, past the hangman's house on Bilton Place, along City Road and Rebecca Street to midnight mass at St Patrick's RC Church in Bradford. With the contrast of a small patch of light around the crib within the vast darkness of the church, not far away the tortured Christ hangs in hyper-realistic agony contemplating the story of a death foretold. 'In my beginning is my end' The Church Fathers knew their dramatic lighting effects and how to make an insoluble claim on the spiritual imagination of small children.  I think of an adult trip many years later to prehistoric caves in the Pyrenees and the recapturing of that unbounded sense of awe, elation and some fear at the 20,000 year old paintings that were the focus of initiation of the yo...

I read this poem back during the summer and made a note on my smartphone to publish it, today, the first day of Advent. Mr Roberts is my poetry find of the year.  Although the poet has his own very distinct style and subjects he is clearly steeped in TS Eliot's metaphysics and concerns with mystery and the hidden. The 'wounded king on the forest floor' has to be the reappearance of Eliot's 'broken king' who appears in 'Little Gidding' the last of the 'Four Quartets'.  From 'Little Gidding', line 20:                If you came this way, Taking the route you would be likely to take, From the place you were likely to come from, If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness. It would be the same at the end of the journey, If you came at night like a broken king....... Eliot's king is of course Charles I, who visited the church at Little Gidding three times. Th...