The Poems of Rowan Williams

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.