The back page column of the Church Times, famously occupied for many
years by Ronald Blythe, continues to be a breath of fresh air in the
hands of poet and priest Malcolm Guite. His acute observations of the
local, the everyday, moments of conversation and life’s simple pleasures
are doorways into a bigger reality of a world suffused with the meaning
and beauty that lies beneath surface appearances.
His lucid, perceptive and imaginative musings follow a similar pattern
to the sonnets for which he is so renowned. In his own words, he treats
these 500 word essays ‘a little in the spirit of the sonnet, with a
sense of development, of a ‘turn’ or volta part way through, and a sense
that the end revisits and re-reads the opening’.
These draw together everyday events and encounters, landscape, journeys,
poetry, stories, memory and a sense of the sacred, and fuses them to
create richly satisfying portraits of the familiar that at the same time
opens the way to an enchanted world.
Malcolm Guite is renowned throughout the
English speaking church. He lectures widely on literature and theology
in Britain and in North America and is the author of bestselling poetry
collections and other books. His poetry blog has many thousands of
regular readers www.malcolmguite.wordpress.com