URBAN ANGEL:
Exploring the soul of the city
Poems by Stewart Henderson and Penelope Wilcock
Collages and drawings by Ben Ecclestone
Alpha/Paternoster Publishing. 57 pages. £9.99
ISBN 0 9535757 2 1
The pictures, notably the eight double-page collages, are stunning. The 16 poems are more varied, but rich in hint and allusion, and at best intensely moving. The quotations are interesting, the contributors well established. The price is crucial.
This last makes it a book some Christians might feel guilty about buying for themselves. I wish it were three times the length, and cost just half as much again. A slim and lovely gift book, in other words, to pore over, wrap up, and then borrow back. But mostly a welcomingly positive mix of celebration and lament for eight earthly cities, suffused with longing for the heavenly one.
I know four of the eight places; three of the corresponding colour plates and Stewart Henderson's poem about the fourth, Belfast, are brilliant. But that fair city is pictured more as the media see it. The four I have never visited are equally beautiful and painful.
Among the poems, I also know what Cranmer is doing at Oxford, armies at Jerusalem and children in Bangkok; I am less certain of Ave Maria at Willesden Green. 'I am the door' stirs many thoughts and feelings, and for me is Penelope Wilcock's best. But if you can ever get to hear Stewart Henderson, do.
