Page 33 - LOTN Summer Issue 47 2021

FAITH AND CULTURE

The People of God is Jesus’ Bride. But what a long road! And Italian literature has given especially to you. Go on, read
you Italians, in your literature you have a masterpiece. The it and you will see the beauty, the suffering, but also the
Betrothed. Young people need to know about it and read it. faithfulness of the betrothed.”
It is a masterpiece that tells the story of an engaged couple
who have endured great suffering, they travel a road filled The Betrothed: I Promessi Sposi (Penguin Classics) Paperback
with many struggles, until at last they arrive at marriage. is available from all good book shops and Amazon
Don’t leave aside this masterpiece on betrothal, which

EILEEN CLARE GRANT testament, Sarah has eloquently expressed emotions so
many of us have struggled to articulate, while at the same
time offering us a gleam of light that shines through the
Vigils - Poems in memory of darkness of grief and loss.
Jonny Poet Malcolm Guite tells us: “Put the murmuring shell of
Author: Sarah Akehurst these poems up to your ear and you will hear the sound of
Paperback: 36 pages the sea, not just the ‘sea of troubles’, but the wider, deeper
Publisher: Handsel Press Ltd sea of God’s mystery and his mercy.”
17 Mar. 2021 Stephen Cottrell, Anglican Archbishop of York, who spent
ISBN-10: 1912052628 one week a year for over ten years in Jonny’s company at
ISBN-13: 978-1912052622 a summer camp, says in his Foreword: “These beautiful
List Price: £6.00 poems bring his memory back and also pierce the heart
with the painful knowledge of a mother’s love and the
unimaginable sorrow of having to let go. In one of them
“Did you agree to this, agree to be – ‘Christmas Day’ – Sarah writes that ‘the heart's affection
grafted to the wood that made the Cross? is a fire, the only fire/whose brightness can illuminate the
… here you will leave us – Mungo’s city, night.’ I remember Jonny waiting for the campfire to be
Mungo’s dear green place, lit; and poking in its embers the next day, coaxing it back
where he stayed to comfort the forlorn – to life. These poems do the same thing, prodding at the
and pray, may he pray now for us embers of memory and sorrow, joy and longing. Bringing
until day breaks and all the shadows flee.” them to life: ‘In the morning let me know your love,/that is
the only prayer I can manage now.’”
eaders may remember Sarah’s first little collection, And from our own Bishop Hugh: “These poems chronicle
In Firmamento Caeli (still available). Her second a slow and painful parting. They do so with the kind of
Rlittle book of poems, entitled Vigils after the night detail that comprises reality. They made me aware of what
office of monastic prayer, chanted before the dawn, is a a wonderful medium poetry is, with power ‘not to forget
“series of beautiful and closely observed elegies on the the smallest thing’, to honour a living and dying like Jonny’s
life of her late son Jonny, threaded together like the and add discreetly to the sum of hope.”
rosary of broken shells we find in the poems themselves”
(poet Malcolm Guite). Jonny was born with a genetic “For now there’s silence,
condition, Neurofibromatosis Type 1, which caused him milestones, memory, I hope
a range of problems, including learning difficulties. It never to forget the smallest thing.”
also eventually led to him developing a rare kind of
cancer, an aggressive nerve-sheath tumour, diagnosed Vigils may be purchased from Handsel Press/Sanctus
in the summer of 2018. Despite radiotherapy and Media or directly from Sarah, email: sarahakehurst7@gmail.
chemotherapy, the cancer spread to his lung and around com
Christmas 2019 a brain tumour was diagnosed. He died
on 15th January 2020, shortly after his 21st birthday.
Sarah says of him, “Jonny suffered a great deal, but he
rarely complained. He kept his smile and his sense of
humour – rather dark at times – and enjoyed life as far as
he could, right up until the end.”
This little collection of poems covers Jonny’s last months
and afterwards – his dying, death and the memories that
will never die. But they are not gloomy or mawkish. If, as an
Ancient Greek writer, Simonides, once wrote, two and a half
millennia ago, “poetry is eloquent painting”, then in these
poems we glimpse through the tears and ache of loss,
the eternal beauty of God’s Creation and the hope to be
found therein. Another poet once said of poetry – the best
poetry – that it echoed “what oft was felt, but ne’er so well
expressed”. In the shining beauty and pathos of her poetic
Page 33