I am already imagining trees coming into leaf as I read Rowan Williams’ poem:

Under the soil, humming,
lips closed till the frequencies break cover,
flower.

Yet I don’t wish this blessedly cold winter to end, to yield to what Williams elsewhere has called the false hope of spring. But that image: the frequencies break cover is so moving.

These poems have within them a kernel of light. Although it is the first book of Williams’s poems I own, I am inordinately fond of his work through PN Review. His poems speak of his own religious experience, of his reading of poetry, of beautiful frescoes and landscapes. Each poem offers a word-clothed vision of Williams’s imaginative power.

FEOFAN GREK: THE NOVGOROD FRESCOES

Did Yeats mean this? because when sages
stand in the fire, this happens Skin
umbers and cracks and shines. And then
on hands, shoulders and skirts, the splash
and dribble; you should think the bells
have melted from their perch,
so that the roaring hollows fall, lazy as snow,
bright liquid pebbles. And then, long
after the eyes have gone, the cheekbones
gleam, razored with little scars in parallel,
the surgery of initiation, letting through
furnaces under the dun hard skin.
We slow down more and more as the heat rises; surfaces
dry up, something inside swells painfully.
The razor makes its first cut. From the oven walls,
out of the searing dusk, they smile
(not at us) blindly.