
Best Scottish Poems 2007 Introduction \| The Poems \| Acknowledgements

The poems

Rachael Boast

Source

Author's note

Editor's comment

Biography

Caritas

The speaking stones

These stones speak a level language,
murmured word by word,
a speech pocked and porous with loss,
redressed by the slow hungers of weathering.
And there, in the broken choir, children
are all raised voice, loving the play of outline
and absence where the dissembled god
has shared his shape and homed us.
At the end of the nave, the east front stands
Both altered and unchanged,
its arch guttural and uvular.
and what comes across, half-said
into all that space, is that it's enough
to love the air we move through.

Source

From Stolen Weather (Castle House Books, 2006). Reprinted with permission of the poet.

Author's note

The poem was written in the first couple of months after moving from Bristol to St Andrews. Having soaked up the atmosphere of the Evensong services at Bristol Cathedral, I was trying to come to terms with the fact that the Cathedral at St Andrews was in ruins. After being informed that it had fallen down twice before the stones were eventually carted away to build homes and hearths, I began to see the grounds very differently. Already I'd had a sense of something vivid concealed in the ruined appearance of the place but only began to touch on what that might be when the poem in its various stages started to draw me in.

What the stones had to say about the relationship between matter and spirit, Kirk and worship, came down to a sense that a state of brokenness or ruin can be a preliminary for a deeper generosity, or Caritas; and, more specifically, that (in a poetic sense) the Cathedral only found its culmination of purpose in its collapse. Not all places of worship can embody paradox at that level. To say this is, of course, to subvert the idea of the intended use of an ecclesiastical building; to pull away from matter, towards spirit, or spaciousness of viewpoint. I'd also had in mind a recent discovery that the name 'Jesus' derives from a Hebrew root that denotes 'to be spacious'.

As for the 'half-said', I figured that often a poem can only communicate through 'half-saying' which, as the old Irish poets knew, functions as a form of protection of the subject being described and testifies to its ultimate sacredness. It also entails incompletion, of something not of this world which nevertheless is happy to leave a scent or trace of itself for us to follow.

Editor's comment

Rachael Boast is another poet whose work I hadn't read before. There's a lovely confident ease of movement to this one, an inherent musicality that doesn't descend into over-obvious sonority, empty onomatopoeia for its own sake. It's a fourteen-liner, flirts with the sonnet form without being limited by its too-tight constraints - it lets the content shape the form instead of the other way about. The final couplet is pitch-perfect, moves through to a note of quiet grateful acceptance, ending with love, echoing the earlier line about the children loving the play…

Biography

Born in Suffolk in 1975, Rachael Boast studied literature and philosophy at Wolverhampton University and then relocated to the West Country for ten years. In 2005 she moved to St Andrews to begin an MLit in Creative Writing and is now in the final year of her PhD, the subject of which is an examination of poetic technique with reference to The Book of Job. Her work has appeared in several magazines, including Ambit and Sufi Magazine, and anthologies, including The Heart as Origami (Rising Fire Press), Stolen Weather (Castle House Press) and Addicted to Brightness (Long Lunch Press). She currently divides her time between Bristol and Fife.