Poetry review – THE ICONOSTASIS OF ANXIETY: Pam Thompson engages with a dense and complex short collection by W N Herbert
The Iconostasis of Anxiety
W.N. Herbert
Blueprint
ISBN 978-1-7393695-3-8
28 pp
An iconostasis is a screen of icons and religious paintings between the nave and the sanctuary in Greek Orthodox churches, separating the earthly from the divine. Evidently this small collection had its origin when the poet came across the iconostasis in a Greek chapel, in or near Emprosneros, a small village in Crete; but W.N. (Bill) Herbert’s pamphlet defies being compartmentalised in any poetic niche. There are no poem titles but there are literary resonances: Lewis Carroll, Edwin Morgan, Norman MacCaig, T.S. Eliot along with echoes of quest narratives or a pilgrimage. Each page of poetry is fronted by one of Herbert’s idiosyncratic collages.
This is an ekphrastic project in that images and text are in some sort of relation to each other. Which came first? I suspect that Herbert’s process most probably juggles forethought and happenstance (happenthought?) in images and writing. At the heart of the collection is an scrutiny of the iconography of religion; of believers’ emotional investment. Why anxiety? An existential anxiety, perhaps, prompted by the discovery of the iconostasis. Surrealist collages and texts are ideal vehicles for exploring this multi-faceted emotion. Bill Herbert, acting as guide, takes the reader/ viewer on a kind of quest, with its challenges and mini-epiphanies, navigating a conceptual terrain where the divine become earthly.
The quest is prompted by curiosity; a seeking for answers, for meaning. In the introductory prose poem the poet/speaker, addressing himself in the second person, comes across a ‘ruined chapel the size of a small garage’ on his walk near a Greek village. From the outset, it is no easy exploration, ‘You must have missed the signpost and these sandals are totally wrong for rocks and thistles, but you head off anyway’. The door is ‘jammed ajar’, ‘leaves have blown in’. Persistence pays off and the poet directs our attention to the moment for a vision or revelation: ‘the sun is casting a hot cuboid of light through the tiny window’, which is, in fact, hard to come by. Frescoes are ‘badly-faded’, and beyond them stands ‘the wooden-framed iconostasis’. The two tiers of icons are ‘battered and worn’ and ‘elements that ought to be present appear to be missing’. That this is ‘a very particular, even vernacular depiction’ is a hint of what follows: religious figures are given voices and made into the subjects of tales, tall or otherwise, probably true to their origins This opening poem is a portal for the reader to cross just as the chapel and glimpsed iconostasis is for the poet.
In fact, the subsequent poems present a sequence of thresholds and have a dream-like ambience. The poet/narrator is sleepy after a large lunch, all is ‘dim’ and it is ‘difficult to focus’. He relies on a leaflet rather than his own iconological notes. Each day, ‘he would go and sit in the good gloom (of the chapel?) / and count himself unlucky’ as he ponders on ‘the work he’d been sent here to fail at’ while the statue of St Thomas stares ahead. ‘How do we see what it is we see in dreams?’ the poet asks. How to grasp and make sense of the ungraspable? Dream-words wake a priest whose pronouncement at the end of the poem is suitable gnomic:
The rooms continue on others’ breaths.
Each exhalation pushes their doubles
deeper into memory, until the dead
can enter them and be at home.
The accompanying collage of a man in nineteenth century dress sitting on a chair, an open book on his lap and with what looks like an octopus for a head reminded me of Leonora Carrington’s work where all sorts of strange creatures inhabit domestic spaces.
Other collages contain buildings and rooms, interiors and exteriors mirroring the unsettling and unsettled thresholds in the writing. A door lintel headed with the word ‘Emergency’ frames a woodland scene with a startled greyhound in the background and a small scared ghost running away from some unnamed threat hinted at in the poem’s prefatory warning of an enemy ‘nearly upon us’. Whose voice is this? A universal whispering of anxiety? Images of doors are repeated, performing like a hall of mirrors and
Through the panes set in the doors you can see
the panes of other doors, you can see yourself,
your light reflected tin those other panes
as though you were someone else,
coming toward yourself.
The anxiety is around a sense of identity, of being taken over by another with suggestions of dissociation and alarm.
The combination of visual/aural/ linguistic play is a standout feature. Doors open onto corridors of other doors (e.g. the literary references). A boy stands on his head in a watery living room. The accompanying poem, a conversation between John the Baptist and Jesus, echoes Lewis Carroll’s ‘You are Old Father William’. In it, Jesus blames John for milking his own demise for fame, ‘you repeatedly cut off your head – / would you rather not chat over coffee?’. John’s responses, in the guise of deference, ‘You’re the Truth … and also the Way’, have a sting though it is Jesus, I think, who has the final word, ‘Will you cut me a break? I predict things for free: / this freaks out the folks for the money.’
Elsewhere an owl in a nightdress holds up a sign, ‘ignore tired paint’, pointing towards what looks like a kitchen with a pink fridge and a lavender door. The accompanying poem also has echoes of Carrollian verbal play with a conundrum at its heart – a man speaks to a woman, ‘I’m most human when I’m humane’ and vice versa and in italicized verses a human speaks to an angel’, ‘Is time a mill or just a mangle’ and vice versa.
Fervent religious belief brings about an altered state and informs the language of prayer. As do sleep, drink and drugs; mirrors, reflected light on windowpanes and other sleights and patterns of language. Allusions to the Alice books signal a topographical and ontological hinterland.
Hypnopompic hallucinations occur in the transition from sleep to wakefulness. In a sonnet about journeying, the travellers (poet and family/friends?) discover an ekklesáki, a small chapel, to Michael the Hypnopomp. (The image is of a cabin with outsize snowy owl in a large window; pines and a snow mound above which a green overcoat hovers.) Interestingly, I found another reference to a saint Michael as a ‘psychopomp’ or ‘soul guide’. Both words are fitting with but who are the travellers, the ‘we’ of the poem who set off for the Idaean Cave (reputed birthplace of Zeus), putting trust in a satnav, a technological guide which takes them past inhabited places to desolate ones, levelling out on a muddy track and a ‘thankfully’ locked chapel. This is one of the places where I was reminded of T.S. Eliot: the Magi, not knowing quite what they have found and seen. The final line, ‘The road had ended: God would be born elsewhere’ suggests a journeying towards an unsought nativity. How reliable, though, is our navigator-narrator?
Drink loosens ties to a logocentric universe. Drunks, in literature and life, can be humorous and/or pathetic. A drunk Jesus is very entertaining. In eight quatrains, there is both pathos and humour in the depiction of Jesus trying to downplay his powers and messing up the common miracles. The observational stance is that of an onlooker or disciple. ‘Even when drunk Jesus would never admit / to knowing things we knew he must’, going so far as:
… getting so mortal
the holy spirit would descend on cats and dogs
who’d bark prophecies and mew in tongues
till the night ended in psalms and slammers.
Jesus has not heeded the warnings, from Doubting Thomas, for instance, ‘who had not appreciated being christened / ‘Shouty Doubty’ at 2am’, for his pains. It is delicious to savour the descriptions of how it all falls apart:
His whole system became
cardiovascularly frabjous. The lilies of the field
spun like soiled propellors. It rained sparrows.
Angelic tailspins piled on pie-eyed needles
and pissed hissers advised the heedless rich
to hail a cab and leave their camel home.
Is that blue gloved hand in the image opposite holding what could be a shallot or a tulip bulb, in front of a field of tulips, performing a small miracle? It makes sense to bring the divine down to our size. How small and powerless is the individual in the face of an unseen deity.
Declaring ‘You made all those stars now listen’, the poet/speaker takes on God or some omniscient/omnipotent being, in a poem whose collage is an assemblage of scraps and fragments, diagramatic, intestinal, against a black background; a blue oblong with a cut-out black dog. This denotes mayhem in the universe, reflected in ‘the objects of desires and our dreads’ which become ‘bulbous transparent bouyant’, everywhere ascending and yet, curiously ‘like the opposite of snow rising in moonlight’:
the attributes of our loved ones, diseased organs,
the seeming numberlessness of material goods
both numbered and made into the immaterial
that which is prayer …
The unheard individual wants a sign, ‘I have needs too just like the next billion … / tell me YOU heard me say this’.
Another poem instruct us ‘Now listen’; but to what? There is a shift to consideration of the ecosystem, ‘Krill swilling in the mouths of blue whales / each talking a thought to themselves / like the souls of the damned.’ Then comes another move to ‘grit whirling into the rings of Saturn’ and the thought-provoking image of each ring ‘carved into the netsuke of the bunched-up, / the bowled-over, the prostate and forsaken’. A planet has been distorted. A netsuke is a small carved miniature sculpture from 17th century Japan, originally used as a sash or toggle fastener, decorative, often in the shape of an animal. The last phrase is ‘the very shape of repentance’, and in that repentance I sense a clinging to, a holding on.
The above connects with a poem where the Virgin Mary, carrying the baby Christ, is conscious of her responsibility, ‘To bear the universe within one // is to be lighter than anything within it.’ Insects bite her in the night saying, ‘don’t blame us, Our Lady, we are / the jewels of the cosmos, the jewels!’. I thought of the bones speaking to Mary in T.S. Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday’ of the unlooked-at being given voice. The insects, being altered by human interventions, become like complaining people, ‘their chirps, their whines, their gurns, their grinds’. There is ecstasy in Mary’s unknowing, ‘I’m as giddy as a drunken school-girl / I don’t know anything’ . Eventually the poem concludes with deft substitution of consonants in a sentence used by T.S. Eliot (via Julian of Norwich’) in ‘Little Gidding’, ‘all shall be pell, and all manner of things shall be mell.’ What will be will be. This moment, on the brink, foreshadows chaos. Alongside, a woman in a long bluish dress with clouds – or some kind of explosion – for a head floats in the air in front of a municipal building, at one side, a magnified insect. The caption is ‘Drifting’.
Just as the images are varied and compelling, so are the forms of the poems which include: a prose poem, long and short line quatrains, (some with added lines), an unrhymed sonnet, a five-liner, parody, longer free verse, ‘call and response’ dialogue, monologues by ‘characters’, a commentator or speaker.
Herbert sometimes employs Dundonian, which is a distinctive Scots dialect that richly embellishes the vernacular. This brings in further perspectives that are unpredictable and play no small part in the pamphlet’s brilliance. A rare case where the collage more literally depicts what’s in the accompanying poem is an illustration of a large fly on the face of the infant Christ and the attendant face of his mother. This fly, ‘Thon lucky sucker’, after drinking the child’s tears is assured immortality unlike the one in Miroslav Holub’s poem, who, at the battle of Crécy, is devoured by a swift fleeing ‘from the fires of Estrées.’ Elsewhere Jesus is
happy
as a woodchip
planed aff the True Rood
worthless till sandit aff
then a fortune a skelf (splinter)’
nicely satirising the notion of monetised holy relics.
As I reach the end of thjs review I feel I’ve wandered off that mountain track and have glimpsed all sorts of visions: an alien spaceship in a blue sky: the chunky door-sign; a red letter T with a crustacean clinging to it; The shape of a person on a cross; ‘T’ for Thomas.
The final poem is plainly-spoken, in eight tercets, no dialect. It is the end of the story and although we know one version, we probably couldn’t have guessed at this one:
In order for Jesus to smoke upon the cross
a rickety cleft stick device
had to be knocked together by Thomas
Other disciples or helpers join in. It is a precarious enterprise, ‘how to do this without / setting fire to His hair which we all / unspeakingly agreed was to be avoided’. As the disciples help Jesus smoke this cigarette there is collective weeping. The pathos is redoubled by this last act of friendship at the crucifixion which is related in such a matter-of-fact way. It’s a rewind. Thomas will doubt the resurrection until he has proof. Here, it is he who cannot hold the stick and cigarette straight enough and it falls, ‘like a comet / … and you could see the light/ passing like a bright letter across His eyes.’
In the end it is all about interpretations. I will have missed a lot but have tried to focus on what stands out for me. The collages are rendered with a transparency which allows the rippled texture of the pages to show through, a granulated vividness. Is this, in fact, one long poem which moved via formal and linguistic variety to transport this poet’s singular exploration of faith?
Jun 12 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – W.N.Herbert
Poetry review – THE ICONOSTASIS OF ANXIETY: Pam Thompson engages with a dense and complex short collection by W N Herbert
An iconostasis is a screen of icons and religious paintings between the nave and the sanctuary in Greek Orthodox churches, separating the earthly from the divine. Evidently this small collection had its origin when the poet came across the iconostasis in a Greek chapel, in or near Emprosneros, a small village in Crete; but W.N. (Bill) Herbert’s pamphlet defies being compartmentalised in any poetic niche. There are no poem titles but there are literary resonances: Lewis Carroll, Edwin Morgan, Norman MacCaig, T.S. Eliot along with echoes of quest narratives or a pilgrimage. Each page of poetry is fronted by one of Herbert’s idiosyncratic collages.
This is an ekphrastic project in that images and text are in some sort of relation to each other. Which came first? I suspect that Herbert’s process most probably juggles forethought and happenstance (happenthought?) in images and writing. At the heart of the collection is an scrutiny of the iconography of religion; of believers’ emotional investment. Why anxiety? An existential anxiety, perhaps, prompted by the discovery of the iconostasis. Surrealist collages and texts are ideal vehicles for exploring this multi-faceted emotion. Bill Herbert, acting as guide, takes the reader/ viewer on a kind of quest, with its challenges and mini-epiphanies, navigating a conceptual terrain where the divine become earthly.
The quest is prompted by curiosity; a seeking for answers, for meaning. In the introductory prose poem the poet/speaker, addressing himself in the second person, comes across a ‘ruined chapel the size of a small garage’ on his walk near a Greek village. From the outset, it is no easy exploration, ‘You must have missed the signpost and these sandals are totally wrong for rocks and thistles, but you head off anyway’. The door is ‘jammed ajar’, ‘leaves have blown in’. Persistence pays off and the poet directs our attention to the moment for a vision or revelation: ‘the sun is casting a hot cuboid of light through the tiny window’, which is, in fact, hard to come by. Frescoes are ‘badly-faded’, and beyond them stands ‘the wooden-framed iconostasis’. The two tiers of icons are ‘battered and worn’ and ‘elements that ought to be present appear to be missing’. That this is ‘a very particular, even vernacular depiction’ is a hint of what follows: religious figures are given voices and made into the subjects of tales, tall or otherwise, probably true to their origins This opening poem is a portal for the reader to cross just as the chapel and glimpsed iconostasis is for the poet.
In fact, the subsequent poems present a sequence of thresholds and have a dream-like ambience. The poet/narrator is sleepy after a large lunch, all is ‘dim’ and it is ‘difficult to focus’. He relies on a leaflet rather than his own iconological notes. Each day, ‘he would go and sit in the good gloom (of the chapel?) / and count himself unlucky’ as he ponders on ‘the work he’d been sent here to fail at’ while the statue of St Thomas stares ahead. ‘How do we see what it is we see in dreams?’ the poet asks. How to grasp and make sense of the ungraspable? Dream-words wake a priest whose pronouncement at the end of the poem is suitable gnomic:
The accompanying collage of a man in nineteenth century dress sitting on a chair, an open book on his lap and with what looks like an octopus for a head reminded me of Leonora Carrington’s work where all sorts of strange creatures inhabit domestic spaces.
Other collages contain buildings and rooms, interiors and exteriors mirroring the unsettling and unsettled thresholds in the writing. A door lintel headed with the word ‘Emergency’ frames a woodland scene with a startled greyhound in the background and a small scared ghost running away from some unnamed threat hinted at in the poem’s prefatory warning of an enemy ‘nearly upon us’. Whose voice is this? A universal whispering of anxiety? Images of doors are repeated, performing like a hall of mirrors and
The anxiety is around a sense of identity, of being taken over by another with suggestions of dissociation and alarm.
The combination of visual/aural/ linguistic play is a standout feature. Doors open onto corridors of other doors (e.g. the literary references). A boy stands on his head in a watery living room. The accompanying poem, a conversation between John the Baptist and Jesus, echoes Lewis Carroll’s ‘You are Old Father William’. In it, Jesus blames John for milking his own demise for fame, ‘you repeatedly cut off your head – / would you rather not chat over coffee?’. John’s responses, in the guise of deference, ‘You’re the Truth … and also the Way’, have a sting though it is Jesus, I think, who has the final word, ‘Will you cut me a break? I predict things for free: / this freaks out the folks for the money.’
Elsewhere an owl in a nightdress holds up a sign, ‘ignore tired paint’, pointing towards what looks like a kitchen with a pink fridge and a lavender door. The accompanying poem also has echoes of Carrollian verbal play with a conundrum at its heart – a man speaks to a woman, ‘I’m most human when I’m humane’ and vice versa and in italicized verses a human speaks to an angel’, ‘Is time a mill or just a mangle’ and vice versa.
Fervent religious belief brings about an altered state and informs the language of prayer. As do sleep, drink and drugs; mirrors, reflected light on windowpanes and other sleights and patterns of language. Allusions to the Alice books signal a topographical and ontological hinterland.
Hypnopompic hallucinations occur in the transition from sleep to wakefulness. In a sonnet about journeying, the travellers (poet and family/friends?) discover an ekklesáki, a small chapel, to Michael the Hypnopomp. (The image is of a cabin with outsize snowy owl in a large window; pines and a snow mound above which a green overcoat hovers.) Interestingly, I found another reference to a saint Michael as a ‘psychopomp’ or ‘soul guide’. Both words are fitting with but who are the travellers, the ‘we’ of the poem who set off for the Idaean Cave (reputed birthplace of Zeus), putting trust in a satnav, a technological guide which takes them past inhabited places to desolate ones, levelling out on a muddy track and a ‘thankfully’ locked chapel. This is one of the places where I was reminded of T.S. Eliot: the Magi, not knowing quite what they have found and seen. The final line, ‘The road had ended: God would be born elsewhere’ suggests a journeying towards an unsought nativity. How reliable, though, is our navigator-narrator?
Drink loosens ties to a logocentric universe. Drunks, in literature and life, can be humorous and/or pathetic. A drunk Jesus is very entertaining. In eight quatrains, there is both pathos and humour in the depiction of Jesus trying to downplay his powers and messing up the common miracles. The observational stance is that of an onlooker or disciple. ‘Even when drunk Jesus would never admit / to knowing things we knew he must’, going so far as:
Jesus has not heeded the warnings, from Doubting Thomas, for instance, ‘who had not appreciated being christened / ‘Shouty Doubty’ at 2am’, for his pains. It is delicious to savour the descriptions of how it all falls apart:
Is that blue gloved hand in the image opposite holding what could be a shallot or a tulip bulb, in front of a field of tulips, performing a small miracle? It makes sense to bring the divine down to our size. How small and powerless is the individual in the face of an unseen deity.
Declaring ‘You made all those stars now listen’, the poet/speaker takes on God or some omniscient/omnipotent being, in a poem whose collage is an assemblage of scraps and fragments, diagramatic, intestinal, against a black background; a blue oblong with a cut-out black dog. This denotes mayhem in the universe, reflected in ‘the objects of desires and our dreads’ which become ‘bulbous transparent bouyant’, everywhere ascending and yet, curiously ‘like the opposite of snow rising in moonlight’:
The unheard individual wants a sign, ‘I have needs too just like the next billion … / tell me YOU heard me say this’.
Another poem instruct us ‘Now listen’; but to what? There is a shift to consideration of the ecosystem, ‘Krill swilling in the mouths of blue whales / each talking a thought to themselves / like the souls of the damned.’ Then comes another move to ‘grit whirling into the rings of Saturn’ and the thought-provoking image of each ring ‘carved into the netsuke of the bunched-up, / the bowled-over, the prostate and forsaken’. A planet has been distorted. A netsuke is a small carved miniature sculpture from 17th century Japan, originally used as a sash or toggle fastener, decorative, often in the shape of an animal. The last phrase is ‘the very shape of repentance’, and in that repentance I sense a clinging to, a holding on.
The above connects with a poem where the Virgin Mary, carrying the baby Christ, is conscious of her responsibility, ‘To bear the universe within one // is to be lighter than anything within it.’ Insects bite her in the night saying, ‘don’t blame us, Our Lady, we are / the jewels of the cosmos, the jewels!’. I thought of the bones speaking to Mary in T.S. Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday’ of the unlooked-at being given voice. The insects, being altered by human interventions, become like complaining people, ‘their chirps, their whines, their gurns, their grinds’. There is ecstasy in Mary’s unknowing, ‘I’m as giddy as a drunken school-girl / I don’t know anything’ . Eventually the poem concludes with deft substitution of consonants in a sentence used by T.S. Eliot (via Julian of Norwich’) in ‘Little Gidding’, ‘all shall be pell, and all manner of things shall be mell.’ What will be will be. This moment, on the brink, foreshadows chaos. Alongside, a woman in a long bluish dress with clouds – or some kind of explosion – for a head floats in the air in front of a municipal building, at one side, a magnified insect. The caption is ‘Drifting’.
Just as the images are varied and compelling, so are the forms of the poems which include: a prose poem, long and short line quatrains, (some with added lines), an unrhymed sonnet, a five-liner, parody, longer free verse, ‘call and response’ dialogue, monologues by ‘characters’, a commentator or speaker.
Herbert sometimes employs Dundonian, which is a distinctive Scots dialect that richly embellishes the vernacular. This brings in further perspectives that are unpredictable and play no small part in the pamphlet’s brilliance. A rare case where the collage more literally depicts what’s in the accompanying poem is an illustration of a large fly on the face of the infant Christ and the attendant face of his mother. This fly, ‘Thon lucky sucker’, after drinking the child’s tears is assured immortality unlike the one in Miroslav Holub’s poem, who, at the battle of Crécy, is devoured by a swift fleeing ‘from the fires of Estrées.’ Elsewhere Jesus is
nicely satirising the notion of monetised holy relics.
As I reach the end of thjs review I feel I’ve wandered off that mountain track and have glimpsed all sorts of visions: an alien spaceship in a blue sky: the chunky door-sign; a red letter T with a crustacean clinging to it; The shape of a person on a cross; ‘T’ for Thomas.
The final poem is plainly-spoken, in eight tercets, no dialect. It is the end of the story and although we know one version, we probably couldn’t have guessed at this one:
Other disciples or helpers join in. It is a precarious enterprise, ‘how to do this without / setting fire to His hair which we all / unspeakingly agreed was to be avoided’. As the disciples help Jesus smoke this cigarette there is collective weeping. The pathos is redoubled by this last act of friendship at the crucifixion which is related in such a matter-of-fact way. It’s a rewind. Thomas will doubt the resurrection until he has proof. Here, it is he who cannot hold the stick and cigarette straight enough and it falls, ‘like a comet / … and you could see the light/ passing like a bright letter across His eyes.’
In the end it is all about interpretations. I will have missed a lot but have tried to focus on what stands out for me. The collages are rendered with a transparency which allows the rippled texture of the pages to show through, a granulated vividness. Is this, in fact, one long poem which moved via formal and linguistic variety to transport this poet’s singular exploration of faith?