Poetry review – FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT: Thomas Ovans admires Alwyn Marriage’s sequence of ekphrastic poems based on Christian artworks
From Darkness to Light
Alwyn Marriage
Oversteps Books
ISBN: 978-1-906856-96-0
60pp £10
This collection of poems is subtitled Poems from an Exhibition because it was written to accompany an event at St Mary’s church, Guildford involving the display of a large number of artworks from the Methodist Modern Art Collection. The poems relate to twenty-five paintings among which are works by artists as well-known as Elisabeth Frink, Graham Sutherland and Maggi Hambling. For the most part, the paintings are displayed in colour on a page facing the poem they inspire (although in a few cases permission to reproduce the picture was not obtained and a QR code is given instead which provides a link to an on-line representation).
Most of the pictures and poems relate to events from the gospel narratives – chiefly from the last weeks of Jesus’s life leading up to the crucifixion and resurrection. The poems themselves are usually quite short and only a handful of them occupy more than one page. Typically they give voice to the thoughts of one of the characters in the image/story or else they express the reaction of someone watching from outside the frame. In “The Summons” (based on John Reilly’s The Raising of Lazarus”) the poet examines the possibility that Lazarus might have been as reluctant to emerge from the peace of his silent tomb as he had been unwilling, as a boy, to get out of bed when his busy sister Martha would ‘stand outside your door calling / Lazarus, come out, there’s work to be done.’ On the other hand “Five thousand hungry people” (from a painting by Eularia Clarke) allows several members of a family to speak for themselves and give a running commentary on the miraculous feeding of the crowd at the end of one of Jesus’s open air meetings
Shh I can’t hear him.
He’s not talking any more,
Has he gone?
…
He wouldn’t just walk away
and leave us here, would he?
I’m hungry!
…
Stop crawling over me
I’m hungry!
Well, there’s nothing here to eat.
We may smile at that restless child’s plaintive voice, because we know that hunger will soon be satisfied. But the boy who speaks from another John Reilly painting, The Healing of the Lunatic Boy, is voicing a deeper discontent about the years of being shunned for his unpredictable behaviour
….no one ever
saw the boy I was, just the labels
that were slapped on me, so I was
written off
(It is perhaps a small point in this context, but I had always understood the Bible story to imply that the boy was epileptic rather than insane. The poem clearly responds to the title that the painter has given to his picture; and of course its point about the longed-for deliverance from social exclusion is a valid one whatever the boy’s illness was.)
Whenever we look at a 2000 year old story with 21st century eyes – or even dare to imagine ourselves into the thoughts of one of the characters while dragging all our 21th century assumptions – we run a risk of misunderstanding. But I think it is a worthwhile risk because even to gain a partial identification with a Bible episode is better than to regard it as being so alien and strange that it has no relevance to us. The description of Jesus entering Jerusalem (on the day we call Palm Sunday) as ‘a day when wild hysteria / ran like rogue electricity / through the crowds’ is obviously anachronistic and yet the vividness of ‘rogue electricity’ conjures up a picture of the event that I’d never had before. On the other hand, in the poem “Washing my feet” where a disciple remembers Jesus bathing his feet before the Last Supper, the lines ‘Even now, I feel my skin / begin to glow as I recall’ has, for me, a little too much of a suggestion of contemporary bath products! The hands ‘caressing / my cracked and dirt-encrusted / heel’ are I think closer to the mark and remind me of words spoken by one the sisters from the Shrine of Our Lady in Walsingham when asked why she thought Jesus chose the feet for his symbolic act of washing. She replied ‘Because that’s where we carry all the pain we try to hide – our corns and our bunions. All our nakedness is in our feet.’
Pain and nakedness figure more and more in the paintings and the poems as they approach the crucifixion. “Fool for God” boldly takes the risk of trying to discern Jesus’s innermost thoughts as he prays in Gethsemane: ‘Was it unwise / to entrust my life to weak / and wayward men?’ The poem invites us to imagine what it must be like to be clothed in all the vulnerability of a human body and yet to have divine abilities to see far beyond human timescales and human wisdom.
One of the most notorious of the ‘wayward men’ is of course Judas; and the poem “Judas kiss” explores an interesting ‘what-if’ possibility
If you had not despaired and hanged yourself,
what might your life have been? Would you
have found it possible to accept forgiveness
and affection from the one you had betrayed?
The assumption seems to be that forgiveness could have been available for Judas (even though Dante consigns him to the lowest circle in Hell and presumably regards him as being unredeemable). That Dante connection is powerfully recalled in the poem’s last verse picturing Judas’s thirty pieces of silver thrown down on the Temple floor and asking ‘did they burn / a hole that opened to reveal the fires of hell?’ Some have tried to portray Judas as a sort of pawn within a bigger game since without his action the whole Easter story would not have unfolded as it did; but it does seem likely that the Jerusalem authorities would have done away with Jesus sooner or later even without his help.
The poems seem to gain in intensity and bewilderment as the sequence nears its climax. The poet cries out in protest at the sufferings of Jesus; and then in the next page asks for the grace to watch steadily and patiently as he dies. Joseph of Arimathea speaks in elegant terza rima in behalf of all those who had to lay their hopes to rest on the first Good Friday
Pilgrims and weeping followers find reief
as my sweet spices soothe away the pain
of those who loved him, offering a brief
respite of peace where they might remain
a little while to pray and gather strength,
before returning to the world again
Then comes the mystery of the empty tomb and the astonishing appearances of the no-longer-dead man in his risen body. (In one account of the famous encounter on the road to Emmaus, Marriage accepts a reading that might have seemed novel to me a few years ago. She identifies the unnamed traveller as Cleopas’s wife rather than one of Jesus’s male followers.) And so we arrive at Jesus’s final departure via the mysterious Ascension which ‘artists and poets interpret,/ as best they can’. This is followed by Pentecost and the arrival of the Holy Spirit as wind, fire and outpourings of speech that are mistaken for drunkenness. In a rare misfire, the straight edges of Marriage’s diamond-shaped Pentecost poem don’t seem particularly well suited to the disorderliness and energy of event as reported in Acts chapter two.
This is a delightful and beautifully produced book. The images are good to look at and to dwell upon (and the use of QR codes turns our reading into a multi-media experience). The poems are varied in their forms and styles but remain consistently clear and accessible. One of them, “Added value”, asks a question which is highly relevant to ekphrastic poetry based on religiously-themed art: ‘if a picture has no / spiritual meaning for / the artist, can it still /inspire the believer?’ On the evidence of Marriage’s poems the answer must be ‘yes it can’.
May 13 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Alwyn Marriage
Poetry review – FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT: Thomas Ovans admires Alwyn Marriage’s sequence of ekphrastic poems based on Christian artworks
From Darkness to Light
Alwyn Marriage
Oversteps Books
ISBN: 978-1-906856-96-0
60pp £10
This collection of poems is subtitled Poems from an Exhibition because it was written to accompany an event at St Mary’s church, Guildford involving the display of a large number of artworks from the Methodist Modern Art Collection. The poems relate to twenty-five paintings among which are works by artists as well-known as Elisabeth Frink, Graham Sutherland and Maggi Hambling. For the most part, the paintings are displayed in colour on a page facing the poem they inspire (although in a few cases permission to reproduce the picture was not obtained and a QR code is given instead which provides a link to an on-line representation).
Most of the pictures and poems relate to events from the gospel narratives – chiefly from the last weeks of Jesus’s life leading up to the crucifixion and resurrection. The poems themselves are usually quite short and only a handful of them occupy more than one page. Typically they give voice to the thoughts of one of the characters in the image/story or else they express the reaction of someone watching from outside the frame. In “The Summons” (based on John Reilly’s The Raising of Lazarus”) the poet examines the possibility that Lazarus might have been as reluctant to emerge from the peace of his silent tomb as he had been unwilling, as a boy, to get out of bed when his busy sister Martha would ‘stand outside your door calling / Lazarus, come out, there’s work to be done.’ On the other hand “Five thousand hungry people” (from a painting by Eularia Clarke) allows several members of a family to speak for themselves and give a running commentary on the miraculous feeding of the crowd at the end of one of Jesus’s open air meetings
Shh I can’t hear him.
He’s not talking any more,
Has he gone?
…
He wouldn’t just walk away
and leave us here, would he?
I’m hungry!
…
Stop crawling over me
I’m hungry!
Well, there’s nothing here to eat.
We may smile at that restless child’s plaintive voice, because we know that hunger will soon be satisfied. But the boy who speaks from another John Reilly painting, The Healing of the Lunatic Boy, is voicing a deeper discontent about the years of being shunned for his unpredictable behaviour
….no one ever
saw the boy I was, just the labels
that were slapped on me, so I was
written off
(It is perhaps a small point in this context, but I had always understood the Bible story to imply that the boy was epileptic rather than insane. The poem clearly responds to the title that the painter has given to his picture; and of course its point about the longed-for deliverance from social exclusion is a valid one whatever the boy’s illness was.)
Whenever we look at a 2000 year old story with 21st century eyes – or even dare to imagine ourselves into the thoughts of one of the characters while dragging all our 21th century assumptions – we run a risk of misunderstanding. But I think it is a worthwhile risk because even to gain a partial identification with a Bible episode is better than to regard it as being so alien and strange that it has no relevance to us. The description of Jesus entering Jerusalem (on the day we call Palm Sunday) as ‘a day when wild hysteria / ran like rogue electricity / through the crowds’ is obviously anachronistic and yet the vividness of ‘rogue electricity’ conjures up a picture of the event that I’d never had before. On the other hand, in the poem “Washing my feet” where a disciple remembers Jesus bathing his feet before the Last Supper, the lines ‘Even now, I feel my skin / begin to glow as I recall’ has, for me, a little too much of a suggestion of contemporary bath products! The hands ‘caressing / my cracked and dirt-encrusted / heel’ are I think closer to the mark and remind me of words spoken by one the sisters from the Shrine of Our Lady in Walsingham when asked why she thought Jesus chose the feet for his symbolic act of washing. She replied ‘Because that’s where we carry all the pain we try to hide – our corns and our bunions. All our nakedness is in our feet.’
Pain and nakedness figure more and more in the paintings and the poems as they approach the crucifixion. “Fool for God” boldly takes the risk of trying to discern Jesus’s innermost thoughts as he prays in Gethsemane: ‘Was it unwise / to entrust my life to weak / and wayward men?’ The poem invites us to imagine what it must be like to be clothed in all the vulnerability of a human body and yet to have divine abilities to see far beyond human timescales and human wisdom.
One of the most notorious of the ‘wayward men’ is of course Judas; and the poem “Judas kiss” explores an interesting ‘what-if’ possibility
If you had not despaired and hanged yourself,
what might your life have been? Would you
have found it possible to accept forgiveness
and affection from the one you had betrayed?
The assumption seems to be that forgiveness could have been available for Judas (even though Dante consigns him to the lowest circle in Hell and presumably regards him as being unredeemable). That Dante connection is powerfully recalled in the poem’s last verse picturing Judas’s thirty pieces of silver thrown down on the Temple floor and asking ‘did they burn / a hole that opened to reveal the fires of hell?’ Some have tried to portray Judas as a sort of pawn within a bigger game since without his action the whole Easter story would not have unfolded as it did; but it does seem likely that the Jerusalem authorities would have done away with Jesus sooner or later even without his help.
The poems seem to gain in intensity and bewilderment as the sequence nears its climax. The poet cries out in protest at the sufferings of Jesus; and then in the next page asks for the grace to watch steadily and patiently as he dies. Joseph of Arimathea speaks in elegant terza rima in behalf of all those who had to lay their hopes to rest on the first Good Friday
Pilgrims and weeping followers find reief
as my sweet spices soothe away the pain
of those who loved him, offering a brief
respite of peace where they might remain
a little while to pray and gather strength,
before returning to the world again
Then comes the mystery of the empty tomb and the astonishing appearances of the no-longer-dead man in his risen body. (In one account of the famous encounter on the road to Emmaus, Marriage accepts a reading that might have seemed novel to me a few years ago. She identifies the unnamed traveller as Cleopas’s wife rather than one of Jesus’s male followers.) And so we arrive at Jesus’s final departure via the mysterious Ascension which ‘artists and poets interpret,/ as best they can’. This is followed by Pentecost and the arrival of the Holy Spirit as wind, fire and outpourings of speech that are mistaken for drunkenness. In a rare misfire, the straight edges of Marriage’s diamond-shaped Pentecost poem don’t seem particularly well suited to the disorderliness and energy of event as reported in Acts chapter two.
This is a delightful and beautifully produced book. The images are good to look at and to dwell upon (and the use of QR codes turns our reading into a multi-media experience). The poems are varied in their forms and styles but remain consistently clear and accessible. One of them, “Added value”, asks a question which is highly relevant to ekphrastic poetry based on religiously-themed art: ‘if a picture has no / spiritual meaning for / the artist, can it still /inspire the believer?’ On the evidence of Marriage’s poems the answer must be ‘yes it can’.