Hastings Poet on the Pilgrim Path
ELIZABETH ALLEN
In this time of violence and turmoil, we were granted an hour of peace and beauty in the calm space of Berwick churchwatching. Watching sunset light shimmer across the butterflies and flowers of a pulpit decorated by Duncan Grant, we listened to local poet Antony Mair read from his latest collection Beyond the Seen. For the last year Antony has been Poet in Residence for the Pilgrim Path, which links Berwick and six other Downland churches.
The collection of poems celebrates the very particular histories of the churches and his response to them. Voices of the anonymous crowd/of spirits hidden from your sight, known to us only by their artefacts and traces/in hilltop barrows, in the bend of roads mingle with the insights and pain of the famous, like Bloomsbury artists Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, whose paintings surround us as we listen. Later, Antony talks to me of the inspiration given to him by these ‘capsules of history’ divided by the thunderous road running westwards to Lewes, at a time when he had been experiencing a dryness of creativity. The Pilgrim Path has offered, he says, “something outside yourself”.
It is in the relation of this ‘outside’ with the ‘inside’, the poet’s moments of intense response to the unseen whispering spirits of people, to rivers and paths, that some of the poems’ most moving lines are achieved. The poem Alciston Church ends in one such moment:
something slots/into a gap I was never conscious of/ giving a sense of contact/ with a self I have forgotten/or perhaps I scarcely knew.
Antony Mair was first prize winner in 2022 of Live Canon International Poetry Competition and is Poetry Society representative of Hastings Stanza.
We hope you have enjoyed reading this article. The future of our volunteer led, non-profit publication would be far more secure with the aid of a small donation. You can also support local journalism by becoming a friend of HIP. It only takes a minute and we would be very grateful.
Leave a Reply