Evidence and Imagination – Angela Graham writes on the genesis of her new poetry collection ‘STAR: poems for the Christmas season’

As a film maker I have worked on more than a hundred documentaries and factual programmes. The documentary form, no matter how subjective its point of view might be, privileges evidence and witness. I shouldn’t have been surprised that the first book I wrote, a collection of twenty-six short stories, ‘A City Burning’, was found by reviewers to be full of acts of witnessing and, therefore, of moments of choice about what to do in response. I hadn’t realised how deeply ingrained in me that witness/choice dynamic had become, but it came out in the writing nonetheless.

‘Sanctuary: There Must Be Somewhere’, my second book, is a poetry collection on an overt theme but I value the collaborative element that documentary necessarily has so I sought four poets to write a poem each with me as part of the contents. They all have experience of an aspect of sanctuary. Witness is rooted in experience.

My third book is a poetry collection, ‘Star: poems for the Christmas Season’. This subject-matter is rich and well-known. I gravitated towards a focus on the star that was followed by the ‘three wise men’, or kings, or magi. I felt the star’s pull largely because of a nine-hundred-year-old stone carving from Autun Cathedral in Burgundy.

The sculptor, Gislebertus, allowed himself to imagine the moment before the kings’ story begins. He worked backwards from the ‘documentary evidence’ of the gospel account. This mentions only their arrival ‘from the east’ to Jerusalem, but he must have wondered how the story began.

He used imagination and intuition to create an ‘inciting incident’, to use the jargon of drama development. He invented a scene in which a king is woken from sleep by an angel who points to a star.

It’s a moment that rings artistically very true indeed. We know what happened next but Gislebertus portrays the king at the moment immediately before the point at which he chooses – when he himself does not yet know what he is going to do.

We all know how it feels to surface from sleep, when the unconscious and the conscious stand on each other’s thresholds. Often something new is perceived. But it’s we who must choose whether or not we act on what we have seen.

I wrote the following poem prompted by the carving and by a visit I made one December to Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire which is even older than Autun.

AUTUN CATHEDRAL, MAGI

Does the sky have tent-poles?

And some cathedrals are forested.
God walks in their depths on a December afternoon
while the topmost branches brush the undersides
of planets fixed mid-orbit
– those stained-glass windows fruiting overhead.
Here no one thinks of weight, of downwardness
and how the roof desires it.

God pauses among the pillars
at a carved capital that always lifts his heart:

an artist like himself, from this blunt-cornered oblong stone,
gives us a bird’s view of a bed
draped in a ruched counterpane, three kings tucked in,
but the eyes of one, popped open, register
Why? Who? still unaware
of the angel at his shoulder, stroking his hand,
whose other index finger points at a star.

God sighs, at the weight borne by the moment
after such a moment; at how he waits
for a man to look up at the sky
and recognise and seize
the chance of joy.

Encouraged by the sculptor’s bold approach, I too thought back beyond the recorded story. I wondered who the three kings had left behind when they went on their quest. And so I ‘met’ The Three Queens, the women we never usually hear from. Each Queen and King has a narrative poem at the centre of ‘Star’.

The first third of the book engages with the ‘accessible’ aspects of Christmas such as decorations, presents, cards, shopping. The Kings and Queens are followed by what poems about what I call ‘the dark hinterland’ of Christmas. Here there is threat, murder, flight and exile but also resistance, fortitude and hope. So we emerge, with the poems, into a New Year.

I felt that the cover of the book had to feature Gislebertus’s carving but it’s a fine version by the American artist, Michael Erspamer. There are fifteen of his sensitive linocuts in ‘Star’.

Although the story of Christmas is so well-known it confronts us every year with a narrative that invites our unique response, especially, I believe, around the adoption or rejection of violence as a means of change.

Angela Graham will be reading a poem from ‘Star’ every day at approximately 4.55pm on BBC Radio Ulster’s ‘Evening Extra’ programme, from 16th to 24th December.