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Description

The Celtic Christian world and the islands of the Hebrides have inspired many of these beautiful, evocative poems. Some recreate those early Celtic days in Ireland and in western Scotland, others are concerned with the finding of God's presence in our lives amidst the ordinary and the everyday. All are about moments of transformation and the finding of faith amid our human struggle.

Listen to a selection of Kenneth Steven's poems on the media player to the left of the screen

EXTRACT

FRILSHAM

We go to break bread and drink wine
In the early March sunlight of morning.

A church so old its walls might once have grown
Like strange stone roots up from the ground itself.

The story is a woman fled here once, so long ago
Her life is thin as parchment, was whispered down –

A few frail fragments from daughter to daughter.
She found water in the earth, a pure source

That gave healing. The water sang out of deep earth –
A living thing, full of the mystery of God.

Eight souls go to the communion rail,
Slow and old and grey.

Light falls in a golden cup:
Blesses their heads where they kneel.

I go outside, into the day where the yellow daffodils are breaking
In a jostling of young and yellow heads

And I hear it, I hear it clearly –
The bright chink, the jewellery, of spring water.

A CD of Kenneth Steven's poetry is now available for the first time. In a beautiful collection, called Sanctuary: Poems of Celtic Spirituality, Kenneth reads some of his best poems and talks about the influences on his work.