This book is the second poetry collection by Jonathan Kinsman [this being the first], who's a personal inspiration to me and an all-round fantastic bean. The fourteen* poems herein exploratively reimagine the personalities of Jesus of Nazareth[who!?]'s disciples, with all of their quirks, flaws and background-complications - as 21st-century persons.
I'd read or at least heard many of them before but upon receiving my copy of the book in the post I took the opportunity to read it all out again, aloud, in the park, as it was a nice day, though on reflection I'll think twice about doing something like that again as I had to interact with a gaggle of strangers who were looking for a lost football in a bush while I was fully teared-up from the sheer emotive power of some of the poems in this volume. This is a righteous angry book, of radical love and hope, of seeing depths of injustice and hypocrisy latent in the world and knowing that if Christ came again today we would crucify him again; and his followers, for all their pain and self-tormented inner conflict, would probably let the authorities do so. I think most "orthodox" Christian readers would find elements of these poems grating, because they are challenging - they ask the hard questions, remind us of the fundamentals of Jesus's mission, redraw familiar boundaries into stories that feel so strangely familiar and eerily echoant of contemporary reality - I'm rambling.
This book is excellent and I'd recommend it to all discerning poetry-lovers with the knowing caveats that if you're a Christian it will make you think some uncomfortable things but lead you deeper into Christ - and if you're not - well, it could be an even more dangerous book.
I'd read or at least heard many of them before but upon receiving my copy of the book in the post I took the opportunity to read it all out again, aloud, in the park, as it was a nice day, though on reflection I'll think twice about doing something like that again as I had to interact with a gaggle of strangers who were looking for a lost football in a bush while I was fully teared-up from the sheer emotive power of some of the poems in this volume. This is a righteous angry book, of radical love and hope, of seeing depths of injustice and hypocrisy latent in the world and knowing that if Christ came again today we would crucify him again; and his followers, for all their pain and self-tormented inner conflict, would probably let the authorities do so. I think most "orthodox" Christian readers would find elements of these poems grating, because they are challenging - they ask the hard questions, remind us of the fundamentals of Jesus's mission, redraw familiar boundaries into stories that feel so strangely familiar and eerily echoant of contemporary reality - I'm rambling.
This book is excellent and I'd recommend it to all discerning poetry-lovers with the knowing caveats that if you're a Christian it will make you think some uncomfortable things but lead you deeper into Christ - and if you're not - well, it could be an even more dangerous book.
* The twelve originals, plus Mary Magdelene, and Matthias - who in Acts is chosen by lot to replace Judas.
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