Announcement: Heart of Flesh Literary Journal

I'm really pleased to announce that two of my poems have been published in Issue 2 of the Heart of Flesh Literary Journal. 
Absolution was written while I was working for the Watford Homeless charity New Hope.   It is inspired by working with a homeless teenager with a particularly harrowing past, and explores the theme of redemption. To find more about the extremely important work of New Hope, please click here. 

Your Stare is inspired by my baby son, and how observing the beauty of an infant can reveal so much about humanity, communication and consciousness.
Click here for Issue 2 
Here to read issue 2 as a .PDF
And here to go straight to my poems.

Heart of Flesh is a very exciting and unique new journal that seeks to publish poetry, fiction and art 'with a Christian element' though not necessarily explicitly Christian or by Christians, believing that 'God’s truth as written in the Bible can be found in both the secular and the non-secular, in nearly every work of literature and every part of the human condition.'(from their 'about us' page).

For me, the discovery of this journal is particularly exciting, both as a poet and as a Christian, as the intention behind the journal ignites both my theological and artistic passions, and allows those passions to meet. As a Christian I believe our imagination is part of what it is to be created in God's image. I believe that we have been endowed with the imagination so we can apprehend and express truth that is beyond the comprehension of reason and logic. A theology of imagination has been expressed and explored by the likes of William Blake (See Chapter 1 of his long poem Jerusalem), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (most notably in his Biographia Literaria), J.R.R Tolkien (perhaps best expressed in his essay On Fairy Stories), Owen Barfield (most notably in his books Poetic Diction and Saving the Appearances, but for an overveiw of the man and his thinking watch this documentary), and Malcolm Guite (specifically explored in his book Faith, Hope and Poetry, but you should also subscribe to his blog).


A great resource to explore these ideas are this years Laing Lectures at Regent College, Vancouver. Malcolm Guite gave an inspiring defense of the imagination as a truth bearing facult, in three lectures entitled 'Imagining the Kingdom'.


At a time when Christian art is often twee, cheesy and wholly contained within a Christian sub-culture, and wider poetry is often deliberately inaccessible and pretentious, it so important to have places where true art, responding to bible, or God's creation or actions, can find a home. A home that is not content to remain within the sterilising safe-space of a religious sub-culture. A home that doesn't require artists to confirm to the creative prescriptions of the artistic status quo, no matter how revolutionary that status quo is convinced that it is. Heart of Flesh seems to be such a home. 

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