Monthly arts column

It's a story that takes various forms, but here's the one I like.

In the 1960s the great theologian Karl Barth, at the end of his career, made a farewell tour of America where he was heard by huge audiences in the nation's leading universities. After one lecture, a student stood up and asked the world-famous theologian, 'Dr Barth, you have written a great deal on every aspect of theology and church history. Can you sum it all up in just a short sentence or two?'

Simplicity

There was a prolonged silence while the great man pondered and the audience began to feel embarrassed at the temerity of the question. It's said that Barth took out his pipe and slowly filled it; pressed the tobacco down; and lit it. Finally, he looked back at the questioner. 'Yes, I believe that everything I know about theology can be summed up in a single sentence. It would go something like this: "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so".'

Whether that makes Anna Bartlett Warner, who wrote those words, as great a theologian as Karl Barth is an interesting question, and one upon which most of us who have dipped into Barth's Commentary on Romans will have a view. But there's no doubt that simplicity has its own profundity. Some of the most profound utterances have been couched in language that children can easily understand: just look at William Blake and William Wordsworth, or for that matter a most moving quatrain by Clifford Hill that has meant a great deal to me over the years:

Tell my people I love them
Tell my people I care
When they feel far away from me
Tell my people I'm there.

Practitioners

Enough of this talk of neo-Calvinist theologians, tobacco, William Blake and Clifford Hill. A book dropped through my letterbox a few weeks ago: Steve Turner's latest poems for children, 'I Was Only Asking'. I've been enjoying it.

An older generation?

Turner is one of a generation of arts practitioners who first came to public attention in the days when Hans Rookmaaker and Francis Schaeffer were living presences guiding the fledgling Christian arts movement in Europe and elsewhere. He was of the same generation as such people as Peter Smith the painter and Norman Stone the film maker, and like them is notable for having retained a strong evangelical faith in a working world where such views are in the minority. His first poem was published in the Sunday Times in 1968, and since then he has published a number of collections of poetry for adults and kids. He is also a well known rock journalist and has also written on travel, food and a range of other topics.

The poems in the new collection are responses to questions he has been asked when working in schools as a performance poet. As usual, the kids homed unerringly in on the big questions in life, and the result is a collection of quirky, witty poems with great command of words and usually a pay-off that lingers in the mind.

Tradition

He belongs to a tradition that includes Roald Dahl (an earlier collection, for example, has the Dahlian title 'The Day I Fell Down the Toilet') and Roger McGough (another collection, 'The Moon has Got His Pants On', has the same playful inversions that McGough enjoys). But his voice is unmistakably his own. If there is ever an Oxford Book of Late Twentieth-Century Christian Poetry, Steve Turner's memorable quips will need a column or two. He is one of the most-quoted Christian authors. For example, 'These are the good old days - just wait and see'... 'History repeats itself. Has to; nobody listens'... 'Came here to write a poem about apathy but got fed up and left'.

No coded evangelism

'I Was Only Asking' contains poems that will (to quote another of Turner's generation, playwright Murray Watts) make kids laugh so much they won't be able to help but think. He doesn't pull his punches - 'Lazy Laura' ends 'She once dreamed of making a mark/An achievement that time wouldn't fade/In the end though her bed was her life/And sleep the lone mark that she made.' But he is also provocatively witty: 'Life is like an ice cream van/My granny used to say./I meant to ask her what she meant/But then she passed away.'

There's no coded evangelism here, no embedded gospel promises. What you get is a series of crafted poems, all intimately fitting with the child's world, each one of them tantalising the reader to pursue the logic of the world's oddity which, at that age, they haven't been able to get used to. The conclusions Turner points to are ones that have great biblical integrity.

There's a lot of good content here. Kids won't grow out if it, either: this is the kind of poetry that is too good to be restricted to children. Highly recommended; Karl Barth would have found it most profound.

Going from Barth to verse

Simplicity

Practitioners

An older generation?

Tradition

No coded evangelism

David Porter

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