‘I come to pour out my marrow, un-skimping, I want to be holy.’
Psalmody (2016, Eyewear Publishing) is poet Maria Apichella’s ambitious, lyrical and technically brilliant debut collection.
Exploring the complex relationship of a Christian woman and an atheist man named David, the story plays out in familiar feeling tones and tropes to King David’s psalms, and both characters share similarities to him in varying degrees and aspects.
Welsh landscape
Set in contemporary Aberystwyth, the Welsh landscape and coastline permeate the poems with the taste of salt air and the feel of the wind-rouged cheeks of its central characters. Traversing waters of brokenness and hope, deep despair and exultant praise, this is a narrative of faith, love and conflict.
A quiet threat lies beneath the surface of each poem, making firm footing hard to find as the lovers draw close together and move apart, and as our narrator fights to cling to the God she knows and his love which, so unlike human love, never demands or obscures.
Throughout it the narrative voice questions what is to be at the centre of her life; what will motivate her, what is she to gravitate toward in her thoughts, actions and loves? The tangible affection and romance of the atheist object of her desires is ‘all kindness, green, corduroy brown’, and his proximity to, and pursuance of, the narrator presses her to keep having to decide afresh that it is God whom she will love and serve: ‘Love’s the law I obey. I should forget him. His mud, his heavy bones.’ The appealing immediacy and weight of David’s reality versus the patient waiting involved in seeking God’s reality is the line of tension this collection, and our narrator, must walk.
The journey which ensues touches on some of the most profound longings and experiences of the human condition, especially a human who has glimpsed the divine and is captivated by it: ‘all loyalty but the numinous fails. Like King David, I trust the invisible.’ The narrator submits to God as the greater love, the steadfast and unchanging lover of her soul. She regularly recalls his softening work in her, and the rhythms of corporate worship her life is based upon, as an antidote to the bitterness she expresses elsewhere. Likening herself to clay in the potter’s hand, she ponders that ‘the potter dips into my dry-mud, throws pulls presses my pagan sludge. I am becoming Plate Cup Bowl.’
Enchanting page-turner
Apichella’s simplicity and clarity of voice, paired with her beautiful and sophisticated symbolism, make this collection an enchanting page-turner. The transcendent moments of the collection often find their home in the firm, commonplace moments and activities of the everyday – the numinous of God pondered in the sizzling of a pan or the spilling of honey. These are the psalms, the songs, of a woman wrestling with the temptation to give in to what she desires, and instead look to God for the strength to desire what is good for her.
As we read the inner thoughts and experiences of this contemporary King David, perhaps more in his humanness than in his royalty, we find the age-old longing for real intimacy which has been the quest of every human heart. To be wholly known, and yet fully loved, this is a sign of what we’re made for. We expect, and promise, too much when we look for, or assume, that this can be found in each other. Yet we are capable of reflecting it in small degrees by the grace of God, who promises that in himself every human longing is satisfied and with whom we will one day dwell face to face, a promise more firm and more tangible than the Welsh coast.
Psalmody is available for £9.99 from https://store.eyewearpublishing.com/products/psalmody.
