Kyrie

Kyrie, Tim Cunningham, Revival Press

To have written a volume of poetry that, by being based on Church furniture, festivals and liturgy (albeit the Roman Catholicism of his Limerick upbringing) will inevitably remind readers of George Herbert’s The Temple, reveals Tim Cunningham as a poet of high ambition.

Kyrie, with the sharpness of its form and insights and the lyricism of its tone and humour is ample reward for such ambition. Cunningham has been called the poet of good endings and his apposite phrases serve to illuminate the everyday encounters which characterise his poetry.

We meet Father Pat who “hit the introit like a sprinter” and could say the weekday mass in fifteen minutes flat. At his funeral, the mourners agree that he was also “slow to judge, quick to compassion.” An elderly lady blossoms through the Parish’s mystery tours before beginning a different mystery tour by ambulance with Murillo’s Madonna safe inside her purse.

The title poem is a confession of our lack of insight and faith including: "For not walking on water when all / It needed was the buoyancy of faith, / Kyrie eleison." ‘Pater Noster’ meanwhile explores his relationship with his Grandfather as an analogy for relationship with God before concluding: "I would jump up on the bar / Of his old Raleigh any day / And listen to his stories / While he pedalled all the way / To an eternal paradise / That I already know by analogy."

Analogy is the clue to Cunningham’s experience of faith. It is in the connections between ordinary existence and the Christ event that faith becomes real. A friend “a mere unlucky Thirteen years” collapses at play, dies and is lifted up across a wall into the garden that becomes the parent’s Gethsemene, the wall shaping their pieta. The statue of the Virgin “looks down at the girl stanching tiny / Dams of tears, the girl whose secret was not / Whispered by an angel in her ear.”

The final poem finds Cunningham mute in a church that, apart from God and he, is empty. He is on hold, his turn missed at the exchange, but, he reasons, God will perhaps call him back, after all God has his number. The wry humour of Cunningham’s experience and verse reveals faith.

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Taize - Kyrie Eleison.