By Stefan Szczelkun
Fran Lock doesn’t hold back when forging her poetry.
Here she is spurred on by her vision of Mary Magdalene as a revolutionary. A lover of Jesus who witnessed the resurrection of the Christ. Lock has a fierce imagination that is determined not to be held back in its ambition. She intends to conjure up the world of Mary Magdalene for us. In ‘Anointing Song’ we are introduced to a world of smells that Mary Magdalene inhabits: “slattern of lavender” and “prodigal of orris as I knelt to anoint.” This did more to put me back there than any film could.
Magdalene lived two thousand years ago and was barely described in the male-filtered Gospels, or – using a word of Lock’s – the spancelled record. But this cannot hold back the poet who is tasked to use her imagination, and every word in our common lingo to break to her truth on the basis of a shared nature as human as woman. English has more words than any other language Lock sets out to marshal this power even if we have to reach for our dictionaries a few times, as I did with ‘spancelled’.
“He scraped the slur of their ‘whore!’ from me with the raw edge of his patience.” – p.12
This is the non-judgemental attention that we all need to learn, if communism is to become a human relation, rather than an edict. I have never seen it put so freshly.
In the poem ‘When my beloved talks about love’ – the poet evokes Magdalene’s experience of hearing the living Christ’s talk: “a lush disorder of metaphor, rhapsodies of vine and briar” and “He held my face in warm and dusty hands, and blew the luminous breath of life into me.”
As someone brought up in the Catholic religion, this tactile image had an evocative power. It brought me to the intimacy with which I felt the figure of Jesus with my childhood imagination. Literally touching. This is the power of the poet’s wordsmithing.
The moment Magdalene returns to the tomb to anoint the battered body of her adored man is surely at the heart of this book. When she finds the sepulchre empty “… my soul sang” – p. 19.
Lock reaches for the metaphorical power of this moment. This is where we as readers need to step in. Lock talks of the ‘insurrection’ of Jesus. This is not a lone zombie, but rather the launch of a movement. With the charismatic leader gone, his disciples must do him proud.
So why are we not all communists?
As I’m writing this I’m also reading about the mass picket in Birmingham and imagining how the local binmen must have felt after holding out so long alone: to be surrounded by the working class come en masse to stand alongside them.
The mystery is this. We have this powerful message of Love, taken up by millions. Led by imperfect men but still, no excuses. Why has this not led to a communism that is legislated by love? Where have we as humans not overcome our base natures to order ourselves with reason? An order which implies we prepare ourselves for the consequences of throwing out money relations. Jesus was crucified but he acted alone and impulsively.
“I am not giving up my life Mary; I am giving it away.”
This is not a book of poetry to be taken lightly. Take a week off with it to a mountain bothy or monastic retreat; or read it aloud at a mass picket.
Poetry is made by one person, but once uttered it enters the common lingo through its imbibers. This book attempts to transcend our bog-consciousness. To make ties across two thousand years of our common being. This book punches through the normalising language we get accustomed to. It asks us to learn new words (think – new tools). To ask the perennial questions, that have become dull and faded into silence, and now to ask them with such rejuvenated poetic verve that we can perchance revive the practice of love and have a resurgence of solidarity based on unaffected love of humans.
To love in spite of the surging pain of oppression – we must.
Lock’s last words:
“he stands beside in us. to stand beside, a messianic act, we are the resurrection. the hinge on which the word hangs, the axis upon which history turns.”
‘Love is stronger than death: Mary Magdalene and the Insurrection of Jesus’ is available here.
