In accounts of recent reading I keep forgetting to mention Martin Lings's Collected Poems, a lovely little book I bought at Wardah Books the last time we were there. There are only some twenty poems all told, and I've been deliberately eking them out since the beginning of Ramadhan, savouring each with plentiful re-readings. I've still got about eight to go.
This is the sort of stuff that's not likely to get into an anthology of twentieth century poetry. It reads more like something from the nineteenth I suppose, with its deliberate archaisms and lack of the slightest attempt to be in any sense modern, yet I think there's a muscularity to the verse that makes it of its time. The opening sonnets are beautifully crafted and one of the pleasures of the whole collection is one's sense that this is consciously finely wrought stuff, deliberately beautiful for its own sake - or rather that of the Creator who is so often invoked. This is a writer so utterly certain of what he is about that the reader feels a kind of confidence in entering into the poems as places to feel at home in. The familiar world of disturbance and doubt appears banished in a kind of perfect garden.
One thing I've learnt in the last few years is not to care or pay any real attention to the notion of reputation or ranking where poetry is concerned. All that matters is the depth of experience of the poem, and I've found that in some unlikely places. And this seems to apply to this collection particularly. A few years ago I don't think I would have considered it worth my attention simply because it doesn't seem to have had that of too many others.
I must say I was sorely tempted to buy, when in Wardah Books, a CD set of a reading of Lings's biography of the Prophet, peace be upon him, Muhammad, his life based on the earliest sources. Now I'm wondering why I didn't.
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