Nearly twenty years ago I went on a retreat with the aim of discerning, and then distilling into a single sentence, what I thought it was that God had put me on earth to do. This is the sentence I came up with:
I am here to use my love of language and my delight in poetry to kindle my own, and other peoples imaginations for Christ.
Its not surprising therefore that the verb ‘to kindle’ crops up quite often in my poetry. It occurs, for example, five times in my collection of seventy sonnets Sounding the Seasons. When I reached for that word kindle, on retreat in the early nineties of the last century I had no idea that the word would one day be a noun to describe a kind of Ebook that could be made instantly available to anyone anywhere. Now I have some issues with Amazon over their tax avoidance here in the UK, but I think their choice of name for their Ereader was inspired, for kindling a fire of light and longing, one light kindling and lighting another, the flame leaping from mind to mind across the world and over the generations, is just what reading, at its best, is all about.
So it is with some pleasure that I can say that today my book of sonnets is released on Kindle!
It should be easy to find and download via Amazon in any country but here are the links for the kindle edition for the UK, USA, and Canada:
Finally here is one of the sonnets from the book in which I use the word kindle; this one is a celebration of all God’s unknown saints
All Saints
Though Satan breaks our dark glass into shards
Each shard still shines with Christ’s reflected light,
It glances from the eyes, kindles the words
Of all his unknown saints. The dark is bright
With quiet lives and steady lights undimmed,
The witness of the ones we shunned and shamed.
Plain in our sight and far beyond our seeing
He weaves them with us in the web of being
They stand beside us even as we grieve,
The lone and left behind whom no one claimed,
Unnumbered multitudes, he lifts above
The shadow of the gibbet and the grave,
To triumph where all saints are known and named;
The gathered glories of His wounded love.
Malcolm Guite 