Incendium Amoris

by Steve Ely

British poet Steve Ely's third collection of poems, which takes its inspiration and its title from Incendium Amoris (`The Fire of Love') by the fourteenth century saint and mystic Richard Rolle. The book offers a vision of pre-Reformation and post-industrial England through the eyes of the trespasser, the poacher, the recusant, and the revolutionary, in solidarity with the swinish multitude against the landed power. Contesting language and landscape and addressing issues including carnality, class, skepticism and belief, Incendium Amoris is a peasant's revolt against the accelerating cultural, social and environmental devastations of globalizing capital, a guerrilla-pastoral prophecy of a yeoman-anarchist utopia.

117 pages, Paperback

Published August 9, 2017

Reviews

[Andrew H · Rating 3 out of 5]

A challenging book. I needed all my Anglo saxon and Middle English to read it! There were some wonderfully imaginative lines. The book has an Imagist quality and a verbal directness that seemed to echo Pound and Villon. The poetry also (as the blurb acknowledges) mines the language of Geoffrey Hill. The simpler the poetry became the more it struck home. The more it leant towards Hill and his arcane obscurity the more I sighed. Ely does a great job in bringing the medieval word of Rolle to life. The parallels between medieval mysticism and Crowley, however, are confused and forced.

[James Askari · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first sequence of poems is straightforward and politically committed: Ely yomps across a South Yorkshire moor, hunting with dogs by night, 'dynamiting windfarms', execrating the heavy hand on the weedkiller of the agribusinesses (abetted by Labour councils) that have done for the wildlife. The technique is of the repetition across poems of tags--the poet himself is 'Catweazle in cuccula', a bald children's TV wizard from the early 70s whom he has shockingly come to resemble in his despised hoodie. There are bluebells underfoot ('endymion non-scripta'); and in an archetypally English landscape, Ely recalls Blake's vision of violence at Varley's seance ('ghost of a flea') and Yeats's vision of the hell-hounds dogging Pound. There are few verbs, few articulated sentences; but this may not be inappropriate to the timelessness of Ely's Roman Catholicism.

The longer poems, where Ely stretches himself more, are more contentious, and in many ways more interesting. In 'AEcerbot', the book's hero Richard Rolle, the Yorkshire hermit, mystic and apparent fornicator with nuns, is imagined as returning to life and performing a fertility ceremony. 'The Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram', drawing sympathetically on the Kabbalah, equates the decreation of the world with Aleister Crowley's snide anal sex and the Saturday night television of Simon Cowell. 'Little Sir Hugh' is partly a narrative poem recounting a thirteen-century blood libel against the Jews, in which Aaron of Lincoln's community is alleged to have taken revenge on a group of children that disrupted a community wedding--kicking a ball against the walls--by enticing in a child with the promise of cream tarts; the boy is never seen again. Ely's puzzled confession of faith is 'Scandalum Cruces', which again finds anal sex sinful. Ely seems to imagine the liberal granting of rights to individuals (rather than to a community or body of Christ) as socially splintering or privatising; the world is peopled by 'nine billion screaming mandrakes' crying as they are torn up, and wishing death on anyone else. The writ of human rights, as they are promised (apparently) in the House of Lords, a non-democratic council, seems absurd to him: 'notarised rights for screaming mandrakes, United Federation of Planets'.