The Poetry of Herbert Lomas

Herbert Lomas's poetry is highly thought of in Britain, and he has been a recipient of some of the country's most prestigious awards, including the Cholmondeley Award and the Guinness Prize. His collection Letters in the Dark (1986) was named an Observer book of the year, not a common honor for poetry collections. Rivers Carew wrote in Contemporary Poets that "it could be said that his [Lomas's] poems have been written for the love of people, of life, and of God." (qtd. in "Herbert Lomas" n.p.) His translations of Finnish poetry have won him honors outside his country, and his own poetry has been translated into several languages. Its mixture of faith in God and skepticism about the world, of exaltation and humor, of sublime and ridiculous have strong appeal for a wide swath of readers of all faiths and none. But his work should be better known in the United States, as, writing in the tradition of Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot, he provides a contemporary reflection of the Anglo-Catholic tradition. A complex writer who does not clearly belong to any of the contemporary schools, he writes both formalist poems and free verse, on a variety of topics and in a range of voices. His wit and wordplay, his wry, uncompromising glances, and his startlingly apt observations will make his poetry speak to many listeners, and its quirky metaphysics give it special appeal to spiritual seekers and readers of Christian poetry. Lomas was born in the Pennines, served in World War II as an infantryman, and graduated with an MA from Liverpool University. He has taught at the University of Helsinki and the University of London and has received numerous awards. He writes nonfiction as well as poetry and has translated Finnish poetry collections and individual poems. His Contemporary Finnish Poetry won the Poetry Society's translation award in 1991. He is a member of the Finnish Academy and was made Knight First Class, Order of the White Rose of Finland, for his services to Finnish Literature. His translations have made some breathtaking Finnish works available to readers of English. Lomas's work is intensely physical and metaphysical. On the physical side are his evocations of sex and place, sometimes linked--landscapes and lovescapes. On the metaphysical side are his exploration of saints' lives and of spiritual possibility. The latter is a haunting preoccupation, and the speaker tries to look at faith from all sides. His attempt to nourish faith, and to analyze its possibility, in an age of spiritual indifference is persuasive. Sometimes he is ironic, sometimes questioning; he alternately interrogates and affirms. Much of his work is grounded in the particulars of place. Sights and sounds of a West Yorkshire childhood are represented in such detail that readers can experience a world that is mostly gone. But, as for Eliot, place subtly acquires metaphoric freight that transforms the scenes and suffuses them with light and shadow. His poems of growing up, with their adolescent fumblings and grumblings, bring to mind the scenes in Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. The unreliable and sometimes frightening landscapes that surround the challenges of childhood, though, suggest the metaphysical quest that surfaces in much of this work. Formally the poetry is all over the map--from relatively tight sonnets to expansive free verse. Lomas's sensitivity to sound makes every container appropriate to its contents, so his most indecorous poems are models of decorum. In the poems of spiritual quest, Lomas is dextrous and clever, balancing ideas, images, rhyme and rhythm. Sometimes his work makes one think of both John Donne and Richard Wilbur, though his esprit is purely his own. The spirit of play rules, often even in the more serious poetry. In a sense the physical and metaphysical quests merge in poems that search for transcendence through love, sex, and religion. His poems of the last thirty years show the flip sides of a romantic metaphysics-and indeed, of Romanticism in general--ecstasy and irony. …