Librarians' Christian Fellowship

Kirsty Robinson reports on Stewart Henderson's lecture at New Road Baptist Church in Oxford ...

I have never heard a performance poet live and Stewart’s reading of his own poems was a joy in itself, given greater depth by hearing why or how they were written.

Starting, as have so many writers, by discovering libraries as a child, Stewart now feels that he was observing, defining and recording the mental archive which would later produce the social history snapshots of his adult poetry. Stewart certainly has a deep love for his home city of Liverpool and the first poem he read, ‘Only my name is the same’ not only recreated Liverpool in the late 1950s and early 1960s but also considered how we recall the past when “in exile in the present we file the memories”.

Personal background followed, with a poem about his grandmother, 'I only knew her old' which Stewart described as a ’30 year poem’ - one that has a long gestation period even though it may be written quickly.

This ability to commute back to his childhood, as Stewart described it, has produced the children’s poetry for which he is justly famous. Stewart starts his children’s poetry by ‘hearing’ a child’s voice . This was very apparent in the poem where a child tries a variety of creative means to convince his teacher to let him stay inside at playtime. There is great authenticity in both the humour the child employs and the heart-wrenching despair at the end where he falls back on ‘Please don’t make me go into the playground, Mrs Thomas’.

Stewart then talked briefly about his work for Radio 4, which covers a range of social documentaries. The next poem he read, ‘Under the clock’, was inspired by the film ‘Matter of Life and Death’. Read slowly, in rhythm to a tapping foot, it was an unnerving meditation on mortality, and led Stewart into a discussion on his the spiritual aspect of his work.

Stewart emphasised that his first priority when writing on matters of faith is to be authentic, even when that means saying ‘I don’t know’. He also recognises that the poems have to communicate very clearly with people who do not have an background of faith and the poems he read were superb examples. One was from the series commissioned by J John as part of his work on the 10 commandments, a meditation on the name of God which made such an impact on me that I found myself using lines from it during the worship in church the following morning.

Stewart Henderson described himself as a poet trying to make words work from a position of faith and observation. Those attending LCF’s 2006 annual lecture now know that he does it movingly, amusingly and successfully. To those of you who were not able to attend I can only suggest you buy the books or, even better, try to attend a live performance.

A longer version of this report appears in the Winter 2006 edition of Christian Librarian.

Stewart's collections of poetry for children, Who Left Grandad at the Chip Shop and All Things Weird and Wonderful are available from St. Andrew's Bookshop.