Some New Publications: Attention, Theology, and the Poetics of Presence
Harry Nankin, Platanus luna, 2002. Eight toned gelatin silver shadowgram films paired in four sandwiches each inside a Mylar envelope. Film pairs are 19 x 71 cm, 10 x 72 cm, 19 x 71 cm and 23 x 71 cm respectively. Arrangement variable. Unique objects.

I’m pleased to share four recent pieces that have found their way into print in recent months, each exploring different facets of what it means to pay attention—to art, to theology, to culture, and to the world after certainty has departed.

Rethinking Nicaea from the Margins

Together with John Flett, I contributed “The Heresy of Nicaea and the Jesus of Colony” to Receiving Nicaea Today: Global Voices from Reformed Perspectives (Evangelische Verlagsanstalt). The essay questions how the Nicene formulations functioned—and continue to function—within colonial frameworks. We ask what it means to receive this Christian creed from perspectives shaped by the experience of empire’s violence, and how orthodoxy itself can become a form of theological imperialism.

Photography as Attention

In “Attention in Harry Nankin’s Photography Practice: Assisting Nature to Write Itself,” published in Art-Making as Spiritual Practice: Rituals of Embodied Understanding (Bloomsbury Academic), I introduce the work of the Australian photographer Harry Nankin, locating it in a tradition of cameraless photography and highlighting its key concerns vis-à-vis matters of attention, which are made equally concrete in Nankin’s processes and the subjects themselves. I then propose that Nankin’s art practice shares some analogies with that of an iconographer or, more exactly, with one who recognises and indexes icons. This reckons with certain convictions Nankin shares about nature’s communicative character and how he, therefore, understands the place and responsibility of the human artist.

Engaging with Paul Mitchell’s Poetry

My review of Paul Mitchell’s High Spirits appears in the latest edition of TEXT. Mitchell’s collection presents a vigorous conversation with existence itself through poetry that is both deeply personal and universally resonant, balancing spiritual depth with artistic sophistication while finding transcendence in ordinary life. The collection addresses contemporary existence through intimate portraits of marriage, family, and Australian suburban life alongside broader cultural and environmental concerns, all rendered in an accessible yet profound conversational tone marked by humour and wisdom. Mitchell’s work demonstrates how careful attention to the world reveals it as sufficient and potentially sacred, offering poetry that connects rather than obscures, in a tradition that labours under the burden of modernity’s “broken contract” (George Steiner) between language and reality.

On Attention and Absence

Finally, my essay “On Being Called to Attention ‘After the Gods have Departed'” appears in Gesher. This short piece wrestles with what happens when traditional structures of meaning recede, and how we might cultivate forms of attention that don’t depend on what has been lost. The title gestures toward that strange condition of modernity: how do we attend to what matters when the old guarantees of significance have withdrawn? The essay engages with work of three witnesses: Simone Weil, Harry Nankin, and Edward Said.

These pieces circle around related concerns: the quality of our attention in a disenchanted age, the politics embedded in theological language, poetry’s ongoing argument with reality, and the spiritual dimensions of aesthetic practice. Each represents a different register—scholarly, collaborative, analytical, critical—but all share an interest in how we show up to the world, and what might show up when we do.

PDFs of all four pieces are available here on my website.

The Ledger of Our Lives: The Hobsons Bay Blues

In the halls of Hobsons Bay, they’ve drawn their battle lines,
There’s squillions for the roads, while community declines.
Seven dollars ninety-nine for art, for books, for dreams –
Tell me what this says about our values, plots, and schemes.

Thirty-nine for every road, twenty-one for parks and play,
Nine dollars for the aged, the faint, the ones who’ve lost their way.
These numbers tell a story of a community that’s lost,
Where concrete speaks much louder, and compassion pays the cost.

Sixty-three million for the monuments we’ve planned,
While the homeless sleep in doorways throughout this promised land.
Where is the friendly shelter when the rain falls cold and hard?
Where is that stubborn hope when kindness seems forever barred?

Twenty-five million dollars flows beneath our very feet in drains,
While struggling families break apart under crushing financial strains.
No food banks in the budget, no refuge for the poor,
Just the thunder of construction shaking every weary door.

A mother reads to children by the light of shopping malls,
An artist paints on cardboard in abandoned bathroom stalls.
The programs fade to nothing while the asphalt spreads like flame –
These are the quiet victims of our civic spending game.

Twelve-ninety for the fragile earth that cradles all our dreams,
While thirty-nine pours concrete over rivers, fields, and streams.
The warming earth sends warnings through each rising tide and flame,
Yet still we pave our children’s paths with poison, steel, and shame.

Just pennies for the saplings that could clean our poisoned air,
While toxins flood our waterways without a cent of care.
No funds to plant the forests that our children’s lungs will need,
As chemicals keep flowing from our profit-driven greed.

Disability gets nine dollars in this cold arithmetic,
While millions fund the monuments to progress smooth and slick.
The numbers tell our story of a community grown numb –
Fine roads for all to travel, but life has been struck dumb.

Is this the cost of progress?
Is this what we are for?
At least the ledger’s balanced
though humanity’s no more.

*****

This wee poem, first published in Star Weekly, my local paper, was my response to the Hobsons Bay Council 2025–26 budget, which was mailed out to residents as a mode of positive promotion.

Sunflowers

This song, co-written with my friend Jonathan Hicks, was inspired by and written for the people of Ukraine. It first emerged in 2024 during my time performing with the folk group Catgut and Air. It is also a song that strikes close to home genealogically. Were she alive to witness it, my Russian babushka would have been utterly appalled by the aggression shown by the leadership of her motherland. Today marks the anniversary of her death. Releasing this song today is one of the ways I acknowledge her enduring influence on my life.


You can check out some of my other songs here. I am also currently working on a new album, which I hope to release later this year.

Genocide
Marc Chagall, The Troika Galloping into the Night, 1948. Etching, 21 x 27.5 cm. Private collection.

‘In Ukraine there are no Jews. Nowhere – not in Poltava, Kharkov, Kremenchug, Borispol, not in Iagotin. You will not see the black, tear-filled eyes of a little girl, you will not hear the sorrowful drawling voice of an old woman, you will not glimpse the swarthy face of a hungry child in a single city or a single one of hundreds of thousands of shtetls.

Stillness. Silence. A people has been murdered. Murdered are elderly artisans, well-known masters of trades: tailors, hatmakers, shoemakers, tinsmiths, jewellers, housepainters, furriers, bookbinders; murdered are workers: porters, mechanics, electricians, carpenters, furnace workers, locksmiths; murdered are wagon drivers, tractor drivers, chauffeurs, cabinet makers; murdered are millers, bakers, pastry chefs, cooks; murdered are doctors, therapists, dentists, surgeons, gynecologists; murdered are experts in bacteriology and biochemistry, directors of university clinics, teachers of history, algebra, trigonometry; murdered are lecturers, department assistants, candidates and doctors of science; murdered are engineers, metallurgists, bridge builders, architects, ship builders; murdered are pavers, agronomists, field-crop growers, land surveyors; murdered are accountants, bookkeepers, store merchants, suppliers, managers, secretaries, night guards; murdered are teachers, dressmakers; murdered are grandmothers who could mend stockings and bake delicious bread, who could cook chicken soup and make strudel with walnuts and apples; and murdered are grandmothers who didn’t know how to do anything except love their children and grandchildren; murdered are women who were faithful to their husbands, and murdered are frivolous women; murdered are beautiful young women, serious students and happy schoolgirls; murdered are girls who were unattractive and foolish; murdered are hunchbacks; murdered are singers; murdered are blind people; murdered are deaf and mute people; murdered are violinists and pianists; murdered are three-year-old and two-year-old children; murdered are eighty-year-old elders who had cataracts in their dimmed eyes, cold transparent fingers and quiet, rustling voices like parchment; murdered are crying newborns who were greedily sucking at their mothers’ breasts until their final moments. All are murdered, many hundreds of thousands, millions of people.

This is not the death of individuals at war who had weapons in their hands and had left behind their home, family, fields, songs, books, customs and folktales. This is the murder of a people, the murder of homes, entire families, books, faith, the murder of the tree of life; this is the death of roots, and not branches or leaves; it is the murder of a people’s body and soul, the murder of life that toiled for generations to create thousands of intelligent, talented artisans and intellectuals. This is the murder of a people’s morals, customs and anecdotes passed from fathers to sons; this is the murder of memories, sad songs, and epic tales of good and bad times; it is the destruction of family homes and of burial grounds. This is the death of a people who had lived beside Ukrainian people for centuries, labouring, sinning, performing acts of kindness, and dying alongside them on one and the same earth’.

– Vasily Grossman, ‘Ukraine without Jews’, trans. Polly Zavadivker. Jewish Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2011): 13.

Grossman’s essay, originally titled ‘Ukraine bez yevreev’ in Russian, faced significant publication hurdles. The Red Army’s official newspaper, Krasnaya Zvezda, initially rejected the piece. It eventually found its way to print only in a shortened, Yiddish translation in Einikeit, the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee’s journal. The original Russian version remained unpublished during Grossman’s lifetime, until its discovery and publication in the journal Vek in 1990.

 

On history’s eradication of memory
Photo by Caroline Hernandez | Unsplash.

‘The “acceleration of history” … confronts us with the brutal realization of the difference between real memory – social and unviolated, exemplified in but also retained as the secret of so-called primitive or archaic societies – and history, which is how our hopelessly forgetful modern societies, propelled by change, organize the past. On the one hand, we find an integrated, dictatorial memory – unself-conscious, commanding, all-powerful, spontaneously actualizing, a memory without a past that ceaselessly reinvents tradition, linking the history of its ancestors to the undifferentiated time of heroes, origins, and myth – and on the other hand, our memory, nothing more in fact than sifted and sorted historical traces. The gulf between the two has deepened in modern times with the growing belief in a right, a capacity, and even a duty to change. Today, this distance has been stretched to its convulsive limit.

This conquest and eradication of memory by history has had the effect of a revelation, as if an ancient bond of identity had been broken and something had ended that we had experienced as self-evident – the equation of memory and history’.

– Pierre Nora

‘Blessed are the cracked, for they shall let in the light’ (Julius Henry Marx)

Christ as Strange(r)
Julie Dowling, Mary, 2001. Oil on linen, 150 x 120 cm. State Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Australia.

I have a new essay out: ‘Christ as Strange(r): The Elusiveness of Jesus in the Work of Nick Cave and Julie Dowling’. In Seeing Christ in Australia Since 1850, edited by Kerrie Handasyde and Sean Winter, 149–66. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.

The Abstract reads:

Strangely, Australian theologians have mostly been quite uninterested in pursuing the question of what an Australian Jesus might be like. This suggests an investment in a theological methodology at odds with the disruptive and inverting character of the presentations of Jesus offered in the Second Testament, wherein questions arising from particular contexts were considered basic for responsible theological work. Conversely, the figure of Jesus has occupied an endearing and idiosyncratic place in the broader Australian imagination. This essay represents an effort to listen to what two contemporary Australian artists—Nick Cave and Julie Dowling—make of Jesus and to consider some implications of their contributions for doing theology in Australia. Their work recognises that the question of Jesus’ identity and the countless cultures in which Jesus is woven cannot be unbraided, however interruptive and strange such a reality may prove to be. In testing the claim that it is only as a stranger that Jesus is ever a sign of the divine life among us, the essay is also an invitation to relinquish efforts to domesticate or homogenise Jesus. To experience this stranger is to experience one who ‘appears only in the moment in which we are dispossessed’ (Judith Butler) of them. This is the event that disrupts, disorients, and dissolves any sense one may enjoy of history’s continuity or possession. Recognition of this stranger is only ever the measure of our failure.

Around the broadcasting system of multiple transmitters
Photo: Shared by Stella Assange via Instagram|ABC News.

Predicaments
Photo by Joe Green on Unsplash.

“[I]t is possible to mean well, to be caring and kind, loving one’s neighbour as oneself, yet to be complicit in the corruption and violence of social institutions. Furthermore, this predicament may not correspond to, and may not be represented by, any available politics or knowledge.”

– Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 35.

Around the interwebs …
Photo by Randy Fath on Unsplash.

Adam Gopnik reviews Charles Taylor’s new book, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment.

Victoria Emily Jones has a nice piece on New Mount Pilgrim’s Maafa Remembrance window.

Sailing to Byzantium: an exhibition of work by Olga Bakhtina.

Alfonse Borysewicz on art and transcendence.

Tyler Cowen’s discussion with David Bentley Hart is excellent. Here’s a taster: ‘There are people I know, in fact, people near here in Notre Dame, who are all terrifically intent on trying to revive a dying Christendom, because they think that would be the revival of Christianity in the West. They ally themselves to these reactionary figures like Victor Orbán. Whereas my ideal of what would be a brighter future for Christianity would be the final eclipse of that kind of conflation of Christianity with the interests of a particular civilization or culture or nation. I believe that’s a perfidious corruption. So, bright in what way? I would say that in many ways, the brightest future for Christianity may consist in the death of many of its institutions and of much of its cultural power’.

Mike Watson offers a defense of the Frankfurt School.

The Australian Association for the Study of Religion (AASR) has issued a CFP for their annual conference (29–30 November, in Canberra) on the theme ‘Thinking Religion in Place’.

Worthwhile piece by Eric Naiman about ChatGPT, reading Dostoevsky, writing [sic] essays, and the banality of ideas: ‘Users of ChatGPT don’t need the “heavenly bread” of intellectual freedom and individual authenticity; instead they want the grade and the degree that will lead to various forms of material bread after graduation. …. Readers of [The Brothers Karamazov] should understand that every time they use ChatGPT they are burning Christ at the stake’.

Excellent piece by Brian Boyd on Why We Need Amistics for AI: ‘Beneath a veneer of debate over how we should apply universal principles to novel technologies, our tech fights are a power struggle over who gets to count as “we” and who is left out — over who will rule whom. The result is that we often wind up going down technological paths unreflectively, seeking only pleasure and profit — and then are surprised to find things we don’t like. We also sometimes fail to go down technological paths whose ends we would have liked. We had better unlearn this habit, because a historic technological breakthrough is here in the form of generative AI. If we wish to decide together how we can use this breakthrough to live well, rather than having it choose for us, we must learn the practice of Amistics. … If we are to live well with AI, we must recognize and emphasize this level of ethical formation that is neither individual nor universal, not zero-sum but free-range. To act for the common good requires a community that understands its shared ends and goals. We must find ways for politics to enable meaningful decisionmaking to take place in actual communities and cultures, rather than in higher, more abstracted contexts’.

Speaking of the interwebs, I learned last week, via a Google search, that my father died last year. What a strange and estranged world we live with.

Talking books

Recently, Titus Olorunnisola, who serves as the Interim Director of Research at Whitley College, interviewed me about two of my recent publications – Imagination in an Age of Crisis and the T&T Clark Handbook of the Doctrine of Creation. Below is a revised transcript of that conversation.

TITUS: Why is art important in times of crisis?

ME: I remember seeing an image of a bombed-out National Library in Sarajevo in 1992. Among the ruins was a man playing the cello. I later learnt that his name is Vedran Smailović, that he is a Bosnian musician and that he was playing a fragment of music rescued from the Saxon State Library in Dresden after it was bombed in 1945 by British and American Forces. I was struck by this simple human action and what it might suggest about the possibility of seeking and making meaning amid even the most horrific of circumstances.

Of course, sometimes there may not be meaning to be had at all. At other times, the horror is so great that it silences us, leaves our bodies immobile, sucks all meaning out of life, renders things like ‘art’ to be an impossible indulgence – or worse.

But in time, if indifference doesn’t get the better of us, there can arise the possibility to respond to crises in other registers. And here, I think, is where the artist and those who receive art recognise something about arts’ capacity to come near to the truth of things and the artist’s capacity to witness to dislocation in ways that refuse to accept that the way things appear is the way that things must be or will be. This is about committing to being human in a particular direction.

Another way of approaching all this is to think of art as a way of paying attention, which involves refusing to deny, or forget, or bury the most uncomfortable truths of the human experience. Simone Weil referred to such attention as ‘the rarest and purest form of generosity’.

It is, of course, about a way of dignifying the human condition. But it’s more than that. It’s also something about how art and imagination are closely associated with our hopes, imagination being a prerequisite for understanding and nurturing hope.

TITUS: How do these convictions find shape in this particular book, Imagination in an Age of Crisis, and who is it written for?

ME: This book is the work of a diverse group of over 30 poets, art practitioners, and academics reflecting together on how the arts and theology inform – and are informed by – our imaginations. They help us see and interpret what is happening in places such as an Aboriginal cooking ritual, biodiversity loss, institutional responses to child sexual abuse, folk rituals, our experience of film, theatre, music, and literature. Their contributions assist us to discern the ways of Spirit and generate hope and empathy in our lives.

Poets do that through attention to language and reverence for mystery. Art practitioners do that by working closely with the ‘stuff’ of meaning both before and after the limits of rationality. And theologians do that through engagement with cultural practices and products as possible modes of epiphany and witness. And the book offers some record about that.

The book is written for those open to the possibility of discovering wider horizons of meaning in a messy world. It is also written for artists willing to entertain the possibility that they are engaged in serious theological work. And it is for those who believe – or who want to believe – that art and spirituality can be acts of defiant hope in the face of all that appears anything but hopeful.

TITUS: Why does this book matter for theology?

ME: It seems that one of the things that good art does is to shed light on the true nature of things; it broadens our horizons, it enriches our capacity to see, it alerts us to dimensions of reality that we had not seen before, and for which regular prose, sometimes, is not enough. This is a helpful way to think also about the task of theology.

The other thing I’d want to say here is that both art and theology are concerned with how we receive gifts concerned with particular ways of knowing. These are often pursued on the wager that there is the possibility of something like an epiphany or a connection. At their best, they are also an invitation to say ‘Yes’ to engaging in conversations concerned with opening up matters in ways that resist the temptations to tie up loose threads. This is important because, very often, the truth of things seems to be hidden in these threads.

TITUS: Turning to the creation book, you could have chosen to work on a book on any number of topics, so why did you choose to devote time and energy to put together a book on creation?

ME: I’ve asked myself that question a lot over the past 7 years, and whenever I skim through an inbox of around 3,000 emails related to this book, representing something of the privilege and challenge of working with over 70 contributors from all over the globe.

The answer to the question of why is, of course, multi-faceted. But let me name just three things:

First, it arises from my conviction that theologians must be concerned with the most pressing issues of our time. Incontrovertibly, these include the threats posed to our ecosystem. At the same time, and for various reasons, we are increasingly dislocated from the world. Such matters ought to be of pressing concern to theologians and to the communities their work serves.

Second, I wanted to work on the kind of book I would find helpful as a student or as a teacher. This is one of the reasons the chapters tend to be quite short and avoid, wherever possible, copious technical paraphernalia. But more importantly, it’s why the book attends to so many different themes. I wanted to expose the assumptions that we all have about the created world and how these assumptions influence what we think about all kinds of other things – like beauty, land, justice, time, evil, the bible, medicine, sport, and technology – and then, conversely, how what we think about such things affects how we think about and live with creation.

Finally, there is something too about the place that doctrines of creation have typically played and continue to play in Christian thought. Typically, when it is on the radar at all – and it’s very often missing, especially in ecclesiocentric theologies – Christian accounts of creation treat the idea as a great unifying theme in which many other ideas coinhere. I think this is unfortunate, not only because such approaches inevitably flatten out the rich multiplicity of voices and ideas about creation in the bible and elsewhere but also because of how such accounts serve the agendas of the powerful. I hope that this volume, with its multiplicity of voices, methodologies, and themes, might challenge such approaches in ways that open up and deepen our love for and fascination about this world and for the entire creation beyond. Of course, it will be up to others to judge whether or not the volume has achieved these aims.

Recent publications

I note two recent publications:

The T&T Clark Handbook of the Doctrine of Creation is a project that had its genesis in 2017 when Bloomsbury invited me to edit a book in their Companion series. I suggested that I would like to tackle the volume on creation and they were agreeable. It was a privilege to work with such a diverse array of scholars, early career and established, across a range of disciplines, not a few undertaking their work in very difficult circumstances. I’m delighted – and somewhat relieved – to have completed this project and am so grateful to all who contributed so generously to it. I hope it might prove useful for those engaged in learning and research.

I also have a poem, ‘Gathering’, in the latest edition of Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality.

Hope, Resilience, and Resistance: Life in the Holy Land

Mercy Aiken began volunteering with Bethlehem Bible College in 2015 and lived there for a period of over five years. She is passionate about sharing her experience through writing and advocacy. Mercy is currently employed as a Relationship Manager for the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East (NEME). In this role, Mercy engages evangelical leaders, scholars, and pastors in learning more about the challenges that Christians and others face in the Holy Land and across the Middle East. Mercy holds a BA in English from Northern Arizona University and is currently working on a Master of Arts in Theology/Culture/Peacemaking from Saint Stephen’s University in New Brunswick, Canada. She is part of the International Advisory Council for Christ at the Checkpoint and is passionate about ecumenical work and relationship-building between Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Mercy also organises and leads tours to the Holy Land twice yearly. She is the co-author of the biography of Bishara Awad, a Palestinian Christian and founder of Bethlehem Bible College – Yet in the Dark Streets Shining: A Palestinian Story of Hope and Resilience in Bethlehem. Mercy interviewed Bishara and many of his family members and other Palestinian Christians over a number of years for the writing of this book. The book weaves historical facts with a personal account of Bishara’s remarkable life.

Rachel Coghlan is a public health leader with over 20 years of post-qualification experience gained in clinical physiotherapy practice and in international health and humanitarian research, policy, and advocacy. Rachel is a Fulbright Scholar and holds a PhD from the Centre for Humanitarian Leadership, Deakin University. Her research explores the place of palliative care in humanitarian settings. She has contributed to palliative care research and education in Gaza and maintains special connections with Palestinian friends and colleagues. Rachel is a curious thinker and listener, always searching to learn from those most affected by illness and humanitarian crises. She regularly writes to spread compassion and humanity in living and dying and to help make sense of grief and suffering in our world.

Register here.

Tempo

‘E il tempo che viviamo non è la fuga astratta e affannosa degli inafferrabili istanti: è questo semplice, immobile «mentre», in cui sempre già senza accorgercene siamo – la nostra spicciola eternità, che nessun affranto orologio potrà mai misurare’.

Giorgio Agamben, ‘Mentre’, 14 marzo 2024.

Church Responses to the Palestine–Israel Conflict
Jason Goroncy, Towards the Ancient City, 2016. Photograph of mixed media.

The escalation of execrable violence in Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories is again in the world’s spotlight. Among the many statements being offered in response are those from Christian communities and ecumenical bodies. These reflect a diversity of approaches and viewpoints, a reminder, among much else besides, that catholicity does not equate to univocality. In most instances, these give some visible expression to the aspirations of those whose lives remain marked by a struggle to bring discord, division, fear, and violence to an end; that is, some expression of the hopes promised in the gospel.

Ecumenical and Interchurch Statements

Other

Please include any further such statements in the comments below and I will add these to the list.

Wes Campbell: Disturbing Illusions of Peace
Wes Campbell, Encroaching Salt, nd.

Last month, I had the immense pleasure and honour of speaking at the opening of an exhibition of Wes Campbell’s artwork. Wes is a theologian, artist, and (retired) Minister of the Word in the Uniting Church in Australia. An edited version of my talk is now available on the ABC’s Religion and Ethics portal.

Below are a few more photos of Wes’ work – 1. Nativity; 2. Silence I; 3. Silence II; 4. Three Crucified Shirts; 5. Banksias and Leucadendrons; 6. Transfiguration of Christ; 7. Transfiguring Light IV; 8. Wholeness; and 9. Women Visiting the Tomb.

A wee vision of the happiest society

‘The best, most beautiful, and most perfect way that we have of expressing a sweet concord of mind to each other, is by music. When I would form in my mind an idea of a society in the highest degree happy, I think of them as expressing their love, their joy, and the inward concord and harmony and spiritual beauty of their souls by sweetly singing [or making other such music] to each other’.

– Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 13: The “Miscellanies” (Entry Nos. a–z, aa–zz, 1–500), ed. Thomas A. Schafer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 331.

There are worse visions …

Motet
John Olsen, Birds and Frog at Lake Eyre, 1975. Lithograph printed in brown & purple inks on paper, 80 x 121 cm. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
John Olsen, Birds and Frog at Lake Eyre, 1975. Lithograph printed in brown & purple inks on paper, 80 x 121 cm. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.

O my white-burdened Europe, across
so many maps greed zigzags. One voice
and the nightmare of a dominant chord:
defences, self-mirroring, echoings, myriad
overtones of shame. Never again one voice.
Out of malaise, out of need our vision cries.

Turmoil of change, our slow renaissance.
All things share one breath. We listen:
clash and resolve, webs and layers of voices.
And which voice dominates or is it chaos?
My doubting earthling, tiny among the planets
does a lover of one voice hear more or less?

Infinities of space and time. Melody fragments;
a music of compassion, noise of enchantment.
Among the inner parts something open,
something wild, a long rumour of wisdom
keeps winding into each tune: cantus firmus,
fierce vigil of contingency, love’s congruence.

– Micheal O’Siadhail, ‘Motet’, in The Chosen Garden (Dublin: The Dedalus Press, 1990), 82.