Abstract/Summary

English Martyrs is a catholic church on the Old Kent Road in South East London, both the building and its congregation strongly reflecting the histories of that ancient area. The title poem of this second collection by Conor Carville sees the church in such terms, but pushes on out into planetary, even cosmic dimensions. This poem, and others here, reassert the capacity of the lyric, of song, to begin to grasp the shape of a life, a community, a nation or a world, in the shadow of disorder. Sometimes lyric, sometimes violent, the pages of this book teem with martyrs and martyrdoms everyday and epic, from the furnaces of family and worklife, to the mystical journeys of the final long sequence 'Bless'.