Poems by Peter Brooke
(1) "Those Two Boys" and other poems. These poems correspond for the most part to a period after I had 'come out' and was actively involved in the gay scene in Belfast and in London. They are to do with the fascination of glamour and image, sex, drugs and rock'n'roll.
While I suppose I now have to denounce all that as 'sinful', and while I am certainly grateful beyond all imagining that this period of my life is over, I still look back on it with a certain fondness and especially fondness and respect for the people I knew at the time. These were people who maintained a sense of decency and of good humour under extremely difficult circumstances; and their sins, gross and obvious as they were, were so much healthier, so much easier to repent, than the mean, sneaking, hidden sin we commit every time we fill up our car with petrol, knowing what that has cost in terms of lives, nations and lands ruined.
At this time I was active in politics and very much wanted to write 'political' poetry but was quite unable to do it. Poetry dictates its own subject matter. A positive application of the saying 'the medium is the message'.
(2) Against Photography. The spirit of discontent and rebellion against that sort of life, against spirituality trapped in the prison of glamour and image. Most of these poems were written in France in the late '80s and early '90s, where I had gone to study the work of Albert Gleizes. Gleizes' denunciation of 'machinism' looms large but, most importantly, living with the potter Genevieve Dalban, I was beginning to learn something of the difference between the abstract experience of the intellectual and the much fuller, corporeal, 'aesthetic' (meaning everything to do with the senses) experience of the craftsman - a transition I long for and am still far from having accomplished.
During this period I made my first religious commitment, with the Baha'i World Faith. This will eventually, I hope, be discussed in the 'Politics and Theology' pages. I very much wanted to write Baha'i poems but was again, quite unable to do it.
(3) Things as they are. These poems reflect my baptism in the Orthodox Church through the intermediary of Fr Quentin de Castelbajac of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad in Lyon (but Fr Quentin is not to be held responsible for the sometimes rather eccentric content of the poems). The title is ambitious, and I don't claim for a moment that it is merited, but it reflects the hope that these poems put everything into their real context, the context of Eternal Life.
This is a theme developed in the texts by Albert Gleizes given in the Art and Religion section. We all know our life as it is conducted under the two, mutually contradictory, conditions of Space and Time. But everything in Space and Time stands in relation to, and finds its fulfilment in, a third condition, which is that of Eternity. Eternity is not to be understood as endless Time. It is as distinct from Time as Time is from Space.
These poems are of course poor vessels for such a content, such an awareness of reality. They are liable to crack under the strain. But once one has had a glimpse of this, then nothing else that could ever go under the name of 'culture' is worth attempting.
(4) The End of Everything Had I died after producing Things as they are my poetic output would have had a pleasing aesthetic shape to it. As it is the first enthusiasm of encountering Orthodoxy has now, in this and in the succeeding collection, settled into something more mixed with other concerns, more complex and, perhaps, for that reason, more interesting.
(5) The Invisible Combat Although these don't indicate much of a change of mood from The End of Everything they do include a number of poems connecting with (or failing to connect with) the thinking of other people, notably Blake, Yeats and Geraldine McNeill, the dentist in Cushendall, who was also a rather extraordinary painter.