Reading through all of Siew-Yue books over the last week, I was struck by two very unusual things.  One is that she published all her poetry herself: the Grevatt & Grevatt imprint was her creation, and she handled every aspect of it.  The other is that the same poems often recur in different books.  Even in her Northumbrian Passion Play – which was perhaps her masterpiece – there are passages that are in fact poems written and published earlier.

            Some might say the self-publishing was faute de mieux: to find a commercial publisher willing to publish poems of such directly Christian inspiration as Siew-Yue’s would not be easy these days.  Those same cynics might say that the re-cycling of old material was almost lazy: something that an academic running out of steam might do in his articles and lectures.

            But I don't think of either the self-publishing or the re-cycling in this way, and I want in this short talk to tell you why.

            Think of a house – maybe quite an old house, like the one I am lucky to live in in Riding Mill, with many rooms, and an accumulation of possessions from different generations and places.  Think of someone – or a married couple, like Dermot and Siew-Yue – living in the house for a long time, gradually improving it, changing it, rearranging it to their need and liking.  I think Siew-Yue’s poetry was like a house: her house, that she wanted to be an expression of her life and feelings.  There should not be any other publisher than herself, any more than would want someone else to come in and start arranging one’s own house.  Older poems would be re-used, just as one might move ornaments or pictures round the house: placing them in different rooms, to suit different phases of one’s life.

            Siew-Yue’s house had many rooms.  If one includes her activities other than poetry, there were many more still.  But I want to think about the house of her poetry.  What was it like?  What were its main rooms?  In which room did she feel most fully herself?

            There was considerable variety.  Poems about her childhood in Malaya and her memories of the occupation.  Poems about the North-East.  Poems about wars, most recently the Iraq war that horrified her so much.  Poems about birds.  Poems about love and marriage and old age and death.  But absolutely central to her writing – the room that she returned to again and again – was the Easter Cycle: the Passion and Crucifixion and Entombment and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Yes, there are poems about other days in the Christian year – Christmas, Pentecost, Remembrance Sunday.  But her poetry and her faith revolved, year after year, round Easter.  No other poet in English has written Easter Cycles like she did, and probably no other poet will.

            Characteristically, the last poems that Dermot found at her bedside are another Easter Cycle, though not yet named as such, beginning with her wonderful poem on Ash Wednesday 2004, in memory of her flute-teacher Martin Shillito, in which ‘The risen Word moves me still/To listen again for my cold calling.’

            ‘My cold calling’.  A phrase so typical of Siew-Yue.  Read those last poems, and you will find that word ‘cold’ being used over and over again.  I think it was her favourite word.  What did she mean by it?  It seems paradoxical.  Siew-Yue wasn’t cold: she was the absolute opposite of cold – she was vital, warm, excitable, full of exuberant energy. 

            Think of that house again, and think of the Easter Cycle, and the tomb as the central room in the house.  That is the place where we all must go.  In organising and rearranging the house over the years, Siew-Yue was trying to give more and more priority to that room, to its coldness and stillness and silence.  But only so that a resurrection would be possible.  It was the sine qua non.  No warmth without cold.  No life without death.

            Now that she has gone, entered that tomb herself, I think of the future of her poetry as her resurrection.  She did not perhaps live long enough to arrange the rooms in the house so that her best poems shone out to their fullest effect.  But she left all that we need to achieve that.  An arrangement and selection can, I think, be made that will come close to her aims.  It will be made, I have no doubt of that.

            When that has been done, then indeed her ‘final silence will be no more than a bar’s rest’ – as in her great poem, ‘Singing Practice’, which we shall hear very shortly.

And the house of her poetry will become what she above all wanted it to be:

A house of quiet prayer,

A refuge for all nations.