Before My Actual Heart Breaks

In The Vanishing Song, poet Jay Hulme goes in search of what is all but lost in contemporary faith, the ‘beautiful and holy and wild’ way of the saints, and the alluring, perplexing mystery of the places they chose for themselves – forests, caves, rocky outcrops in the sea. Here death and resurrection are so intertwined that the borders between life and death become meaningless and decay becomes another kind of life, familiar and forgotten saints speak, forests overtake the churches, and ancient bones rise from the earth. Revelling in the untamed nature of creation and the holiness that is to be found there, these poems are a call to an older, stranger, form of faith; full of creeping greenery and roaring seas, where death is the only certainty, and the conquering of death through resurrection is the only promised victory.