Carl Tomlinson reviews Eleanor Among The Saints by Rachel Mann (Carcanet, 2024)
As a child, I regularly attended my local church in a rural corner of Wiltshire. It’s safe to say that the guardians of the flower rota, the quietly devout churchwardens and the retired military men who read the Bible lessons would have been surprised – at least – to know that towards the end of their lives the Church of England would be ordaining a trans woman who writes poems about fucking. Rachel Mann also found the idea hard to fathom, telling Christian Today in 2014: “I know part of the reason I resisted for so long was the sense of how could God love someone who identified as a lesbian, who was trans. I had imbibed so much of that prejudice we see in the Church.”
Eleanor Among The Saints is – at times – as dazzling as an altarpiece, and as finely made as a work of Opus Anglicanum embroidery. It draws deeply, and productively, on Christian liturgy, especially the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (the official prayer book of the Church of England), and Christian imagery, in order to root faith in physicality.
The book has three sections. In the first, which gives the collection its title, Mann introduces us to, and re-imagines, the “fourteenth-century seamstress, embroiderer and sex worker” Eleanor ‘John’ Rykener. The opening poem, ‘Embroidering A Priest’, is almost a distillation of the book. It begins:
In the beginning, hem and line of thread,
A tug, a song of praise, arms raised orans-wise
Sanctus Sanctus Sanctus
Let those with ears hear: Love and love.
To make the first word of the collection “embroidering” is an interesting choice. When we talk about “embroidering the truth” we mean telling a story to the fullest, but perhaps not entirely realistically. Mann is explicit that she’s doing this with Eleanor’s story. But to embroider also means to create something with thread, so right from the start we feel the stitches of the transition surgery which will figure in later poems. By the end of the second line I was scrabbling for the dictionary, my cod-Latin insufficient to make sense of “orans-wise” (if you don’t have yours handy, it means ‘in an attitude of prayer’, picture the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio). Generosity is an often over-used word in the poetry world. I want to make the case here for Mann as a generous poet, not because of the fearlessness and clarity with which the poetry is imbued, but because of how the reader is trusted to do the work.
… dazzling as an altarpiece, and as finely made as a work of Opus Anglicanum embroidery
The end of this opening poem appears to prefigure the poet’s double journey of transition and ordination when the speaker tells us: “He shall know folds.” It’s a poem in (possibly unwitting) conversation with ‘The Husband Suit’ from Victoria Kennefick’s account of her husband’s gender transition in egg/shell (Carcanet, 2024):
And what now that a thread from the suit got caught,
and that it ripped right through the fabric from ankle to neck
and that it stopped my spinning
and made us see in the stillness
that you were no husband at all?
Further into this section, in ‘Is It A Surprise’, the surprise to me was something I’d perhaps only half-grasped before – that a theology which can insist on something so physically radical as transubstantiation (the doctrine that insists that the bread and wine of Holy Communion are the physical body and blood of Jesus Christ) might also find the concept of transgender people puzzling.
The second section, ‘Praise’, is in constant conversation with the Christian liturgy, the daily offices, and the church year. Some of its allusions may elude readers unfamiliar with these themes. On balance I think the poems draw from, rather than lean upon, them. And it’s not all liturgy and flourish. In ‘Domestic Chaplain’ the speaker is a child caring for a parent, quietly and patiently and very movingly. In The City Of God, St Augustine of Hippo contrasts the spiritual, eternal divine city with the physical earthly city of pleasure and the present. In ‘Ash Wednesday In The City Of God’, “A Cross glistens on a people’s heads” on the day Christians remember Christ (unique in the Abrahamic faiths as God in flesh and blood) beginning his forty days of endurance in the wilderness.
Faith gets more physical still in ‘Common Prayer’. The Gospel of St John says that the Word (of God) was made flesh (in Jesus) and dwelt among us. The poem links “hands” to “tongue” to “belly” to “flesh” as the speaker receives the Eucharist in person for what seems to be the first time since lockdown. Students of Anglicanism may note that the poem is called ‘Common Prayer’ rather than ‘Common Worship’, which is the current form of the broader liturgy and includes the Book of Common Prayer. There are sound, but not obviously unshakeable, poetic reasons for this; the poem quotes directly from, and alludes indirectly to, the Book of Common Prayer. More crucially, I think, the calling back to 1662 situates Mann’s faith and re-formed body in a reformed Church. One of the central precepts of the Reformation was that a person can find their own way to God, without the church getting in the way, as it once did for Mann. The poem opens with a reference to the Summary of The Law, an abridged version of the Ten Commandments, which says: “Love your neighbour as yourself”.
… the surprise to me was something I’d perhaps only half-grasped before – that a theology which can insist on something so physically radical as transubstantiation … might also find the concept of transgender people puzzling
This underscores how essential transition is to Mann’s faith. How can we love others if we don’t love ourself? That title, ‘Common Prayer’, also celebrates the return to in-person worship after the pandemic-era separation of other poems. In ‘Day Of Resurrection’, locked churches contrast with birdsong, and we wonder if Mann, like the Coleridge of ‘To Nature’, will build an “altar in the fields”. ‘The Feast of the Epiphany’ takes us to the aisles of a supermarket, where it gently and wittily pits the idea of something being revealed against the contrasting idea of
[…] mask time, all snoods and neckerchiefs,
Concealed noses, all the half-faces
Theme can become tyrannical in contemporary poetry collections. Here, the poem ‘Humble Access’, for all its virtuoso wordplay on BCP’s pre-communion prayer, and ‘Thou That Takest Away’, a prose poem based on the Kyrie Eleison, don’t do the heavy lifting of some of their companions.
The book’s final section is ‘A Charm to Change Sex’, which seems to live up to its epigraph:
Of all that God has shown me
I can speak just the smallest word
It looks at the poet’s emergent story from a third, more direct standpoint, and speaks unflinchingly of her surgery. Shedding the medieval embroidery, emerging from behind the playful reverential riffs on the liturgy, it’s a halting conversation with the self. It’s also an object lesson in ordering a collection. We can bear to face the physical pain and spiritual doubt of this section, we are patient with its loops of consciousness. We meet (in ‘Seven Proof Texts On A Transitioned Body’) the person “[b]ack in hospital for the final step” because “the penis does not yield to prayer”. We see a person trying to be happy. We journey with Mann, “into gaps where words won’t go / Not even pronouns” (from ‘After’).
Carl Tomlinson lives on a smallholding in Oxfordshire. He works as a business coach and virtual finance director. His work been published online, in anthologies, and in Orbis, South, The Hope Valley Journal and The Alchemy Spoon. His debut pamphlet Changing Places was published in 2021 by Fair Acre Press.
