Absences

Among the 20th century’s most significant English-language poets, Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is often regarded as one of literature’s great pessimists, a writer who described post-war Britain and the mores of modernity with a gloomy cynicism bordering on the fanatical. Dismissive of notions of God and religion, drawn to failures of human communication, he is a figure reluctantly moored to the meaninglessness of the quotidian. And yet, from such positions of despair, his poetry often reaches for the divine: he is also a soul in search of something beyond the seen, whose best poems reach for the numinous, celebrating moments of mystery and encounters with “unfenced existence”.

In a week of essays, five contemporary poets each take a short poem by Larkin as the starting point for an exploration into their own attitudes to faith, belief and the spiritual. In this second episode, the Northern Irish poet Sinéad Morrissey offers a lyrical essay on the lost Communist faith of her Belfast childhood, responding to Philip Larkin’s poem Absences.

Writer & reader: Sinéad Morrissey

Producer: Phil Smith

A Far Shoreline production for BBC Radio 3