Poetry knows the value of gods

`I don't love life as such; for me it begins to signify, that is to acquire weight and meaning only when it is transformed, that is - in art. If I were to be taken beyond the ocean, into Paradise, and forbidden to write, I would refuse the ocean and Paradise." So wrote the great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva in her essay, Art in the Light of Conscience.

The late Octavio Paz has this to say in his essay Alternating Current. "The difficulty of modern poetry does not stem from its complexity - Rimbaud is far simpler than Gongora or Donne - but rather from the fact that, like mysticism or love, it demands total surrender (and an equally total vigilance). If the word were not ambiguous, I would say that the nature of the difficulty is not intellectual, but moral."

Paz's reluctance to use the word moral is partly the reluctance of the poet to use an amorphous word, a word so general as to be rendered meaningless. Words such as "soul", "creativity" and "inspiration" present the same dilemma. They are the dangerous abstracts; vague, general and too often debased.

Such concepts need to be nailed to the particular without killing their mystery and value. It is part of the poet's trade to be able to distinguish the quotidian from the mundane. Yet we believe in the given or found poem.

I believe all art is an act of faith as much as despair. What is poetry but "words in search of the Word" as Paz says later in the same essay. Poets and artists use the symbols of their religion, whatever it may be, because they are powerful ciphers and reasonably universal in what they convey.

A good symbol is worth a book of abstraction. All the major religions use symbols to convey abstract ideas, or realities. As they used allegory.

A poet, on a certain level, does the same thing. Yet Yeats wrote of the soul as " . . . self-delighting, self-appeasing, self-affrighting", and we all know what he meant.

Although the priest and the poet might disagree profoundly as to the soul's form, shape or relevance, they would be discussing the same territory. Many poets believe even more fervently in miracles than priests or shamans.

The poet's language is often prayerful. The poet understands the nature of devotion and faith. But, unlike priests and theologians, they have no certainty. Poetry cannot allow platitudes and half truths. The real poet works in the service of truth and must go where that path leads.

There are times of spiritual anguish and, unfashionable as it is to speak of that nowadays, "the dark night of the soul". Poets work both in the light of the hell of human viciousness, and know the transforming power of human love. Where is God in all this? Perhaps it is on doubt that the artist is expert.

The relationship between art and religion, and religions, is often vexed and close. Whether we are talking about religion in its vibrant state, where faith flourishes, or the dead institution where the desperate place their last hopes, and are failed, there is still a connection.

Poetry knows the value of gods and their limitations. And religion, and the value of metaphor.

So where is the defining line? You could say it is a question of territory. That poems come from the same place as the mystic's vision. Or, as the Czech poet Miroslav Holub would remind us, the schizophrenic's dreams.

Be that as it may, art for the artist has the force of religion for the devout. Possibly even the fanatic.

But there is another sense in which religion directly inspires or involves the poet. The church provided sensual delight and definite structure, as well as concepts of innocence and its opposite, defined by Blake as experience. And artists have drawn on those, from Chaucer through the Metaphysical poets to the present day.

The same William Blake said that every true poet, wittingly or unwittingly, is on the devil's side. So poets are every bit as contradictory as scripture.

As for myself, I want the old God back. I want him to be stern and good and to keep everyone in line. I want to know that when people are cruel, even downright evil, he'll deal with them. I'd like a special little hot corner for people who sell weapons, and a room next door for the corporation members and county councillors who refuse to build public housing.

I'd pray to that God every night, watch four (admittedly rather dark and quattrocento) angels perch at each corner of my bed, and sleep far more soundly than I do now. I don't object to the gender difference, nor the white beard. I have no great objection to the devil. Even if he keeps the forked tail and the cloven hooves and the ability to come down at night as a great black cat ready to tear the flesh with claws of steel.

I'd bow my head at the sound of a high Communion bell and hear the Latin words that bring the living Christ into the church. I want to be seven years of age, on the brink of reason, and I must live out my life knowing that I will never feel that radiant feeling again.

The loss of that faith took years, but it was, and remains, the single most devastating experience of my life. It taught me the real meaning of the terms "grace" and "the Fall".

I see the Consecration as a metamorphosis but I used to believe it was a miracle.

Poetry, the reading and the writing of it, has a certain complex and not entirely obvious link with the search for lost radiance. But it is not a substitute religion. It is other, and the two cannot be confused.

The symbolism of the religion I was brought up in has given me a store of metaphor, wooden crosses to nail down abstract nouns. It was, at the very least, well defined. Full of muscular lines.

Each writer adds to that store as they grow and learn. My heaven has been replaced by a world, less male-centred essentially, with less certain gods, but also with slightly less room.

I write to make sense of my world and, perhaps occasionally, to transcribe a construct, a message, a glimpse of another dimension through a rent in the everyday. There is no guarantee. Unlike religion, poetry makes few promises.

Mary O'Malley's two recent books, The Knife in the Wave and Where the Rocks Float, are published by Salmon. £5.99 each.