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On the floor in front of me are forty pages of unpublished prose and poetry, all scattered and disorderly. The only part that can be easily set in place is the preface, a single typed page signed 'Kathleen Raine':
With all the current talk of women and their part in society, there is one age-old vocation seldom spoken of unless abandoned - that of the nun. There have been nuns in every civilised society, and long before Christianity - women who have passionately desired to enter a life devoted wholly to God.
The scattered pages are the remnants of a semi-poetic autobiography, written by the nun-poet Sister Mary Agnes and left behind after her death. Raine's preface probably dates from 1978, and the work itself seems to have been written between November 1976 and Januar y 1978, after Agnes's breakdown, suicide attempt and abandonment of the convent, and after she had published her final book.
Agnes's literary legacy is a humble one. She published just three slim volumes, Daffodils In Ice in 1972, No Ordinar y Lover in 1973, and A World of Stillnesses in 1976. She opened her poetical career with:
Frost, moon, snow - silent fall, soul-musical.
Christ's hand, outstretched to bless,
sheds silver over all.
His scars, his ring - his marriage band
are daffodils
in ice.
That first collection consists of only thirty-five short poems printed in a pamphlet of twenty pages. All of the poems are tight, controlled, beautifully still and precise. And, surprisingly for such a slim debut from a small press, Daffodils in Ice bore a celebrity foreword, written by Elizabeth Goudge, the popular author best-remembered for her children's books:
Sister Mary Agnes, while still a young woman, is an enclosed nun who looks at the glory of the world only from the garden of the Monaster y of Poor Clares where she lives, or through the window of her cell. Yet what she can see in a leaf flattened against the windowpane, in a snowflake or the flight of a bird, is comparable to what Dame Julian of Norwich saw when she held a hazelnut in the palm of her hand.
Daffodils in Ice was published on Norman Hidden's Workshop Press the same year in which Hidden...