> Kathleen Riley > Peter Stiles Case #75 - God and the University

Galilee

June 25, 2026

Galilee

Reviewer: Kathleen Riley

In the Introduction to Galilee, his third collection of poetry, Peter Stiles tells us that this compendium ‘represents the aggregation of so many observations, some casual and intriguing, others quite profound and moving. But that is what life is like, the keen observer picking up little things that might easily be passed over, while other matters are unavoidably significant.’ Stiles is describing an appreciation of what David Malouf called ‘the little sacraments of daily existence’ for which poetry speaks up, or what James Joyce defined as epiphanies: unexceptional moments that somehow have a radiance, an invitation to them. What lifts such moments out of the commonplace and into the realm of poetry and revelation? What is it that—to borrow a phrase from Robert Frost—shifts the plane of regard? In Stiles’s case, a deep and abiding Christian faith heightens the poetic sensibility that recognizes the radiance of the everyday, revels in its mystery and reveres its divinity. And so in the pages of Galilee we find delight and poignancy not only, as we might expect, in seasonal rebirth and diurnal rhythms—‘the first flush of jacaranda’ or ‘the lengthening lines of afternoon light’—but also in a crinkled docket in a Sydney street, recording the purchase of a modest treat, or the letter tiles of an evening game of Scrabble in a lakeside cottage, each suggestive to the author of familial love and of God’s unconditional love for humanity.

Stiles’s previous anthology was titled Surprised by Jack, a purposeful allusion to C. S. Lewis’s 1955 spiritual memoir, Surprised by Joy, in which Lewis recounts the story of his conversion from atheism to Christianity. For Lewis, joy lies at the heart of Christianity but it is a phenomenon he perceives as akin to the German word Sehnsucht, a profound yearning. It is ‘distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.’ As characterized by Lewis, joy is essentially a homeward quest, a nostos (the ancient Greek word for a return journey), compelled by a haunting longing and sustained by hope. In the poem ‘Birthday Greetings’, from the present volume (but composed for the launch of Surprised by Jack), Stiles reaffirms his affinity with Lewis: ‘Only time and space divide us, Jack / those fickle elements of life that smudge / our desire to know, to bond, converse, / as you did with your Oxford friends.’ What is more, a Lewisian joy—a joy of longing and hope—pervades Galilee, and is beautifully articulated in a poem such as ‘Lark Ascending’.

The title, of course, references Ralph Vaughan Williams’s famous ‘pastoral romance’ for violin and piano, composed on the eve of the Great War and first performed in the aftermath of that cataclysm. When reading the poem it is hard not to hear the lush, elegiac cadences of Vaughn Williams’s music. But, as with other poems in the collection, it is equally about hearing God’s music in the silence, in the ‘crafted stillness’, the spaces between; it is about letting ‘pure landscapes shine’ under the spell of silent rhapsodies.

The late, great Seamus Heaney was once asked in a television interview: ‘What’s it about, writing the best poetry you can?’ He replied: ‘It’s about redemption. It used to be called making your soul. … It’s a very curious experience, the writing of a poem or indeed the reading of [a poem]; you arrive at a place somehow that you foreknew.’ The poems of Galilee draw us into that uncanny experience. They communicate a nostalgic apprehension of the present, that is, a recognition of the beauty and melancholy of the passing moment, but also a strong sense that the longed-for Ithacan shore is a place foreknown.

Kathleen Riley is a writer and classical scholar whose publications include Imagining Ithaca: Nostos and Nostalgia Since the Great War and The Astaires: Fred & Adele.

Title image: View of the Sea of Galilee as seen from Gamla in the Golan Heights by Davidbena. Public Domain, commons.wikimedia.org