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As you know, St Mary’s has one of Oxford’s most famous landmarks – a dreaming spire – which is admired around the world. In his poem ‘Thyrsis’ (1865) Matthew Arnold called Oxford ‘That sweet city with her dreaming spires, / She needs not June for beauty’s heightening’ in admiration and delight of the stunning architecture of the University buildings. But at St Mary’s we like to think that our tower was the true inspiration for the bard’s words; it would have been one of the few he could have seen clearly from Boars Hill.
There is also another very famous landmark building in Oxford – Headington’s Shark House – which hosts a 25-foot fibreglass shark sticking out of its roof. Over the years this installation, ‘Untitled 1986’ by the artist John Buckley, has drawn much attention and much controversy. The owner of the Shark House, the famous local radio presenter Bill Heine, said that the shark appeared in the night of 9th of August 1986 ‘to express someone feeling totally impotent, desperate and angry’. At the time it was an attempt by Bill to say something about ‘CND, the cold war, Chernobyl and Nagasaki’. I am not sure that Oxford Council and his neighbours shared the same enthusiasm for this vast fishy rooftop statement. But if you come to St Mary’s this evening at 7.30pm you can hear from Bill himself about the impact the sculpture has had in his life and the life of city. Who knows if in this current atmosphere of global political upheaval, marches and public protest the skyline of Oxford will be open to receiving more dynamic, quirky installations?
The Revd Charlotte Bannister-Parker
Acting Priest-in-charge
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| | Services
—Tuesdays & Thursdays at 12.15pm
Lunchtime Eucharist —
Sunday 29th January Epiphany 10.30am - Choral Eucharist
Preacher - Revd Charlotte Bannister - Parker Music: Howells, Communion Service (Collegium Regale)
Frederick Candlyn, Thee we adore
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| | | | | | | | | | | Forthcoming Concerts & Other Events
Check out our website and Facebook pages for more events.
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| | | Poetry Corner
You Know the Way
You know the way how, crossing Central Park,
trying to get to the West Side from the east
or to the East Side museums from the west,
you stray offline –
I’ll start again. You know the way how,
driving into Millstreet, you must decide
at the top of Lislehane whether to go
west to Balllydaly or east to Coalpits –
I’ll start one last time: you know the way
how, when you get the Oxford Tube, you
must decide whether to get off at Notting Hill
or stay on till Marble Arch or Victoria –
Well, that is how it is at this stage of things:
no right or wrong way, not much turning
on which you choose, or how far the decision
will take you from the straight and narrow.
Bernard O'Donaghue
Bernard O’Donaghue read this poem last week in the TS Eliot Prize readings, in which he (poet and translator, who came to the University Church not so long ago to speak about anger in poetry) was shortlisted for his book The Seasons of Cullen Church (Faber, 2016). It is a seemingly tentative, faltering invocation which gains a sort of negative momentum; the only confidence we have, by the end of the poem, is in not knowing. O’Donaghue draws the reader into his confidence, inviting specificity and local knowledge; does he ‘start again’ because he realises his own experience of Central Park is more personal than we can identify with, or because the Oxford Tube analogy is ultimately more specific? It is a fine poem about our personal context and hesitation.
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