Published: 2023

Publisher: Canterbury Press

In ‘The Vanishing Song’ Jay leaves the city streets found in ‘The Backwater Sermons’, and searches for the wildness of medieval Christianity.

Here death and resurrection are so intertwined that the borders between life and death become meaningless and decay becomes another kind of life, familiar and forgotten saints speak, forests overtake the churches, and ancient bones rise from the earth. These poems are a call to an older, stranger, form of faith; full of creeping greenery and roaring seas, where death is the only certainty, and the conquering of death through resurrection is the only promised victory.

"The Vanishing Song is an astonishing collection, at the same time humorous and tender, joyous and sensitive, exploring aspects of the divine from a deeply human perspective." - Joanne Harris

"Jay makes the numinous real" - Dr Nicolete Burbach

"This collection is populated by saints in whom prayers grow like forests, whose hearts are rewilded, who dream of rain, who light fires in the darkness and hope God will find them there. Jay Hulme is the intimate of them all, leading us across sea, land and sky to meet them. Here cups miraculously never run dry, and the bodies of dead saints spread glory as they are returned to the soil, making the whole earth a cathedral of the kind that Hulme famously loves. These shatteringly beautiful poems testify that life, death and resurrection are always tightly entangled, and that God will persist after all the stones and bones have crumbled." - Susannah Cornwall, Professor of Constructive Theologies, University of Exeter, UK

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