David Henry, This Sword: Poems. 2026. ISBN 979-8-9971801-0-2. 30 pp. Digital edition. Download This Sword from Payhip

There is something unfashionable about David Henry’s This Sword, and I mean that almost entirely as praise. These are poems about God which are actually about God. Christianity does not appear as cultural background, childhood memory, political metaphor or an opportunity for the poet to explain why he no longer believes in it. Christ is not reduced to a vaguely admirable ethical teacher. He heals the sick, raises Lazarus, dies upon the Cross and rises bodily from the dead. At the end, He comes again in judgement. That ought not to seem remarkable in Christian poetry. Nowadays, perhaps, it does.

Henry’s collection is short — eighteen poems occupying scarcely thirty pages — but it is surprisingly ambitious. It begins somewhere close to Creation and Eden in “Drift”, moves through David, Jacob and the Incarnation, then concentrates increasingly upon the earthly life of Christ. The centre of gravity is unmistakably the Passion and Resurrection. From there it moves towards Revelation and the restoration of creation. The sequence consequently has something of the shape of Scripture itself. It begins with a garden and ends with a garden restored.

The epigraph gives us fair warning. Before the first poem Henry quotes Revelation 10:7: “the mystery of God should be finished”. What follows is not quite a retelling of the Bible. It is an attempt to enter its mysteries imaginatively.  That distinction matters. Biblical poetry can very easily become versified paraphrase. Henry is after something stranger.

The most immediately striking feature of This Sword is how physical it is. Christianity is often presented today as though it were essentially a collection of opinions. Henry’s Christianity has bodies. People sweat. Christ bleeds. Mary feels the unborn Christ kicking inside her. Lazarus’s joints crack as life returns to them. The man who nails Christ to the Cross feels His blood upon his hands. Jacob wrestles bodily with God and leaves with his hip permanently damaged. The risen Christ still bears His wounds. Even the divine tends to arrive through physical sensation: heat, blood, water, stone, linen, sand and light.

This is particularly effective in “Bright in Bethlehem”, which speaks in Mary’s voice. Henry refuses the sanitised Nativity of Christmas cards. Mary remembers

“his little feet push push against me”

before birth, and then the pain of childbirth itself. Christ’s birth is miraculous, but it remains birth. God has entered the world through a woman’s body. That seems to me an authentically Christian instinct. The Incarnation becomes much less startling if we allow ourselves to turn it into an abstraction. Christianity instead makes the extraordinary assertion that the eternal Logos became a particular human being who occupied space, became hungry and could be touched. Henry keeps returning to that scandalous physicality. And it becomes darker as the collection approaches Calvary.

“Nail” is one of the shortest poems and perhaps one of the strongest. The speaker appears to be the man driving the nail through Christ’s hand. There is no theological discourse. There is simply the action: the raised hammer, the iron, the wound and Christ’s reaction to it. What makes the poem disturbing is its ordinariness. Crucifixion was someone’s day’s work.

Henry has the executioner remember Christ’s blood as

“warm smooth on my hands.”

That is an unpleasantly intimate image. Christian art has made the Crucifixion so familiar that it is possible to forget what crucifixion actually involved. Henry briefly makes it disgusting again. That is useful.

Seeing Christ Through Other Eyes

A device running throughout the collection is the adoption of biblical or imagined witnesses. We encounter David in “Stump”, Mary Magdalene in “Magdala”, Lazarus, Jacob and several less easily identifiable figures. Sometimes Henry invents people who might have stood at the edge of the Gospel narratives.

This works especially well in “Linens”. Its narrator is apparently one of the soldiers involved in Christ’s execution. He receives Christ’s seamless garment when the soldiers cast lots for it and takes it home. The garment then ceases to be an object in a biblical story and becomes part of an ordinary household. His children discover it:

“They draped His linens over themselves
making funny faces together chasing each other around”

The juxtaposition is rather beautiful. They do not know what they are playing with. Their father scarcely understands it either. Yet something remains. The garment passes from the horror of Calvary into domestic life. Children sleep beneath it for warmth. Years later the old soldier, sick in bed, remembers the crucified man and begins to weep. This is probably my favourite poem in the collection because Henry resists explaining it. The soldier does not suddenly deliver a confession of Christian faith. There is no tidy conversion scene. He simply remembers. Christ has remained with him for decades, like the garment stored at the foot of his bed. Theologically, this makes considerable sense. Grace often precedes understanding.

A similar method operates in “Break Sagittal”, in which a disabled man encounters Christ. Here Henry captures something which conventional religious language often loses: the sheer strangeness that the historical Jesus must have possessed for those who encountered Him. The healed man eventually looks upon Christ and thinks:

“My God so young!”

It is a wonderful little moment. Christian iconography has accustomed us to a Christ who seems somehow outside ordinary age. Yet the Jesus who travelled through Galilee was a young man. The exclamation collapses the distance between icon and flesh. God is standing there, and He looks young.

Lazarus and the Abolition of Death

The same physical imagination gives “Lazarus” much of its force. Henry does not merely tell us that Lazarus rises. He imagines what returning to one’s body might feel like. Lazarus hears the stone moving. Christ’s command reaches him muffled through the tomb. His corpse begins awkwardly to obey:

“one more shuffle my joints cracking free limber muscles”

This is resurrection without sentimentality. Lazarus does not float elegantly from his grave. A dead body has started working again.

Yet the poem gradually expands beyond the physical miracle. Death becomes

“a lie told to little children at night”

and the imagery moves from tomb to harvest, fruit and music. Henry’s recurring trees, figs and growing things are important here. Resurrection is not merely reversal. It is fertility returning to creation.

This helps explain the collection’s apparently obsessive recurrence of water, fruit, trees, stones and gardens. Henry’s biblical world is organic. Creation is damaged by the Fall but remains pregnant with restoration. The collection therefore begins to reveal more structural coherence than one might initially suspect.

The Sword

The title poem comes relatively late, and it is visually the most experimental piece in the book. Words are scattered across the page, separated by great spaces, while stars divide its movements. It looks fractured before one begins reading it.  The sword is plainly not primarily a weapon of steel. It is the Word.

Henry writes:

“His word
a sword”

and this suddenly illuminates much of what came before. The book has repeatedly associated divine speech with physical action. Christ says come out, and Lazarus emerges. He commands the storm. The Word enters Mary’s body. Creation itself seems to emerge through speech. The sword therefore cuts because truth cuts.

This also prevents the collection from collapsing into a merely therapeutic Christianity. Henry’s Christ comforts, certainly, but He is not safe. The title poem speaks of justice being “hammered down”. “Return” is even less accommodating. The returning Christ is associated with wrath, judgement, trumpet and sword.

There is an obvious echo here of the Christ of Revelation, whose Word destroys falsehood and restores creation. Henry refuses the modern temptation to separate Christ the loving Saviour from Christ the Judge. That refusal gives the collection some backbone.

The World Restored

One of the more interesting things about This Sword is that judgement does not culminate in desolation. In “Return”, Christ comes with terrifying power, but behind the rider the desert begins to change:

“the desert behind him pushing up lush forest budding
the lilies fragrant soft”

This is crucial. The purpose of judgement is restoration.

The last poem, “Unspoken”, brings the collection full circle. The imagery of fruit, seeds, stone, garden and food returns. Emmaus appears; so does the risen Christ cooking fish beside the water. The Word that seemed buried has escaped:

“the word released spilling forth over earth
the trees nourished again”

The Edenic imagery of “Drift” has returned, but transformed by everything that has happened between Creation and Resurrection.

The final image is wonderfully modest. After cosmic upheaval, resurrection and apocalypse, Christ is beside a little fire on a beach, preparing food.

“let us eat His word
fresh forever”

I like this very much. Christianity contains both apocalypse and breakfast. The God who breaks death also cooks fish.

The Roughness of the Poetry

I should say something about Henry’s style because it will probably divide readers. These are not conventionally polished poems. Punctuation is frequently absent. Sentences run into each other. Pronouns change direction. Biblical images collide before the previous image has quite settled. Grammar is sometimes deliberately unstable. At moments the reader may wonder whether a line break is doing syntactical work or merely visual work.

There are places where I would have preferred greater restraint. Henry occasionally piles image upon image until an individually powerful metaphor loses some of its force. “Circle”, for instance, throws Moses, Aaron, David, Solomon, the Sphinx, Eden, Abraham, angels, vultures, rocks, salt and desert temptation into a single visionary field. Some readers will find the accumulation exhilarating; others may wish that several of the images had been allowed more room.

Yet it would be a mistake simply to “correct” these poems into neat English verse. Their breathlessness is part of their character. Henry writes biblical experience as something occurring too quickly for ordinary syntax to contain it. One perception crashes into another. Past and present overlap. The Old Testament leaks into the New. Physical reality leaks into vision. The result sometimes resembles a stream of consciousness passing through Scripture. And at its best it works remarkably well.

“Carrion Blood”, for example, is compressed almost to breaking point. The Crucifixion becomes cosmic catastrophe:

“nothing can prepare you when the cosmos crack”

The grammatical violence suits the event. A perfectly balanced sentence would almost be wrong. This is poetry interested less in describing religious belief than in reproducing religious vision.

A Strange and Serious Little Book

What I admire most about This Sword is that David Henry takes Christianity seriously enough to let it remain strange. Modern Christian art often suffers from one of two problems. It can become sentimental, offering a Christ whose principal purpose is to reassure us that we are already perfectly satisfactory. Or it can become embarrassed by its own supernatural claims and quietly translate Resurrection, miracle and judgement into metaphors for psychological wellbeing. Henry does neither. His Christ really does raise Lazarus. He really does rise from the tomb. Mary Magdalene encounters something she cannot explain. Jacob really wrestles with God. The Word really possesses the power to remake creation.

Yet Henry’s supernaturalism does not make the poems less human. Oddly, it makes them more so. The miracles matter precisely because they happen to bodies: Mary’s exhausted body, Lazarus’s stiffened limbs, Jacob’s injured hip, the punctured hands of Christ.

I suspect that is why the repeated imagery of wounds matters so much. The risen Christ does not discard His wounds. In “Just Another”, the speaker touches the resurrected flesh and discovers that

“your body remembers it is You.”

That may be the theological centre of the entire collection. Resurrection is not replacement. The body remembers. Christian salvation, in Henry’s poetry, does not mean escaping creation. It means creation healed without ceasing to be itself. The wounds remain identifiable, but death no longer owns them.

There are poems here that I think work better than others. “Linens”, “Nail”, “Lazarus” and “Bright in Bethlehem” strike me as particularly successful because their human situations give Henry’s visionary language something solid against which to push. Elsewhere the sheer density of biblical imagery can threaten to overwhelm the poem. But this is a criticism of excess rather than deficiency. I would much rather read a young collection attempting too much than one carefully attempting nothing.

This Sword has conviction. More importantly, it has imagination. Henry has not simply decorated familiar Christian propositions with line breaks. He has tried to imagine what those propositions would actually mean if they were true: what it might feel like to hear Christ outside your tomb, to watch Him die, to discover His clothing in your children’s hands, or to stand before the man who has just given you legs with which to stand. The answer is not always comfortable. Nor should it be.

The sword in these poems is ultimately the Word itself: creative, incarnate, crucified, resurrected and returning. It cuts through the comfortable distance between the biblical world and ours. Sometimes Henry’s poetry is rough enough to cut with it.

That seems an appropriate achievement for a collection called This Sword.

Bibliographical Details

Henry, David. This Sword: Poems. 2026. 30 pp. ISBN 979-8-9971801-0-2. Digital edition.

The collection contains eighteen poems: “Drift”, “Bright in Bethlehem”, “Resurrection”, “Stump”, “Magdala”, “Break Sagittal”, “The Cover”, “Circle”, “Just Another”, “Carrion Blood”, “Lazarus”, “The Word Remains”, “Nail”, “Linens”, “This Sword”, “The Winds”, “Return” and “Unspoken”.

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