The 'Faerie Queene Now’ project
One particular expression of Manchester Cathedral’s commitment to promoting fresh religious poetry is our participation in the ‘Faerie Queene Now’ project (2010—2011).
This is a national project seeking to draw on the inspiration of a great, somewhat neglected classic of English literature – Edmund Spenser’s 16th century epic the ‘Faerie Queene’ – amongst other things, as a prompt to fresh poetic creativity in the context of liturgy.
The immediate focus for this is St George’s Day, drawing on the reworking of the St George story in Book 1 of the Faerie Queene. But as St George’s Day in 2011 falls on Easter Saturday we’ve actually postponed our Cathedral celebration of it by a fortnight to 8 May 2011 at 17.30.
The event will feature fresh poetry by Andrew Motion, Jo Shapcott, Michael Symmons Roberts, Ewan Fernie and Andrew Shanks; set to a jazz accompaniment composed by Malcolm Creese and performed by the group Acoustic Triangle.
And it will also be the first outing of two new Catalan style processional ‘giants’: a George and a Dragon, to be made by an art group from the Booth Centre for the Homeless. These will be distinctively a Manchester version, based on the rather unconventional painting of the two figures on the reredos in the Cathedral’s Fraser Chapel by Mark Cazalet (2001).
