'Our Alleluias in a minor key/Speak of our sorrow in our frailty' writes Kevin Carey in How Shall We Be Joyful? Voicing a sentiment more typical of this collection than the line from one of his few major-key celebrations of Christmas chosen as title. In this extraordinarily lengthy forensic examination of the topic, a tour de force of over 230 works divided into five sections, there are less than joyful echoes of Betjeman's attempts to reconcile superficial secularity with intimations of the holy, Causley's graphic depictions of modern hostility and indifference to the incarnation, and the meditative unease of Eliot's wrongfooted Magi. However, in frank prefaces, Carey defends 'taking on something of a sombre tone' because of his confrontation of 'the projection of the events in Bethlehem towards Calvary.' In his ongoing, apparently obsessive, struggle to encapsulate in poetic form the theology of the incarnation, with reference to events from the fall to the resurrection, sombreness arises from a pervasive sense of the sin that makes Christ's suffering necessary: 'a nail in the manger and/thorns in/the hay.' Occasionally, a simpler joy emerges when Carey's restless soul-searching is overcome by surrender to wonder, as in the concluding lines of Old Austrian Hymn: 'This child exceeds all mystery/All creeds and all theology: /The logos in an infant's face.' His poems referencing the opening of St John's Gospel, such as IX. John I, from the carol service sequence The Infant King, are uniformly strong.
Carey's poetic enterprise is to provide new lyrics for contemporary composers so that carol singing, and Christmas itself, which he believes 'Christians are in danger of losing . . . In the wake of the loss of Easter' can survive. His best short poems find formal ways of unifying different aspects of the Christmas message while demonstrating mastery of the poetic forms typical of carols, metrical accomplishment and competent rhyming. Carey explores the incarnation from every conceivable perspective, repeatedly revisiting the perspectives of Mary, the shepherds and the wise men, yet, more originally, voicing entities such as the stars in the heavens and the manger. He reimagines Christmas with contemporary references to the Middle East conflict, the refugee crisis, urban poverty, global warming, journalism and technology: in Cloud, the Angel Gabriel appeals: 'Make Jesus viral! Now!'

While the poems in each section of the volume are broadly sequenced to reflect the order of the biblical events they refer to, there is no thematic index, which will make finding a poem for an occasion like a carol service time consuming. Carey advises us that his poetry is taking a new direction in longer poems: the discursive expansiveness of Winters is informed by an exciting breadth of reference, sweeping across cultures, time and space. Freedom from the constraint of writing with an eye and ear to the conventions of the carol has given Carey licence to explore the multiple meanings of Christmas he has long sought to condense with new energy and authenticity.

Singing in carol services as a teenager was one of the keys to the emergence of my Christian faith. Sophisticated reflections on the incarnation from centuries of European thinking were offered in a way that was completely unavailable elsewhere in the humdrum world of church attendance. The author of this collection of Christmas poems, the fruit of a decade's writing, attributes some of his inspiration to his experience as a singer, and offers his work as a source to contemporary composers. Indeed some of this verse is already to be found in the Oxford Book of Flexible Carols (OUP 2009). Reading the poems, one can certainly detect among their inspiration themes and symbolism familiar from the repertoire of the Oxford Book of Carols and Carols for Choirs.

Carey's poems are drawn from the full breadth of the Christmas experience, from the manger to the shopping centre. They do not shirk the difficult: indeed the compiler of a 'blue Christmas' service would do well to read the section entitled 'Now', a complex of ten short poems constituting a meditation on much that is challenging for so many about Christmas as we now experience it. As a reflection on the scriptural passages associated with carol services, the eleven poems that constitute 'The Infant King' offer a ready-made set of reflections to support those looking for something that seems traditional, yet newly challenging. A variety of black and white drawings by Kevin Sheehan add to the charm of this eminently usable volume.

Although Carey tends to use the traditional rhyme and meter, even a somewhat traditional vocabulary, on occasion he comes up with some delightfully fresh perspectives: the Infant Jesus adored not only by ox and ass in the stable, but by koalas, kangaroos and wombats in the Australian outback; by enslaved people in the sugar plantations of the colonial Caribbean, who recognize in the Incarnation a story of the downtrodden and abused with whom they can identify; Mary as envisioned in Indian and Japanese cultures. ... [This book] might be a valuable resource for choirmasters and clergy since, even without fresh compositions, many of these poems could be set to tunes already available.