Brave New Book By Christchurch Poet Tackles Anglican Clergy Sexual Abuse

Jane Simpson’s new poetry collection Shaking the Apple Tree breaks open the taboo subject of sexual abuse by Anglican clergy and offers hope and healing to victims and survivors.

The poems pull no punches when it comes to exposing the grooming, the bungling by church leaders, the theology which shores up male power oven women, and the difficulty victims and survivors have had in securing justice.

It is now anticipated that change will follow the Final Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care, to be released on 26 June. But will it bring redress?

Ken Clearwater, Male Survivor Advocate, says: ‘Simpson’s courageous poems give victims a powerful voice, that will, in time, help them heal.’

The Rev. Louise Deans, author of Whistleblower, says: ‘I have burned with anger reading Shaking the Apple Tree. These poems should cause a bonfire in our hearts and minds, for this is the Church’s new story.’

Award-winning poets in New Zealand have written individual poems about sexual abuse. Simpson is the first to write a full-length collection, and has done so particularly about faith-based institutions. Poems range from the molten to the lyrical.

Internationally-acclaimed New Zealand poet, Dr Tracey Slaughter, says: ‘These are poems that dare to rage against a hidden “crucifixion”, to walk the unholy stations of hurt that women have encountered behind church doors, to tear away the ecclesiastical privilege that enshrined the abusers’ rights to silence, to honour the survivors who have risen from the wreckage and reconstructed their frail faith. They insist women’s bodies are sacred ground they will never surrender’.

With an historian’s eye, Simpson draws on evidence in witness statements to the Royal Commission to create poems that speak with unexpected power. Poetry and feminist theology are brought together in the context of sexual violence. Faith is redefined by women survivors, shaking the apple tree.

Prof. David Tombs, Centre for Theology and Public Issues, University of Otago, says:

‘Jane Simpson’s poetry speaks with compassion, honesty and sensitivity on the abuse crisis in faith institutions. This is a powerful and thought-provoking collection. Readers are likely to go back to reading these poems again and again’.

Penny Hale, Safeguarding and Risk Manager in the Diocese of Waiapu, says: ‘I wish I had had Jane Simpson’s poems before I redesigned my training course’.

Shaking the Apple Tree is available now in selected bookshops, and as an e-book and PDF.

Notes

Author: Jane Simpson

Title: Shaking the Apple Tree: poems in response to sexual abuse by clergy

in the Anglican Church

Publisher: Poiema Books

NZ release date: March 2024

Extent: 64p.

RRP: $25.00 (Paperback) or $10.00 for the EPUB and the PDF

ISBN: 978-0-473-70759-0 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-473-70760-6 (EPUB)

ISBN: 978-0-473-70762-0 (PDF)

About the author

Jane Simpson is an award-winning poet from Ōtautahi Christchurch. After working as a journalist, she gained a PhD (Otago) in religion and gender in New Zealand (1939-1959). In 1993 Simpson became the first tenured woman academic in Religious Studies at the University of Canterbury. She taught the Christian tradition and new approaches to it, including feminist theology and post-colonial studies. She gave lectures on sexual abuse and the abuse of power in faith-based institutions. She never expected to write a poetry collection on the subject.

Shaking the Apple Tree is Simpson’s fifth book of poetry and her third full-length collection. Environmental themes and art wove together in Candlewick Kelp (2002) and Tuning Wordsworth’s Piano (2019). A world without maps (2016) drew on her experience of teaching Muslim women English in a desert school in the UAE. She wrote and published The Farewelling of a Home (2021), a critically acclaimed liturgy created for people who lost their homes in the Christchurch earthquakes. Her fourth collection, Imagined Scar, about her breast cancer journey, is due out later in 2024.

Simpson won second place in the New Zealand Poetry Society’s 2023 International Competition and was placed third in 2020. She was highly commended in the Caselberg Trust 2020 and 2021 International Poetry Competitions. Her poems have appeared leading journals including Allegro, London Grip, Poetry Wales, Hamilton Stone Review, Meniscus, Catalyst, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook and takahē.

About the book

Simpson started to write Shaking the Apple Tree following the death in Christchurch of the Rev. Rob McCullough, a major perpetrator priest in the Anglican Church. Her poems broke the silence of the church authorities about his death, a silence which left victims and survivors hanging in limbo. For Simpson, as is the case for many women, sexual abuse is more than an academic subject.

The poems are both hard-hitting and empathetic. In capturing the horror experienced by victims and survivors when they called out for justice according to the Canons and Statutes of the Anglican Church, Simpson writes as an historian and as an Anglican committed to reform.

The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care is now due to present its final report on 26 June. Survivor advocates have argued that poetry and other creative approaches can bring healing and need to come beforehand as the final report could re-traumatise the many people who gave evidence.

Survivors of sexual abuse have welcomed Shaking the Apple Tree as overcoming their sense of isolation. Sexual abuse counsellors and safeguarding advisors say it is making a much-needed creative contribution in the field of health and wellbeing.

‘It is appropriate that the book ends with love poems to women who have been abused. For many people, that is unthinkable. For poetry, anything is possible’, Jane Simpson says.

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