The Poems of Rowan Williams, by Rowan Williams

This year, the new Archbishop of Canterbury may have the chance to shape national debate in a way that no holder of his office has done since the Abdication crisis of 1936. So people of all faiths, and no faith, need to know a little more about the surprising mind of Rowan Williams. His academic theology will stay a closed book to all but specialists. But his poetry – collected here from two previous volumes, with a handful of new works – opens windows on to a rich and restless imagination.

The strongest sounds passionate, challenging and unafraid, seeking signs of hope to release "the prisoners of a narrative/ of death and spoiling" from the bondage of the past. The weakest picks at its contradictions like a scab, half in love with its own intellectual gridlock, and too willing to find refuge in the fading grandeur of tradition. You might say the same about the church the poet leads.

"Earth is hard text to read" reads the opening of one of several fine translations here – a tribute to Protestant martyrs under the Third Reich by the Welsh poet, Waldo Williams. It could serve as a motto for Rowan Williams's verse. He writes as a lifelong scholar and interpreter, striving to decipher meanings embedded in places and people, in doctrines and events. In the hills outside Jerusalem, Williams finds "a country/ thick with scripts/ most won't read".

The most polished pieces wrestle liberating sense out of landscapes, artworks and lives: beloved scenery in Wales or the Holy Land; icons and paintings in Russia and Spain; the deaths of mentors and friends. These poems work best when erudition tangles with emotion – a poem about Cornish rain, wryly dedicated "in honour of Regional Water Companies", thunders that "Rain sours on the ruts of foresight, payment/ Salts it to piss ... "

Yet Williams's verse truly catches fire when history and humanity scribble over these lovely surfaces. In Jerusalem's Holy Sepulchre, an imperial architect designed "space for cool power to stroll" – but centuries of contact and conflict have cluttered the church with "Whorls, cavities, corners with don't-ask smells/ and fairground decoration". Williams's central belief in incarnation – "the bloody stubbornness/ of getting someone born" – means the embrace of mess, loss and unreadable confusion. Yet it leads also to the invincible maternal presence celebrated in "Altar to the Mothers", with its headscarved rank of working-class heroines "waiting for a bus/ To Ebbw Vale or Rotherham; bleak damp endurance of/ the never up-to-standard world".

Our sub-standard world ends in death, which in "Dream" becomes the poet's own. Distant bloodshed ("Sarajevo? somewhere like that") first prompts abstract theological musings at a "seminar on violence". Then, shockingly, war comes home to the dreamer in the guise of "a haze of wasps" that swarm in for the kill. Williams can soothe and smooth with art and thought. Yet he also knows when, and why, to sting.