POETRY: EAMON GRENNANreviews Frightening New Furniture, By Kevin Higgins, Salmon Poetry, 95pp, €12; The Last Falcon and Small Ordinance, By Paul Perry, Dedalus Press, 90pp, €12 and Invitation to a Sacrifice,By Dave Lordan, Salmon Poetry, 124pp, €12
WITH BACKSTAGE guardians in Paul Durcan (see his titles) and Patrick Kavanagh, Kevin Higgins’s work has a buoyant spoken immediacy (often taking the form of dramatic monologues), his poems springing out of colloquial address and celebrating the ordinary through a use of quotidian bric-a-brac, which he often pits – with positive effect – against larger (but no more important) forces. Many of his poems are lively performances, crammed with contemporary cultural references. In addition he is able to strike more muted emotional notes (as in a fine poem for his mother). He has a shrewd eye for the telling detail, matched by a decisive self-awareness. He’s a satirist with heart and humour, mixing autobiography with a sharply critical sense of the public world. In his biographical (fictional or factual) journey from radical revolutionary street idealist to zones of liberal middle class comfort (“My face/ the poster for a failed revolution”), he rigs a bonfire of Celtic Tiger vanities into a comico-satirical documentary montage.
Some of his best work is in small biographical vignettes, seeing the past through a glass clearly, or recalling the anorak angst of Days("Whatever happened to alienation?"). His poems are like world-ranging word documentaries – speedy and to the point. In this vigorous elimination of "my old political furniture" he sends outdated radical agendas up in smoke. Comedy is part of his poetics, and what I especially like in his work is its swiftness of wit, its tone of buoyant contrarianism and jubilant disappointment, how he is a cocky, wisecracking inhabitant of "Angryville".
Sometimes, however, for all his inventively good-humoured extravaganzas, or his sometimes surreal touch with metaphor and simile, the fun can fall a bit flat, endings can pall, the satire can get a bit bland, while attempts at form in some poems tend not to rise above the level of workshop exercises. I’d hazard, too, that some authorial and/or editorial pruning would have made this a stronger, more streamlined volume.
"Speak./ Say something./ You can still be healed", is how the first poem in The Last Falcon and Small Ordinanceends. Paul Perry's commitment to such injunctions marks his best work, along with his meditative pace and tone, his carefully regulated, lucid essays at emotional truths. In what is often a bleak visionary air, Perry creates a poetry of hope, dragging himself up by "memory's shoelaces" with "words like love and peace", remaining a little distance from passionate engagement, yet pulsing quietly with feeling. A number of short, intense personal narratives, especially Visiting Hoursand To the Book of Kells(prompted by the plight of a brother), achieve a pitch of quiet hallucination, and are among the strongest and most impressive of the collection. In certain poems, we're told the speaker – in the midst of odd happenings that generate a dizzy dance of action – sees life as "a series of events that happened to me", but that out of random happenings a self is somehow made. The aesthetics of the collection, too, reflect a similar sense of assembling a kind of order from happenstance.
When Perry’s minor key surrealism invades poems without genuine emotional need or ignition they are less successful. At times, too, the rhetoric can become inflated, with phrases such as “the ruin of our hearts/ memory’s wreckage”. Sometimes the nature of a gapped narrative remains too enigmatic for deciphering, the poet’s rhetoric of fragments lacking the emotional conviction of the plainer narratives. Among these latter, especially successful is the title poem, a brief, intense, plainspoken narrative, rich in tangible detail, dealing with the mysteriously disappeared early American settlement of Roanoke. A couple of lines from it might be taken as an epigraph for much of Perry’s best work: “I see too how history cannot map// whatever losses the heart has held”.
Dave Lordan's new collection bristles with satiric energy and a richly varied vocabulary of attack that, at its best, is morally pointed and comically exuberant, converting anger into a performative language of wide cultural reference and rhythmic power. Like any conscientious objector, Lordan's contrarian stance questions the culture (Irish as well as global) he lives in, implicating himself by his use of pronouns ("our", "us", "we") in the general rot. I'm startled, then satisfied, by the speed, scatological diction and kaleidoscopic image-making of a poem such as Funeral City Passeggiata. Pieces such as Invisible Horsesor Spite Specificreveal, too, the positive emotional side reinforcing Lordan's satire. There's a remarkable energy at work here, impatient of shibboleths and sacred cows, while indifferent to conventional lyric effect.
Let go on, losing focus, some of Lordan’s pieces become just stand-up routines: the poem on automatic, not outliving its own jokey cleverness. At times, too, the poems degenerate into mere lists of peeves or hates. Another drawback of the collection is that it’s over-packed with too many poems. A sharper editorial and/or authorial eye would have trimmed the whole thing down (omitting, for example, the section of prose pieces, which simply cloud the general effect). At times, too, it’s hard to determine what exactly the enemy is – a sharper sense of the sniper rather than the blunderbuss nature of good satire would serve him well.
The long final poem, however, A Resurrection in Charlesland, is a bravura showpiece, working brilliantly on the page, as it must in performance. In it, Lordan breathlessly turns his head-on rant against our late but not lamented Celtic Tiger into powerful polemic, letting the rush of linguistic mayhem (Swiftian and Joycean riffs recur) be the proper metaphor for an anarchic state of things that's mostly (by conspiracy and public collusion) hidden from sight, For all its differences of register and verbal manners, this poem might claim a place beside the poems of Kavanagh's satiric period and Kinsella's Nightwalker. Like them, it is an act of creative resistance to a suspect status quo, a resistance which Lordan correctly sees as part of poetry's business.
New collections (for each their third) by three Irish poets, each with its own voice, its own way of wrestling with the language, its own decisive view of the world. One of my pleasures in reading them was the sense each one gave of the ways in which poetry can engage immediately or indirectly with public facts, as well as with the private forces (of feeling, intelligence, talent, sense of form, love of language, and so on) which determine its expression. Each volume, so, is political in one way or another, embodying (as each poet struggles privately with the language) some decisive attitude to larger and smaller aspects of Irish life as it is right now, and as it has been in our recent past. Between them they suggest the instructive, positively agitating intersection between poetry and its cultural contexts.
Eamon Grennan’s most recent Irish collection is Out of Breath. A New Selected Poems has just been published in the US
