POETRY:WIDELY PRAISED for the witty, engaged, humorous qualities of his first book, Iggy McGovern extends his lightness of touch in this second collection, Safe House(Dedalus Press, 86pp, €11.50), to decisively serious matters.
Celebrant of his own serio-comic "sacraments" (composing not only an ode to a green shopping bag but also many riffs on remembered moments), he can also edge into a darker, more elegiac, meditative zone – in affecting poems about his parents as well as in a series called "Letters from the Captain" (which in skilful bursts becomes a late big-house novel in miniature). This seriousness can take a political turn, too, touching the complexities of his growing up in the North. Child of Prague, for example, remembers a statue on a window sill, and the collusion of religion and violence:
Patron saint of the safe house
you turned a deaf ear to the screech
of tyres late into the night,
vestments cloaking armalite,
orb, a hand grenade.
I like such encounters with the darker side, as well as those moments where the verse achieves lyrical lift-off, as in an elegy called The Mower("Look, he's back in the seat, / trailing clouds of Sweet Afton; / for the second, sweet cut"). And I relish a poem called The Irish Poem Is– a tour de force making good allusive fun of a category that's been used and abused in various critical posturing.
Throughout Safe HouseMcGovern is a light-fingered formalist, as his many well-tempered variations on the sonnet demonstrate. But the colloquial ease with which he handles his subjects insists that this formality is never too "poetical", never an attempt to elevate the importance of himself or his particular take on the world.
Sometimes the poems seem too mild or merely playful for their own good, and the book would have a sharper point without the near-formulaic competence of certain pieces. Yet there’s an undeniable generosity about McGovern’s imaginative world that allows even his few damp squibs to find their place. Light, rarely lightweight, McGovern’s voice is very much his own, and his take on his present and remembered worlds is, at its best, unaffectedly honest, instructive and entertaining.
While Iggy McGovern's voice maintains its genial, careful, almost tender air even through what he calls "my irony's dull ache", in Matthew Sweeney's freshly selected volume, The Night Post(Salt Publishing, 173pp, £12.99) we get the sense from the opening pages of an edgier habit of speech: sharply knowing, well informed, brimming with opinions. "I have seen through all. / I am excess": Sweeney's early work, especially, is marked by a kind of inspired overkill, the speedtalk of a monologist made verbally and imaginatively uneasy by the world.
From Donegal, migrating to London when he was 21, travelling in Europe, Sweeney in his poems often corrals a scatter of memories into the jagged narrative of a free spirit abroad, controlling the centrifugal tendencies of his subject matter through a carefully modulated formal control (like McGovern, he employs the sonnet to good effect). With its landscapes of desolate isolations, his is often an evocatively noirish world of contemporary angst (the spooky title poem places a loaded Mercedes hearse – containing a body or “dozens of Armalites” – at a roadblock in the North). The persona of the poems is a troubled, self-aware consciousness taking in but never quite making sense of a contemporary world of fragments, a consciousness stretched and strained, but untouched by self-indulgence, self-pity or self-regard.
Thumbnail narratives such as The Cold, The Sea, Pollen, are in a plainer mode, seeking no pyrotechnic effects, achieving a lucid realism. Many of the later poems have a kind of parable quality – brief riffs on what seem like dream images, maybe with a little touch of late MacNeice. And although their plain speech can at times appear a bit flat, I like their emaciated surrealism, as well as their strategy to pare away all "lyric" pretension. That said, I have to admit that in poems such as Reportage of a Day in Calcuttaor Blue Eggs, or The Dark, the language stops the poem from rising beyond itself: it happens but leaves no reverberation.
Still, Sweeney's voice – with its own understated thoughtfulness edged by gritty realism, with his refined sense of the poem as a finished unit – is a notable presence in contemporary poetry on both sides of the Irish Sea. "Only the clouds excite me," he says in Skylight, "with their ceaseless messages." Such continuous openness to the human and other "messages" the world offers is the quietly exhilarating distinction of his work, and of this representative volume.
As poets both Sweeney and McGovern are in their different ways modern traditionalists: both of them, that is, compose along a (usually condensed) narrativegrid. In the younger David Wheatley's work, on the other hand, one senses a restless postmodern consciousness, tugging this way and that at the dazzling display of particularities that is the world, as well as at the mind's own brimming variety of responses, all pressuring language itself to discover a style that will be sufficient to its task of rendering what for want of a better word we'll call reality. Mostly, I'd say, it's a style allied to the habits of collage. As an imaginative strategy this properly (and kinetically) embodies the poet's shrewd, articulate, always wide-awake, endlessly curious sensibility, showing – in how he relishes sensuous surfaces – his delight in (to use MacNeice's immortal phrase) "the drunkenness of things being various".
The title of A Nest on the Waves(The Gallery Press, 87pp, €11.95) evokes a peaceful corner in a world of turbulence (perhaps that corner of respite where poems can be hatched). Emotionally attached to notions of home, this is also a book of visitations – to places near (the Sally Gap, Mweelrea, the N11) or far distant (west Africa, Australia). The poet, however, is never the tourist or sentimental memoirist but a maker of documentaries – mapping the landscape, taking well informed note of fauna (some lovely bird poems), flora and local habits, and reflecting on his own presence. In such poems the counterpointing habits of collage are his orchestrating agent (such as in the brilliant Lament for Ali Farka Touré, where his canvas includes Pepsi, pizza and west African rituals).
At times a poem (such as Antarctic Poetry School) can descend into archness (the blow-away foam of a witty, well-informed intelligence, I guess), or be opaque (Semaphore), or make too self-conscious a display of its knowledge ( Triskets), or be simply slighter (such as Little Ones) than the most fully realised pieces. But with his allusive richness of texture, his sense of history, his ability to take on with convincing panache other voices (such as The Lock Keeper's Daughter, The Recusant St Brenhilda on Sula Sgeir), his startling imagery ("the triplets on the beggar's guitar / sputtered like tachycardia"), his formal relaxation and nicely calibrated freshness of language (a kingfisher "combusts"), Wheatley's best poems – especially those in which one detects the telling fusion of subjective feelings and objective facts (such as The Shadow Life) – have an original shine to them, and their "light is what / we see the dark by".
Eamon Grennan's most recent collection in Ireland is Out of Breath. A New & Selected Poems was published in the US last year
