Poetry round-up: A distinctive, uncanny door to history slides open

John McAuliffe’s poetry is often described as domestic but there is nothing tame about McAuliffe’s rooms where anything could happen:

Once (I am 9 or 10, acting as if there was no use
in my thinking she's the centre of the world),
my mother left the kitchen with tap running
over a half dozen peeled eggs in the steel sink.
The water's a blur. Has she gone up town for milk?
The eggs are white and grey. And then the car returning…

Clippings is one of two poems in The Kabul Olympics (Gallery Press, €11.95)about McAuliffe's deeply influential mother: "She is with me at the kitchen table,/between the fridge and the front door:/both sea and salt, error and adventure." This collection, soaked in "sea and salt", builds on the unsettling voyages of The Way In (Gallery 2015).

A magnificent central sequence, The Harbour, references The Tempest and Aenied, telling 20th century tales of arms and the man along the Kerry coastline, well suited to McAuliffe’s sensibility which is both rapt Miranda and world-weary Prospero. The Coast of Nowhere wonders if its own title means “To be/ here and nowhere at all”, echoing Bernard O’Donoghue’s dilemma of the emigrant.

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Manchester is a central character here, its rooms and streets luminous, often ominous under the intensity of McAuliffe’s gaze. The Manchester Arena bombing is the incendiary centre in City of Trees, tree pollen erupting in “slow green explosions”. Prophetic uncertainty shivers right through this subtly linked seamless collection, building to the final Blown Away, a mere tent which the narrator failed to secure.

But nothing is too insignificant for McAuliffe’s egalitarian, watchful eye: not even the elastic band “in two parts” (as “miraculous” as his mother’s American Maple) which survived the 1996 bombing of Carcanet’s offices in Manchester:

…ash and a smudged print

on the sheet when I move it a little,

a dry scent in the air

as I put everything back…

including the two pieces of elastic

which still hold all this paper together.

“Nuns! Reverse!” shouts Father Jack, with not a little misogyny – and we all laugh because nuns have been successfully othered. When Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin asks in her essay Instead of a Shrine if “a poem is a substitute for an element in the culture that is proscribed…obsolete…under… pressure” she could be referring to her fearless selfless sisters. Sr Mary Anthony in J’ai Mal Á Nos Dents (The Magdalene Sermon, 1989) complained “I have a pain in our teeth/ Her body dissolving out of her first mother/ Her five sisters aching at home.”

In The Mother House (Gallery, €11.95), Ní Chuilleanáin's distinctive, uncanny door to history slides open on An Imperfect Enclosure, dedicated to Nano Nagle, the Cork heiress who founded the Presentation order during Penal times. Deadly adventure, perfect sense of a staccato movement in short lines:

She was out in all weathers.

She was tired, someone gave her

a chair in a shop. Rested

and then away, in the street, on the move.

In The Maps of Convents an independent nun plumbs the basement and searches the chimneys:

Oh, you’d do that, she said,

we couldn’t have a man inside the door.

The kitchen chimney,

and I loved it,

well I remember

the old days, you’d be

black all over after it.

Labyrinthine journeys, internal and external, are central. The Bookshelves “our cliffs, where we hang, grope and slide… it’s the finger tucked in the big dictionary that leads onward…” These journeys, often underground or circular, pulse with the tremendous power of submerged dreams as in The Tree, which meditates on the Cork home her family left in 1949:

We moved on

along a different road, that we followed

as the tree grows, every branch displaying a map of its own,

until the day the place came back to me

and I waited for the words to come, I began searching

in a still deeper seam, just as the root explores

its road underground, looking for sustenance and a source.

Family history is firmly in the driving seat on the first page of Gerry Murphy's The Humous of Nothingness. (Dedalus, €12.50) when "a faltering drayhorse" kicks Gerry Murphy's "grandfather's/lights out on Blackpool bridge" leaving him

…groping

in the Asylum

for meaning and connection.

An age before

I stumbled into verse,

raving blessedly

between truth and delusion

to the sound of Pegasus’

approaching hooves.

Murphy’s hilarious existential angst seems more relevant than ever during lockdown:

I begin to pace the hallway.

Passing the large hallstand mirror,

I pause, as usual, to glance in.

For a split-second of exquisite disorientation

(a slow-firing synapse? a trick of the light?)

I cannot place the panicked reflection.

(Mirror, Mirror)

Perhaps a writer tormented with the notion of self has no other recourse than to respond to other writers. This collection teems with responses and versions of other writers’ work creating a multitude of selves-from Babel’s Prishchepa to this delightful quatrain merging 19th-century Russia with 20th/21st-century Cork:

Where Am I?

after Boris Pasternak

Wrapped in a muffler, I peer through the pane

and recognise that old heart-warming din.

‘Hey! Komsomol kids, playing in the rain,

what century is this we’re living in?’

That sense of timelessness haunts his contemporary love poem Apple Nights, which recalls his work with 15th-century Irish translations:

You would often come naked

into the orchard, in search of coolness.

I would watch, with bated breath,

from the branches of an apple tree,

as you filled bucket after bucket

from the rain water butt

and poured them over yourself…

The strongest love poems are elegies, the dark roots of Murphy’s humour responding overwhelmingly to time’s cruelties which can be relentless or forgetful as his mother promising to time young Gerry if he runs to the shop for “messages” in Oh Ronnie Delany delivered with Murphy’s characteristic light metaphysical touch:

Back in the house,

out of breath,

in a lather of sweat,

I manage to wheeze at my mother: ‘Time?’

‘Time?’ she replies.