Poetry: The Last Spring of the World; In Her Jaws; Selected Poems; and bandit country

The strength of Maureen Boyle’s The Last Spring of the World (Arlen House £13) lies in her strong seam of dazzling imagery which lights up dark corners of private memory while illuminating history:

“My Grandfather worked the mill…

…the sinister snow of scutched flax

… made him wheeze

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at night…

going out into the yard… burning

a circle of white powder

which he’d breathe into his beleaguered lungs…

one snow swapped for another,

a bowl by his bed to collect

the poison he’d cough up at night.”

(Strabane)

Boyle is at ease moving within the larger confines of longer poems. Strabane is one of several long poems but the startling star of this collection is Luscus (one-eyed), a narrative prose poem beginning in a 1966 National Health clinic “in Royal Victoria Hospital… eyes lined neatly in wooden trays… laid in grooves according to colour… hundreds… staring blind off velvet lining… We were there to find me an eye, and the man who could do this was Mr Lennox.”

As Boyle is reaching back to her original source, her images have never been so powerful, so connected. “Belfast… shrouded in the colours of the dark: of rich mahogany wood, of the hunched Victorian corridors of the Children’s hospital, of shops with wooden counters and sweets in wood-cornered vats like coloured fish you had to scoop out…” The accident happened during the construction of an extension to the family home and that home is integral to Boyle’s narrative – the accident set against the public history of Northern Ireland. While Mr Lennox’s “alchemy” is central throughout her years of growing, “busy” after “the Troubles have started”, he is killed crossing the road after his retirement. It will take Boyle years to “find someone I could trust to make me eyes like that again.”

Sensual joy

Rosamond Taylor opens In Her Jaws (Banshee €10) with a Sylvia Townsend Warner epigraph, “…we become witches… to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business…” These poems are not safe, they are wide open to horror: “My feet/in black school shoes/bounced against the bottom /of the van, each beat a victory boom: I am Alive, I am alive./Then he threw me outside – /limping, stained…”

And there is intense, sensual joy: “Her tonne of blubber joins mine/in a rush of flippers, her eyes/shining squid-ink dark.” (My Wife as a Walrus). Few poems succeed in conjuring magic as well as Taylor’s first poem, “I met my other self/in Knocksink Wood. She wore grey… I made her shiver/as though she’d unearthed a blue tit,/ its mouth glued shut by frost.” Grey is Taylor’s totem colour, beautifully outlined in The Drey: “When the rain starts,/I smell lavender and soil”, the perfect shade to express the liminal territory of Taylor’s poetry.

Words are chosen with great care: “So many words are wrong: the closed letters of dog – dog is snout and paw against my leg; the heaviness of home… Sign was the first language: before blurred lips began to speak we opened our hands to invent a new world…”

But there is more than care in Taylor’s poetry, her fine delicacy is at one with an indefinable sorcery which horrifies and exhilarates. And it is just as powerful out of the woods:

“Although I wasn’t sane, I could blend with tourists on the Royal Mile…. Licking condensation and cinnamon, I’d wait by the window in Caffè Nero for a married woman, who’d twist my long hair round her hand and tug. In kirkyards, I found refuge… …The many ghosts were a comfort – plague dead, Burke and Hare, throngs of cattle, horses. I saw them all.”

Irresistible voice

Linton Kwesi Johnson’s updated Selected Poems (Penguin £9.99) – including a fine new introduction by Gary Younge beside the equally fine 2001 essay by Fred D’Aguiar – is timely. And Johnson has an especially keen sense of time from his impeccable prosodic timing so wittily expressed in If I Waz A Tap Natch Poet:

“wid mi riddin

wid mi rime

wid mi ruff base line

wid mi own sense of time”

Then there is More Time’s preoccupation with progress: “Wi mawchin out di ole/towards di new centri/Arm wid di new technalagy /Wi gettin more an more producktivity/ Some seh tings lookin-up fi prosperity.” Its caveat, “But if evrywan goin get a share dis time/Ole mentality mus get lef behine,” is still painfully relevant two decades later. Johnson’s irresistible voice, ignited by radical politics, innovative in form and language, created a new kind of poetry in the hostile racist environment of 1970s Britain:

“w’en mi jus’ come to Landan toun mi use to work pan di andahgroun but workin’ pan di andahgroun y’u don’t get fi know your way aroun” (Inglan is a Bitch).

Johnson’s poems, stunning records of time and place, remain current. Like every original voice, Johnson’s is indebted to many influences including Jamaican folksongs, the Bible, the reggae baseline and literary voices such as Christopher Okigbo and TS Eliot. His characters are particular, too, springing fresh from the page in elegies such as Reggae fi May Ayom, Reggae fi Radney or the new, tender Reggae fi Mama. Johnson sees poetry as a “cultural weapon” – but who else can give so much pleasure while teaching deft lessons on history, form and language?

“it soon come

it soon come

is de shadow walkin behind yu

is I stannup rite before yu

look out!

but it too late now

I did warn yu

when yu fling mi inna prison

I did warn yu

when yu kill Oluwale

I did warn yu…”

Northern patois

James Conor Patterson’s striking bandit country (Picador £10.99) is also written out of a very specific place and time in its own patois – the language of border-town Newry:

“what wonders! t see spricks the relative sizea cattle hauled

onboard yer unsteady vessel, an t jorney, tin soldier, intae a dark

where the only sourcea natural light is the glare from a starbucks

takeaway cup.” (Current)

Patterson’s prose poems are brilliantly tight and sonnet-like, his Douglas Dunn epigraph prompting a comparison with the succinct, haunted atmosphere of Dunn’s Terry Street. Patterson, like Johnson, conjures revenants from a bloody history. About Suffering, Patterson’s response to WH Auden’s Musée Des Beaux Arts, assembles a canvas of Newry characters: “so many of us gathered that ye’d think/we were about t levitate the town hall;/freaks of ivry stripe – from navvies ankle-deep/in concrete dust…calling down the moutha the crimean war cannon/probly drunk,/probly pitching/memorial arcs of strongbow down the arts centre steps – when outta nowhere, a Saracen comes squealing…”

Masterful timing turns the poem here when we realise this is an imaginary scene, “the sorta thing I imagine there might abin/had I lived through the eighties…”. The past informs the present beautifully and Patterson earns his neat political rhyme:

“…the insidiousness of failure as sanctioned by the state.

i think about this, and about my parents & brors,

press book selected flights and i go back home t vote.”

Patterson’s London is equally haunted, “say ye go for a walk near clerkenwell green. say it’s November and the sertraline rattles yer bones like the shackles on Jacob marley’s wrists…” (London Mixtape). But Newry’s ever-present as “we bully home intae coherence…HDMI cables, glassesa pinot grigio…our salt rebuff t England has less t do with speech, an more the small republic sprawled across our mattress.” (London Poem).