New poetry: Tara Bergin, Jason Allen-Paisant, Mark Ward and Breda Spaight

Following her collections Yarrow and The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx, Tara Bergin’s Savage Tales (Carcanet, £15.99, 208pp) underlines her position as one of our most exciting poets. Where her previous book explored the nature of biography and narrative, this book of epigrammatic, fragmentary texts challenges what we expect the lyric to do.

The poems – though “texts” feels like a better word – comprising this substantial, elegant work are rarely longer than a line or two. And yet, the pressure per square inch is quite remarkable. These are funny and profound lines whose accumulation develops into a powerful reflection on language and artistry. Some, such as Japanese Death Poem, are dramatic vignettes:

“The barman had a dog-eared copy of Japanese Death Poems

Underneath the counter.

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A bit of light reading? I said.

Did you want to order something? He said.”

Many of the poems, across the book’s nine sections, depict small moments of the artist in the world, such as in The Optician: “We get a lot of writers in here, said the optician tightening the screws”, or The Rollercoaster Operator: “We get a lot of writers in here, said the rollercoaster operator lowering the bar.”

One sees in this small, radical gesture, how a moment in one’s life may become aestheticised or turned into a poem; one recognises its significance in retrospect

What’s notable in these examples and evident across the book are the ways in which Bergin plays with context – it’s not the writer who is the subject of these poems, but the people she encounters. What does this suggest about the role of the artist?

For most of the book, poem titles and their texts have swapped positions: titles appear at the bottom of the page; the “poem” at the top. One sees in this small, radical gesture, how a moment in one’s life may become aestheticised or turned into a poem; one recognises its significance in retrospect.

Savage Tales is generous and humane and utterly compelling. “I can say everything if it can be smuggled inside something else,” says Bergin in The Fabulist. Quite a lot of everything is within this extraordinary book.

Erudite and expansive

Jason Allen-Paisant’s second collection, Self-Portrait as Othello (Carcanet, £12.99, 80pp) is an erudite and expansive reflection on how identity, political and artistic, is composed, consolidated, and made fragile. The book takes Shakespeare’s Othello as both guiding figure and foil for the speaker’s experiences in Paris and Venice where he is, among other things, “dancing/ through Europe actor and spectator in a carnival of bodies”.

Performance of self is a dominant theme across these poems; the idea of Othello as a version of blackness drawn by an English playwright, “What Shakespeare did not write about. The story he was unable to tell”. The book’s opening poem, Ringing Othello, functions as an uncertain sonnet of invocation: “Presumptuous to think/ that I could make you speak./ Who am I?/ But I feel sometimes/ that our destinies conjoin, that your life/ unfinished, is lived also through mine.” It’s subtle work; both the telephone call of summons and the character’s entrapment between two ‘O’s.

There is a compelling, essayistic quality to these poems in which the speaker’s voice frequently gives way to quotations from Hélène Cixous, Aimé Césaire and Dionne Brand. If self-portraiture depicts the artist by way of their own technique, self in this book is an historical and aesthetic contingency; the speaker wrestles with making a self-portrait from “The Moor who remains invisible; despite the obsession with his body”. This book is, of course, talking as much about our contemporary moment as it is about the historical figure of Othello, a man who excels “in battles/ but not in the city”. The third part of this excellently conceived collection offers a series of particularly moving poems of grief and its performances: “One day I may open my mouth to speak/ and her voice will leap out”.

Resonant with performativity

Like Allen-Paisant’s poetry, Mark Ward’s Nightlight (Salmon Poetry, €12, 68pp) is resonant with performativity. Here, in poems of the body and sensuality, Ward considers the ways in which queerness is performed and reified; how identity is not conceived independently, but by the interrelations and interdependencies of the body and desire. The book’s opening image, in Bare, is one of sex mediated by the television screen: “lighting up limbs playfighting,/ righting themselves into well-oiled hinges”. It’s an aubade, of sorts, a poem of lovers parting. Ward’s variation is to give us the lover who is preserved by screen burn: “a skinflick burnt into the tv”. Elsewhere, Early Teenage Homosexuality is marked as a dramatic text, “For two or more players” in which the rolling of dice becomes a metaphor for the risk and reward of seeking sexual partners.

The corporeal aside, there are excellent descriptions and musicality throughout. A hospital gown is a reverse straitjacket in a poem blending the worlds of medicine and drag

However, one has the sense that the threat of harm is not far from intimacy: this is contested, furtive love. And, owing to that discretion, so often, the idea of a self is arrived at through negation and the subjugation of one’s attributes and qualities: “bury the greenery of your accent/ in collage; learn to think/ inside the barrage of noise”, Ward writes in Ten Steps to be Correctly Consumed by a City.

[ New poetry by Amy Abdullah Barry; Kevin Graham; Christodoulos Makris; and Jane Robinson ]

The corporeal aside, there are excellent descriptions and musicality throughout. A hospital gown is a reverse straitjacket in a poem blending the worlds of medicine and drag. The poems are often at their best when the poems’ sonic features are to the fore, such as in Trick: “your tongue as tender as kindling/ the moment dwindling/ to a regret at not saving all of this/ for love”. There’s much promise in this confident debut.

Poetic bildungsroman

Readers will admire Breda Spaight’s poem The Curse, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. This poem, like many collected in her first book, Watching for the Hawk (Arlen House, €15), is autobiographical, concerned with the role of women in rural Ireland. The book itself, part autobiography, part poetic bildungsroman, gives us a speaker who says of herself:

“By now, I’m a collector of secrets.

I seek mute corners, sift dream from the half-remembered,

meaning from the half-known – staccato night whispers

in the kitchen; the long silence.”

These are poems of the quiet, quasi-sacred places we grow up in: childhood homes, parlours, the houses of grandparents. What’s striking, in the opening pages, is the frankness with which these poems imagine the carnality of the speaker’s own conception, and the extent to which biological fact, stripped of the courtesies of metaphor and euphemism, still makes for remarkable imagery.

[ Breda Spaight explores her troubled relationship with her mother in the collection, Watching for the Hawk ]

A quotation from Sharon Olds, “A family is a mystery”, serves as an epigraph. One feels Olds, and other confessional poets, as presiding spirits. What might have not been said publicly for fear of impropriety is said here with a full voice. Beyond these acts of reclamation – of one’s own life and family history – is a talent for a fine line and a resonant image. “When I drink, it is always 1967,″ starts Her Cross.

One admires, too, the final lines of The Summer of Love:

“Oh my! Did she want us to hold hands

And run like sisters into the blue ocean,

To flit like butterflies, to sup nectar from lilacs,

To be born in to the gold, gold days of that summer?”