You wouldn’t necessarily expect to find a sequence of poems about famous American boxers in a first collection by an Irish poet, but here they all are — Tyson, Liston, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Cassius Clay — shimmying through poems that love to watch them fight, but don’t flinch either from following them out of the ring, back into whole storylines. High points in low lives run throughout a book as interested in bathos as it is in triumph; in the fighters’ hurt bodies and damage, as much as in their myths.
You wouldn’t want such subject matter to be dressed in pretty language, and it’s not. Not aggressive poems, they are determinedly narrative, no fuss about them, precious little metaphor or simile. Instead, these poems draw verve and poise from direct speech, proper nouns, specific detail (“It’s just after 9 a.m. local time in Tokyo. / Tyson’s cornerman has filled a condom with ice water / and is pressing it against his fighter’s eye” – ‘The Young God of the Catskills II’), reminiscent of Michael Hofmann’s angular and emotionally efficient early work.
These are poems with narrative business to do, with lives chased all the way to (invariably) sorry ends, but crossed with personal connections of often surprising tenderness, as in My Son, the Heart of my Life, about the famous Marciano/Louis fight, ending with Marciano’s funeral:
Joe Louis will kiss the lid of the closed casket,
look at the ceiling of the funeral home,
and say, Something’s gone out of my life. I’m not alone;
What seems a poem about boxing combat turns out to be a love poem after all. The gorgeous sequence, Halcyon Days, works a similar mix of poignancy, remembrance and wound, though this time the language is allowed more leeway to describe less factually: “… You made a promise early on, / to pretend I wasn’t all your daylight”.
This is a first collection intensely aware of how poetry can work linguistic restraint to vivid, energetic ends. It parries between matter-of-factness and illumination; covering narrative ground, as it were, to set up the killer punch.
In the opening poem, Sidney Road, the speaker declares, “I was the future, for a week, a while ago”. Crisis Actor suggests a new poetic voice that will be with us, distinctly and dramatically, for the foreseeable.
