THESE three collections evolve around similar of family history recalled, notions of identity senses of place. Eamon Grennan's fourth collection roves, as the sleeve blurb tells us, "from a summer garden in Harold's Cross to a snowy street in Poughkeepsie, from fields in County Monaghan to mountains in New Hampshire".
Grennan, currently teaching at Vassar, is one of this country's most widely published ambassadors of poetry in the United States; his work has appeared fairly regularly in The New Yorker. He has an interesting, if nostalgic, article on Michael Hartnett in the current issue of The Southern Review. The same issue contains an equally interesting essay by Edna Longley on the reception given to Irish poets in America, which includes a quote about Grennan from The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1990), edited by Derek Mahon and Gallery's Peter Fallon, describing Grennan as writing "of his migrations."
Grennan might be described as a transatlantic poet. Many of his more robust, bulkier poems are reminiscent, for readers of American poetry magazines, of a certain type of distinctly American poem, but with a more immediate sense of lyricism. The weightiness, the visual solidness, of his poems are almost part of or at least sympathetic with their themes. Part One of the collection contains finely wrought poems of recollection and remembrance, some of which, such as "Glimpses", use plain, restrained language with considerable dramatic effect:
He'll cough, and the smoke from his first Sweet Afton of the day will lift, drift, and implicate itself in the spills of sunlight . . .
The use of the word implicate here is an example of a technique that conjures good poetry out of descriptive prose. Part Two contains some of those bigger poems, heavy on the page, loaded with words. "Wet Morning, Clareville Road", one of Grennan's New Yorker poems, pours language at the reader in a continuous stream. meshed about and directed by a considered interior rhythm and Dylan Thomas like linguistic structure:
Dark green the over arching ascension of trees; walled gardens where scarlet roses are explod ing; yellow the cylinders of chimney pots;
luminous and edgy the fretwork clouds . . .
The language, its density, application, punctuation have altered radically from that of earlier poems; the theme is more intense, the shape and attack of the poem are similarly weighty. One of the interesting things about Grennan's always competent work is the suddenness and drama of the switch from one rhythm or style to another. Sturdy poems, these, and well made.
Belfast born Pol O Muiri writes most of his poetry in Irish and is clearly concerned with the Irish language and the use of the Ulster vernacular. This is evident from time to time in the metrical and linguistic balance of the poems here, the first group dealing for the most part in smallish poems encircling familial themes, entitled "An Ulster Genealogy" and opening with a breakdown of O Muiri's name; mariner, is a given meaning, so one predicts a sort of voyage around a remembered past and places.
Irish is never far away, in placenames, and in sayings: "The Prodigal Son" has the line: "Drowned without a priest in unknown seas", which recalls the Irish saying, bas gan sagairt. "The Peak of the Soldier" recalls how Irish placename origins have been allowed to fade: "The Peak of the Something. I don't mind it now./ We let the other name fall into forgetfulness." The second part of the book, "D Day", employs second World War imagery in a striking and memorable way. Some of the poems concern Marvin Nebbin and Mary McDonald, who feature in their wedding photograph on the book's cover.
O Muiri's poetry is fresh, vital and the overall pace of his imagination rarely tires.
Joan McBreen's second collection is light, predictable. The poems are fragile things, comfortable and comforting "I make a tent of my blankets/so that I will not hear the rain/turn to sleet on the window" ("In the Daughter's Room") or bland: "The birds fly into the air./Time passes. The weather/turns" ("Watches"). Nothing disturbs this Eden. The poem After Osip Mandelstam" raises the hackles of this reviewer. Irish poets seem more willing to seek identification with persecuted Soviet intellectuals than with other Irish writers and poets. I do wish someone would tell me why. When was the last time we saw a contemporary Irish poem entitled "After Austin Clarke", oil for that matter, "After Mairtin O Direain"? This intellectually chic trait is becoming tedious. And it is chic, essentially, because it is intellectually comfortable.
When McBreen puts aside the water colours, however, she is capable of better things, as in this passionate still life imagery of love: "A bottle of red wine contained my lover./It was like this: apples and wedges of lemon/on a table, blue cornflowers and wheaten bread,/his face turned towards me, white, desiring." ("Heart in a Black Bowl"). But, by and large, the wall around McBreen's poetic garden keeps the big bad world out and preserves what's within in a snug, almost Edwardian nostalgia. The walls around Mandelstam's world were different. The laudatory blurb on the cover is from American poet Paul Genega. Genega, as happens in a small world, is also published by Salmon. Tut tut!