The Twelfth of Never By Ciaran Carson Gallery Press 91pp, £7.95
The Hellbox By Greg Delanty Oxford Paperbacks 46pp, £6.99 in UK
"I cut my hand off at the wrist and threw it at the shore./ The goblin spilled a bag of red gold in my lap./ He wore emerald boots and a bloody fine cap./ Let Erin remember the days of yore./ I'd been riding the piebald mushroom for some time . . ."
This is the opening of `Nine Hostages', one of the 77 sonnets that make up The Twelfth of Never. It is not untypical of the rest of the book: the pulse of the verse is energetic; the allusions are multiple; the effect is phantasmagorical. There are lots of intoxicants and a lot of magic in this book, but alcohol, drugs and magic have this in common: if you're not taking them or taken in by them you can feel left out of the fun. Unlike (at least in my opinion) James Gogarty, Carson seems much of the time to be "off on a frolic" of his own. As in that last sentence - there may be readers who have missed out on the joy of knowing Mr Gogarty - the allusions are a problem. I know that in the poem referred to above the Nine Hostages connect to Niall (a high or stoned king), that the severed hand denotes Ulster, that the line in italics is from a song, and so on, but what does it all amount to? I'm puzzled. And when I get to the last line of the poem - "The red hand played the harp with oars of quinquereme" - the puzzlement grows: a quinquereme is a galley with five banks of oars, so the red hand is playing the harp with oars of five oars? Bizarre.
Irish people of a certain age (young middle), education (a lot of) and experience (illegal) will be hip to much of what is happening here. A good knowledge of Irish politics and history, especially 1798, of folklore, folksong, Hiberno-English and - is this not weird? - the religious practices of the President, Mrs McAleese, is a decided advantage. Foreigners, the gall of course, but also the Japanese, whose country figures a lot in the book, may find themselves lost.
Does this matter? Do coherence and intelligibility matter? The mock-avoidance of reality in significant areas of contemporary Irish verse (for instance, in Paul Muldoon, linguistically, and Paul Durcan, hyperbolically) increasingly inclines one to believe that they don't. Ciaran Carson is a fine poet and this book is powerful in its discrete parts, but this reviewer can't help thinking that too much is being asked of the reader. However, putting aside high moral purpose, poetic sobriety and sternness, this is a fine skilligalee.
Intelligibility is one of Greg Delanty's chief themes in The Hellbox, a collection united around the lore and traditions of hot-metal printing. According to the blurb, a hellbox "is the bin into which printers chucked broken or worn type".
Apart from three typographically tricky poems, two of which need to be read with the aid of a mirror, The Hellbox is a very straightforward book. The tone is conversational: "When push comes to shove, more than anything/ I didn't want to feel a foreigner/ in my own, what would you call it, homeland?" The mixture of tenses there is awkward. The verse-making is informal and rhythmically fitful: "All I set out to say was what has stayed with me/ of that day and that drive home is how I had,/ corny as it sounds, a sort of epiphany". It's hard to imagine that the propinquity of "say", "stayed" and "day" is deliberate.
As with Carson, the assumption that the reader understands local (and, again, presidential) allusions is strong. "And Adi, even if your entreaties to make love/ not war are cliche, your vision ain't. Even now/ in my mind's ear I hear your gusto, revivifying/ every cliche in the book. Say you're in solidarity,/ in sisterhood with this. Say Maaan O Man./ Say, brother, this is the awesomeness of awesome".
Brian Lynch's long poem `An Angry Heart' was recently published in the Daily Telegraph anthology The Ring of Words.