Publishing a book of poems, according to Robert Creeley, is like dropping a feather into the Grand Canyon and waiting to hear it hit the bottom. These four poets are seasoned enough to let their poems sail out on the fickle thermals off Olympus, knowing the necessity to let them go without calculating the outcome.
Sam Gardiner, an architect in his sixties, a native of Portadown long resident in London and Lincolnshire, is also a freelance journalist and editor. This first book of poems displays the classic virtues of clarity and wit: intelligence applied for delight and instruction in artfully balanced measure. He copes with his subjects in a vivid contemporary idiom, uncluttered, detached, ironic. In "Principia Poetica" he contrasts the architectural with the poetic approach:
Poems are not built upwards from the ground
Like summer-houses, hotels and pagodas.
These are heavily built, stage upon stage.
Words however are lighter than air
And have to be caught in flight and pulled down.
He treats the trickiest of situations - domestic violence and religio-political conflict, for example - with unerring originality and tact. This is a book worth a close, leisurely reading and re-reading.
The cover's punning title and rude Hogarth print provide apt wrapping for this ample portion of Hugh Maxton's Swiftian Saeva Indignatio. Wielding his satirical implements - puns, rhymes, allusions, ambiguous modifiers, etc - with mischievous skill, he administers his purges and emetics without fear or favour to every literary institution from the Aosdanach to Yeats. Individuals like "General" Cahill, John Charles McQuaid, the owner of "Innch Mickey" [sic], and a certain "Roman Croesus/With an eagle on his wrist/Posing as a pompulist" [sic] are all brought to the same level by fierce vilification or plain mockery. Others need footnotes for identification, but it's fun guessing who. With all faults, a substantial addition to the sturdy reputation of Mr Maxton (alias W.J. McCormack, lit. historian).
Desmond Egan's career has been lengthy and prolific. This is his 15th volume. There have also been three selected/collected editions. Translations have been published across Europe and in Japan; he has translated from classical Greek. He has received significant awards in America and Italy, "among others". Like several other poets, he publishes his work through his own press. More power to him: he has taken to heart Thomas Kinsella's remark 40 or more years ago about poets having to be their own publicists. Music is a group of poems about pieces of music, composers and performers. Strangely antithetical to the lyric mode, they read more like free-verse travelogues, sketchy fragmented lines about a fiddler in a bar or Thelonious Monk in New York, or heaping very prosaic praise on the pianist Hans Palsson, telling us about the experience - rather than presenting it directly, as his favourite poet Pound admonishes us all to do. I prefer the bluff, outright verses of his earlier books to these sweeping didactic gestures.
The title of John Ennis' book, the Irish for "darts; strong blades of grass" (Dineen), sets us up for 100 "sonnets", each of 14 extremely short lines, no doubt to remind us of blades of grass. They are mostly in the first person singular or plural, like the voices from the grave in Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology.
Give us
cattle stir
fox covert
rabbit sleep
frogleap
fieldmouse
at our feet,
the last
landrail.
There are some brilliant lyric evocations here, but the tight focus on the subject is sometimes blurred, and the identity of the speaker changes from poem to poem, adding to the confusion. A worthy, inventive experiment, nevertheless.
James J. McAuley is a poet and critic