POETRY:
The Dark Age, By James Harpur,
Anvil, 68pp, £7.95and
Tell Me This Is Normal: New and
Selected Poems, Julie O'Callaghan, Bloodaxe, 168pp,
£8.95HERE ARE two poets who couldn't be more sharply
differentiated if they'd been picked to illustrate the range of
poetry being written in Ireland today, writes
Fiona Sampson.
Equally indispensable to the literary mainstream, both British-educated James Harpur and Chicago-born Julie O'Callaghan also enlarge the definition of the Irish writer.
Despite its title, Harpur's The Dark Age, an exploration of Christian spirituality and the challenges and losses of middle age, gleams with images of redemption: "joy, [ . . .] love, /Flooded through me /Wave on wave on wave /And I was drowned /In the paralysis of light" (St Symeon Stylites). One might worry that a book that relies on its punning title to link themes would be under-constructed: this too proves false. Harpur's fourth collection has three carefully composed sections. On Reaching Buddhahood, taking its title from a rueful reflection that instead of the "longed for [ . . . ] holy hush", "I find I've gained the Buddha's belly", is a gently autobiographical introduction to more demanding preoccupations. The book's second section, its title sequence, is a compressed, vividly lyric Lives of the Saints. Thirteen myths of the early Irish saints are collected here - from Kevin and the Blackbird to Gobnait's End - and are transformed into sonnets. In Harpur's hands, this most finely judged of forms seems organic: with stanzification and diction satisfyingly varied, it's frequently the click of final rhyme that gives the poem away - or leads it home: "Unable to see home the more I saw / The hounding fields of Derry, Donegal" (Columba's Exile); "'Hell is stasis, keep heading for the sun /And when you reach the light, sail on, sail on'" (Brendan).
Harpur's most ambitious writing is saved till last. The Monastic Star-Timetable includes three of his versions from Boethius's The Consolations of Philosophy (his fine edition of the poems has also just been published by Anvil); voices from the scriptorium which produced the Book of Kells; and a long piece staging the spiritual journey of St Symeon Stylites. Like Eliot's Beckett, Harpur's Stylites is tempted by both fame and its more insidious shadow, spiritual pride; he too must endure a literal fall in order to achieve understanding that every human individual "is Christ /Walking alone through fields of wheat /Or by the sea of Galilee".
If Harpur offers the reader cathartic redemption, Julie O'Callaghan's Tell Me This Is Normal moves from slangy exuberance in her early Edible Anecdotes (1983) to the darkening shadows of what a new poem calls Problems: fear, loss, grief. Yet she does so without compromising her diction. For O'Callaghan is a fearless debunker, a straight-talking street-fighter of a poet, whose wit and emotional intelligence is so sharp you fear it will cut the poem from the page. Sometimes she writes in persona: "I'm this huge moose /with no hair, /a cheapo wig and cancer. /And I'm supposed to go /and eat a Seafood Platter?" (No Can Do); sometimes with a straightforward inclusiveness - "Simple souls that we are /we now call this region 'Home'" (Home) - or the edge which caricature provides: "[. . .] those darn astronauts /and all that space garbage /[. . .] wrecked the weather. /For crying out loud /you can't keep puncturing /the sky with those items. /Where do ya think /all the oxygen's going?" (Weather). The mixture, though, is never sweet: a dangerous tension lies behind each gag. This is indeed writing which lives up to Bloodaxe's strap-line, Poetry with an edge.
Like all true poets, though, she can make us laugh and cry, often in the same line, O'Callaghan never does so just for the sake of it. Hers is serious work: social commentary built-up through minute observation, from her first collection's title-sequence to such perfectly-formed family portraits as Chit-Chat and Well-heeled, and wry scenes from a writing life in 2000's No Can Do. The steely poise that underlies such pieces blossoms in the elegance of Calligraphy: after Sei Shonagon.
Perfectly poised between ironising and celebrating that tradition, these witty, sensitive homages sacrifice nothing of the poet's underlying wisdom. That comes to the fore in the book's undoubted centrepiece, the delicate grief-work of Sketches for an Elegy, for the poet's father: "when he was crying /he said, 'I'm not sad. /Just sentimental'". O'Callaghan is that grown-up thing, a poet who knows the difference - and steers by it.
...
Fiona Sampson's latest collection is Common Prayer, short-listed for the 2007 TS Eliot Prize