POETRY: PAUL PERRYreviews three books of poetry
Lost Republic'sby Alan Jude Moore
ALAN JUDE MOORE is a young poet from Dublin whose experience of living in Moscow provides the subject matter for his award-winning first collection, Black State Cars, and for this, his second collection, Lost Republics. The social aftermath of the Soviet era is the collection's thematic undercurrent and it is captured with pathos and lyrical detachment. In Fine Art (at the Pushkin Museum), "swastikas on the street" are contrasted with "one of Degas' dancers" adjusting "the strap across her shoulder blade".
There's an attractive understated, sometimes aphoristic, quality to Moore's poems where the first person is backgrounded to the observational keenness of the speaker, where "familiar bodies fade into each other" "and lovers strip each other to the bone". In Snow Tracks, "the sound" of snow "makes you feel/ like you are following yourself". Time passes in a languorous fashion, "fires are burning somewhere in the flat;/ we are waiting for the station to take us in".
A political undercurrent is always simmering, and when it is aligned with longing, Moore enacts a kind of magic: "remember to melt down your ring for me;/ let all our promises be one last bullet" (Zapad). Paradoxically, it's not the exoticism of Lost Republicswhich appeals so much, but its familiarity. An accomplished and intriguing book.
Even So: New and Selected Poemsby Mark Roper
WHERE MOORE’S landscapes are urban, Mark Roper’s worlds are rural. Praised as a nature poet, Roper is more than that.
What becomes clear when rereading Even So: New and Selected Poems is that it is the psychological urges beneath Roper’s descriptions of the natural world which give his poetry its lasting and memorable power. Take for example, the poems about his father. In Yellow and Blue, he writes:
When I was a child
my father said goodnight
to me in every language
he knew. When I heard
the Spanish words again
it was like finding a bird
ringed by his dead hands.
In Father, the speaker tries a shirt on and invokes the "blackmailer", realising "you're in my neck/ of woods, your hands/ collar my opened throat". When not displaying an ornithologist's knowledge in lucid and limpid lines, Roper's patient voice conjures rich metaphors and very often epiphanic moments of resigned realisation. Elsewhere, transcendence is not simply realised, but embodied. In his fantastical Sleeping with the Kingfisher, Roper displays the playful side of his talents. I quote it here in full:
Its appearance in the bed wasn’t surprising.
Giraldus said a dead one kept linen fresh.
No, what surprised was the size of the thing
and the way it hugged me close to its breast.
To feel its bill run the rule down my spine.
To be enfolded in sapphire wings. Surprising.
How much more so to wake and find myself ablaze,
my heart the blue seed in a blossom of flame.
Even So is an absolute delight and a superb achievement.
To Ring in Silence: New and Selected Poemsby Paddy Bushe
PADDY BUSHE IS another poet who writes movingly about his father and his New and Selected Poems also displays an impressive body of work. In this case, Bushe writes with equal ease and assurance in both Irish and English, a rare thing.
Technically expert, Bushe's range of reference is staggering, from Li Bai's Last Poem, a crown of sonnets, to the free-verse sequences Hopkins on Skellig Michael and Poems with Amergin. Like Whitman, Paddy Bushe contains multitudes.
His "apology" for poetry describes gannets as "necessary angels". Their "ordained patterns" recur in a lyric formality which also holds a moral integrity to it. In Ritual for the Propitiation of the Abnormal Dead, the speaker of the poem would have " those who died / By murder, suicide and war" dance "all over Ireland" in "Omagh" "Monaghan" and "Enniskillen",
I would have them dance every bloody sunday
And weekday until only the everyday
Spirits are abroad for their allotted time
Before they rest, and let the living live.
The austerity of Bushe's early work gives way to more tender notes later on, particularly in poems such as Bowls, and in Black Dogswhere after "the addiction centre's house dog" has been buried, "each one" aches "to bury our own black dog". Paddy Bushe is a significant and necessary voice in Irish poetry.
Paul Perry's most recent book is The Orchid Keeper(Dedalus Press, 2007). He is currently writer in residence for Dún Laoghaire/ Rathdown Library Services