"THROUGHOUT history, and under the diverse circumstances," remarks Octavio Paz, "poets have participated in political life." Thomas McCarthy may be said to participate in our politics by writing about its various processes, working that very rare miracle that can turn our small beer affairs into literary art. By holding up for inspection the sorts of politics we have come to recognise as irritating yet oddly comforting, and without which we would not be who we are, he has defined us and our notions of identity in a uniquely articulate way. And never has McCarthy forgotten that his job is primarily to write poetry, not political or historical journalism.
Hardly surprising, then, that The Lost Province (Anvil Press £7.95 in UK) contains poems around politics of one style or another. Part Two of this four section book, entitled "The Lost Province of Alsace", contains a poem called "Polling Day, 1989"
A Green Party van chugs by, emphysemic, rattling in the potholes of our
Republic.
A Fine Gael woman walks from her blue BMW...
Vintage McCarthy, followed, with strategic precision, by "The Count Centre" on a facing page:
Hard necks are stretched.
This day is beyond us, be yond words.
All, at once, are triumphant, wretched.
What might be called a short sequence of three poems, "Triskel Odeon", "The Classic Cinema" and "Desmond Cinema, Cappoquin", describes not merely an understandable regret at precious things passing, but the aspirations and hopes that resided within them and the wonders on show there: "If only our small towns could have been like that;/if we could rearrange and splice the frames/to make a new milieu, begin with something white// instead of sleet on St Patrick's Day, or Fianna Fail." ("Triskel Odeon").
Elsewhere, other notes are played. "And here you are, lost in contemplation/on a Kerry beach. The sea is behind you,/ breaking gently at the centre of my heart." This from a moving poem, "Here You Are". In "November", a long poem (is the form dying out these days?) the poet muses on the ordinary - the falling year, the "pressure of the domestic" - and notes how "one year on, an Arts Council grant winds down", along with all the bigger and smaller things that dominate a poet's life. "Only poetry itself is ever autumnal,/ wanting to drag in and to store too much./Better to lose as much again . . ." the poem continues, a lament, like a number of McCarthy's poems, for the loss of possibilities, familiar things, a sort of personal golden age. Love triumphs. Perhaps poetry does too. "We survive self knowledge," McCarthy writes, "like the memory/of war or a crash." There is a politics of the personal in which memory casts a crucial vote.
The fourth section, "Decian, Scientist", takes a more whimsical approach to history and politics and revives the ancient stone boat legend, a saint sitting in this perilously weighty craft with an ear to his short wave radio, redeemed by "BBC Gaul, Fluctus Brevis News, Radio Lux".
McCarthy, with this book, joins a handful of Irish poets upon whom British publishers have smiled. He is a fine poet and his voice sounds out loud and clear through the messy static that is so much new Irish poetry.
MARK ROPER's last collection was The Hen Ark, which, the jacket blurb informs us, won the 1991 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize. The blurb tells us precious little else about Roper, which is a pity, because he is a talented poet, possessing a quirky but always intelligent and controlled poetic edge.
The poems in Catching the Light (Lagan Press, £4.95 in UK) are all well crafted and impeccably structured; even the odd not so great poem survives a second reading in better shape than many by more advertised practitioners of the trade: "This is your face./On the window glass,/look, your face./It's you, believe me." ("Suzy"). Such stark but elegantly wrought simplicity gives way to a lyrically poignant pastoral dignity, in a poem such as "Marsh Marigolds":
you'll see these fat buttery suns glow/in the darkness of dykes like the headlights/of a dense green traffic streaming south."
RORY BRENNAN's poems in The Old Rapallo (Salmon, £5.99) are also possessed of a rare and marvellous lyrical buoyancy, coupled with a distinct and concerned alertness which informs and directs them. "H Blockages", a sharp and blackly comic ditty dedicated to Robert Greacen, taps out a humorous enough tune about how myths surround identities in absurd ways, ending bleakly in two lines: "Spell holocaust for us,/Says the man with the gun.
Brennan's lovely poem, "Elsewhere and Clonmacnoise", in memory of Conleth Ellis - a teacher in St Malachy's College, Belfast, when I was there - is a fitting tribute, to a dedicated and sadly missed poet; "John Betjeman in Dublin in the War" recalls how "From peeling Hall and whitewashed farm,/John Betjeman fine etched them all/ While the world yelled out in war alarm."
And any novice poet who thinks rhyme is dead and has no purpose should be made to learn off Brennan's "Timelock" by heart, reciting it out loud each time he or she feels the urge to put pen to paper. A sort of mantra to induce a true poetic trance?