POETRY: Dulse, By Frank McGuinness, Gallery, 70pp. €11.95 READING FRANK McGuinness's new book of poetry, Dulse, I was reminded of something Robert Lowell once wrote about his mentor, the Agrarian poet Allen Tate, in many ways McGuinness's opposite, writes Richard Tillinghast.
Lowell praised a poetry that was "burly" and written in a style that "would take a man's full weight and that would bear his complete intelligence, passion, and subtlety". Those words describe pretty well what McGuinness is able to do. There is something burly, earthy and masculine here, a plain-spoken gift for getting right to the point, which must be one reward for the many years McGuinness has spent writing for the theatre, where there is little time for words that don't make something happen.
Along with the bluffness comes some rough erotic language which is both direct and elusive, because, while he is not shy about calling a spade a spade, McGuinness trusts poetry's ability to rely on the sensory image and its ability to convey meaning. Three lines from a poem called Amsterdam illustrate the point: "Cocks and arse were north and south,/ Senses sharp as greyhound's teeth,/ Amsterdam was red as beets." One of the book's most memorable uses of creative metaphor comes in a brief translation from Catullus, himself famous for not beating about the bush when evoking eros: "Watch that old boy, Vibennius,/ he'd steal the skin from your ass./ His son prefers gander to goose -/ we've all parked up his cul-de-sac."
One might be forgiven for wishing this collection did not contain so many occasional poems, often dedicated to particular persons, often with place names as titles: Newmarket, Leopardstown, the aforementioned Amsterdam followed by Rotterdam, as well as ventures into the New World such as Montreal and Wyoming.
But this poet's allusiveness and mercurial powers of association go a long way toward justifying the absence of a thread to sew the poems together. McGuinness pays us the compliment of leaving us on our own, like Hansel and Gretel without the trail of crumbs, to find our way through the forest. Wyoming is haunted by the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, the gay college student who was lured out of a cowboy bar in Laramie and brutally murdered, but on first reading the connection would not be obvious. The short poem thrives on its lack of explicit reference, yet makes a strong claim on the reader's emotions. It ends, "I will go to Wyoming./ I'll buy myself a beer. / They set fire to my hands,/ fire to my hair".
On a more fanciful note, it is a pleasure to watch the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling through the shopping mall outside Leopardstown, weaving the delicacies of a consumer society where "China tea sets were shattered into ploughshares" which "worked the fields at the gates of paradise" into an exhilarating vision of Eden, with "angelic hosts of daughters unborn /singing to four sons, I am Adam, I am Eve,/ returning from exile to Leopardstown".
It is not easy to convey briefly the leaps of imagination of poems where x can be tied to y by a very long thread. Newmarket, leading off with the challenging first line, "We are passing as if touch is a hoof", starts us thinking, by brilliant legerdemain, about chance, fate, luck, parenthood, and horse racing and how all these things are somehow related - at least if you are in a Frank McGuinness poem. Many parents must have felt, as this poem puts it, "thank God we're expert/ at playing mother and playing father./ We would know that starting a family/ is tantamount to sharing a secret/ we cannot divulge". To read McGuinness at his best is to experience, in the words of this poem, the "joy of engaging /in acts of saying nothing but saying /everything".
The New Life, poems by Richard Tillinghast, is published this month by Copper Beech Press in the US