It's tempting to house two books of contemporary Irish poetry together in search of some specious connection. The task of reviewing both Vona Groake's Other People's Houses and Gerard Fanning's Working for the Government defeats that small hope. Their birth dates are more than 10 years apart (they are not, in any sense, schoolfellows), and looking transatlantically at this engaging work, it's hard to find some instant affinity in their methods, their voices and their themes.
Fanning's second collection is elegantly published by Dedalus, but some typographical errors, which raise the bar even higher than that to which we're glumly accustomed in the US (George Eliot becomes "George Elliot"), create a problem in the close reading required of his musical and supple line. The reader of this book needs an OED at close range without the added confusion of misspellings.
Where a title poem can often be trusted to unlock the entrance to a work, or disclose some larger intention, Working for the Government left me reeling on the threshold. Fanning's preamble already warns us of a poet "like a limpet recording its fastidious journeys". A limpet is indeed a "marine gastropod clinging to rocks with its low conical shell always open beneath" - perhaps a good listener, but not the most communicative of creatures.
The title poem is on its way to a more forbidding statement, given our understanding of the work of bureaucracies as mysterious, inscrutable and indecipherable except to a few initiates with access to the codebook. In one of his best poems, A Red City Journal, Fanning asks:
What are these signatures that cannot be undone? then remarks:
We guard our language like a foreign tongue.
So he does. There's nothing wrong with a poet's use of a technical lexicon, drawn from some special expertise, when it's consistent and discrete, but the "pellmet," the "femerell", the "callows" and the "guillemot" don't issue from the same vocabulary. I still don't know what this persuasive talent, promising so much but leaving the reader parched and befuddled, has on his mind. His limpet is hanging fast to some slippery rock, muttering an exotic word for a censer: ("thurible"), and guarding his secrets. Fanning is too gifted to scrounge for words like "contrails" just to invoke crystals from the atmosphere. The civil service is a hermetic trade, but why should the author of the lovely She Scratches His Wrist imitate its worst habits of language: the mingy and the costive? Poets have a licence to rummage the dictionaries of the recondite, if so they choose, but to mingle them so recklessly to obtain an impenetrable polyglot patois raises a further barrier to a talent which already reveals too little of its purpose.
Reading Vona Groake's Other People's Houses, I tried to remember a remark about art as "a house that wants to be haunted". Groake takes the reader on a hospitable tour of domestic architecture, with a craft which shows her mastery of slant rhyme. In a poem which sets down the "House Rules" - that is, the grammar of the house and its odd corners of experience, she says:
The floors uphold the building of the house and, while supportive, may also raze its aspirations. Subversively, of course.
This poet expands a theme both new and already tired (the poetry of the woman's body) into a vision of real dwelling places. The Freudians remind us that houses, in women's dreams, are an extension of the body, but Groake isn't wedded to so banal a leap of imagery. In Open House, she has taken a land hunger vivid in the history of Irish poetry and carried it through to a notion of "house hunger": an appetite for order, prosperity and well-being, whose frustration may now get its due. Groake's poems take possession of this subject - real estate and its shadows of unreality - as she looks with acuity and wryness at the good life and its queasy heirs. Frank Ormsby's Moving In, some decades ago, gave us a foretaste of that trouble: Groake's talent has taken it into new rooms.
The fluent and accomplished Gerard Fanning paces broad fields, an enigmatic surveyor with an appetite for the exotic cultivar. Groake, no complacent poet of domestic surfaces, wittily explores a tenancy of derelict holiday homes and abandoned fantasies. Work at their respective stages of development is sometimes dismissed as derivative. On the contrary, I look forward to a display, down the road, from these separate poets, of more hauntings and more ghosts from the great tradition and myth which nourished them thus far. To whom are they speaking so subtly and so well, but with a resonance subdued into near silence?
Katharine Washburn is a writer and translator. She is co-editor of World Poetry, An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Times, published by W.W. Norton in 1998.