"WHAT oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed". Try applying Pope's definition to the following images by John Ennis: to Eurydice as "a danceless girl facing Monday"; to "the hot pancreas of villages"; to "Twas worth it, all this twisting and turning in the tedious Hebrus/Worse than the sperm of spina bifida in the epididymis"; to "My transistor on the garden wall grows fratricidal with decay"; to juniper cones "no bigger than antibiotics"; to spilled bee semen as fine threads blowing in the wind like a rent trousseau".
What these images share is not the "oft" but the never before of thought. So John Ennis's way of thinking and seeing is new in the world - is there a more exciting thing to say about a poet? But in these circumstances the "well expressed" is problematical: how, in terra incognita, to distinguish between mirage and new found land - what, for instance, does a "rent trousseau" mean?
On the evidence of this book, Ennis is a genuine explorer of the wonderful and strange, a witness reporting back on what Blake called "the lost traveller's dream under the hill". He aspires to "the courage of the solo on the words of every poem" and he does so not for himself alone but in the hope of "Status and dominion for the commoner./To this I pledged honour and my heart". He is a democrat in his ivory tower, solitary for the sake of common sense, yet aware of disappointment: "Populus Meus, I know the words by heart; the worst is/I have no people."
There is, however, a fly in the ointment. It's hard to believe that someone as gifted and as culturally knowledgeable as Ennis - his re telling of the Orpheus legend, for instance, is immensely erudite can be so woefully slipshod in the making of verse (and he's not helped in this book by deplorable proof reading and type setting). His voice is naturally musical, yet he rhymes badly; he has no metre; his line is often so long that it falls apart; and his enjambments are often terrible. Plus, he sometimes doesn't make sense; this, for instance: "Orpheus was mooning over the girl he adored to blank/ Distraction while all of heartened listening hades Pluto's/Cerberus snarled backward".
But then, and often with the same awkwardness, he can do this: "May with the mistle/ Thrush syringes even the inner ear/As the bronze of the horizon/ Blends with the chamaecyparis/ Golden to its nest covert heart". And this, about Molly Malone: "The black sole of my dream sips/ Me, eyes to the left of its lips/ Mouth cruel, small, a cartoonist's". And this: "the unobtrusive hills/Modest with their first blackbird beaks/Of gorse". And this: "A mote or two of dust lands on my sarcophagus/As empires and civilisations bloom and pass./A rumour starts near Syria. Three men on trees". And this visually and aurally beautiful image: "His coddled apiary/Darkened the mulberry valley".
Ennis is a Modernist, influenced by Hopkins, Hart Crane and Ezra Pound, but he is also curiously old fashioned and parochial. Irish and non Irish readers alike will often find themselves at a loss to understand his allusions, and there are no notes to help them, whether the difficulty lies in discerning the link between the Salmon of Knowledge and salmonella or appreciating the significance of John Jordan's swollen knee.
Ennis writes knowledgably about Greek myth, Irish history, religion (he seems to have studied for the priesthood), and with a knowledge heightened by love about trees and bees. For him - "Care blooms like liriodendron, the tulip tree;/Desire, like early lonicera tatarica". As a personality he is, I would say, the most interesting and original poet of his generation. As a poet he is, despite his technical shortcomings, a frequently glorious loner.
Conleth O'Connor (1947-93) left a small body of work which is marked by an astringent, and sometimes brutal sardonicism. According to Anthony Cronin's persuasive preface, he had "the courage and integrity of the naysayer", a feeling that is "not far from elation". Nay saying in poetry is something of a contradiction - for a poet the only true no is silence - but O'Connor managed it, if not the elation, consistently and without the sentimentality that often underlies anger and disappointment.
Sam Harrison, born 1920 in Armagh, spent most of his working life in Geneva. He appeared in the Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry in 1949 and this is his first full collection. Heavily influenced by the early Auden, his work is unassertive and gentle, yet always conscious that the "child with murder in his heart" lives close to home and that we are all "gathered in one vast machine and hurried/relentlessly towards the dumb horizon".