Poetry: Kevin Kiely, like quite a few of his literary contemporaries, has a reputation as strong in Europe and the US as it is here. To this first full collection of poems, then, with their almost encyclopaedic range of subjects and references - beginning with the Buddha and ending with Thomas MacGreevy - including Pound, Poussin, Seán O'Sullivan RHA, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and ". . . old café songs of Paris".
Kiely uses his line breaks to counterpoint the rhythmical undercurrent, a technique that can be irritating at first. Yet his lyrical cadences and shifting intonations draw you into a mysterious intimacy. Virtually every poem is a mystery tour of allusion, now topical, now literary, some distanced, some personal. The tension between subject and form is generally well-managed, but these poems require, and deserve, careful reading.
The title poem, Breakfast with Sylvia Plath, carries the reader forward with fierce impetus from one hectic image to the next, slipping in and out from narrative to interior monologue, a psychic whirlwind that becomes an affecting rendering of Plath's suicide. A similar distanced withholding of emotion makes Elegy a powerful expression of grief.
The governing tone, however, is a kind of world-weariness, cleverly mediated by this Ulsterman's sharp insights and quick wit. Typically, he interfaces the ironic Requiem for Kurt Cobain with the witty Skimming Sam Beckett. Elegy confronts erotic reverie; Glendalough reflections face a comic Movie Treatment starring Euridice and a phone box by a lake. All in all, intriguing new work.
Maurice Harmon's forte is the dramatic narrative. He modifies his ironies with a sharply attuned sensibility, and thereby he tells a good tale. The title poem comprises about two-thirds of the collection. The narrator switches back and forth in history, from the fables of "naming" to the first encounters between the indigenous people and the pioneers, to the tragic betrayal of the Nez Perce tribal leader.
Broken Lights, Broken Lances, the poem's second section, relates how a visiting Irish academic in Oregon is led into "field research" on the culture of the regional Indians. As he interweaves American history with Irish and British literary references, he finds himself involved with a young American Indian student. The weaving motif develops into exchanges of lore between teacher and student. History and myth carry the narrative to its foreshadowed conclusion: the visiting Irish professor and the Indian girl become distanced from each other by differences in age, social status and culture.
The book's second section begins with a new year's resolution gone awry, and ends with a lament for the North Road (now mostly the M1), with its wry nostalgia for "the old road part of me,/ an artery strafed by rain, the bay/ from Skerries to Clogherhead a seething cauldron".
Out of the west rides Kevin Higgins, brandishing his first collection. He begins with broad declarative swathes, patched with mixed metaphors and wisecracks as old as your granny. He continues with vacuous social rhetoric that makes one's teeth grind. The general effect is of a kind of "bodhrán satire" banging away insistently at your eardrums, though the list of contents would lead you to expect a broad range of experience, imagery, allusion.
Higgins can sometimes be funny: The Satirist is funny; Knives, on the other hand, tries to be funny but pancake-lands on a cliche. The poet relies heavily on a sameness of treatment, regardless of the subject. It's significant that his major public recognition so far has been to win the Poetry Grand Slam at Cúirt in 2003. This kind of verse is composed to be read aloud. Many poems that read like whines could actually sound like cynical jibes; laments that seem to drip with self-pity on the page could sound like roars of outrage.
James J McAuley's New and Selected Poems was published by Dedalus Press earlier this year
Breakfast With Sylvia By Kevin Kiely Lagan Press, Belfast, 62pp. £7.95
The Doll With Two Backs, and Other Poems By Maurice Harmon Salmon Poetry, Co Clare, 72pp. €12
The Boy With No Face By Kevin Higgins Salmon Poetry, Co Clare, 69pp. €12