Padraic Fiacc's writing life spans more than 50 years: at its heart lies Belfast; the old industrial Belfast, not the new one. Fiercely individualistic, Fiacc recalls Francis Bacon, the painter, or William Burroughs, in the intensity and focus of his poetic vision. Fiacc's earliest "Celtic Twilight" poems were, even then, shot through with the shocking understanding that life is a kind of ludicrous ordeal. Whether recording his young, expectant emigrant life in America, beautifully captured in Semper Vacare with a re-run of his poem, "Standing Water(A Rag)":
We stare at the brick Halifax sky. A yellow wolf cold
Sits on the leaden Atlantic: A new world horizon . . . Old
Morning, you are the night of life
Fiacc's poetry is starkly emblematic in its use of landscape and unapologetically idiomatic in language. The inflections of Belfast speech patterns are in Fiacc no mere stylistic tic but are at the very core of his writing. Indeed the voice that "says" these poems - grotesque, tragic-comic - embodies the historical experience of a city divided into once invisible districts of often great poverty, communal loyalties, perverse, bizarre and heroic lives, backlit by a countryside of stunning contrasts from hillside to loughshore:
The sky, a little light, goes on and off,
The streets, all day, the sky all night
Impale gold sun with pewter grey Cold, a moon:
The black look of the dead.
Fiacc's broken-up, resistant lines of verse (anti-verse) carry echoes of a tradition which includes Beckett and Berryman as much as Padraic Colum (an early mentor) and the tricksier poems of Austin Clarke. Read "Death Comes to Me" and you will see what I mean: a dream song becomes dirge becomes manic ballad:
How red his face is, then how grey.
He hugs me hard.
There's something `cuddly' here And something I don't know what.
`Uncle, uncle' he cries. (It's weird.) `Will ya try on me new hawt?'
No one writing in English does this kind of thing better than Fiacc. His is a unique, destabilising, unrepentant voice which makes much of the talk about dispossession in Irish writing silly. When the historians come to analyse why and how Belfast lurched into such prolonged self-destructive violence and survived, Fiacc will be one of the key witnesses on behalf of what used to be called "The Ordinary People". We might also get some idea if and where this extraordinary poet fits into the overall picture of Irish writing this vanishing century.
Gerald Dawe is a poet who teaches at Trinity College. His new collection, The Morning Train, will be published shortly by The Gallery Press