issue 6 april 2017 a literary pamphlet €4 —1— Denaturation Jean Bleakney from selected poems (templar poetry, 2016) INTO FLIGHTSPOETRY Taken on its own, the fickle doorbell has no particular score to settle (a reluctant clapper? an ill-at-ease dome?) were it not part of a whole syndrome: the stubborn gate; flaking paint; cotoneaster camouflaging the house-number. Which is not to say the occupant doesn’t have (to hand) lubricant, secateurs, paint-scraper, an up-to-date shade card known by heart. It’s all part of the same deferral that leaves hanging baskets vulnerable; although, according to a botanist, for most plants, short-term wilt is really a protective mechanism. But surely every biological system has its limits? There’s no going back for egg white once it’s hit the fat. Yet, some people seem determined to stretch, to redefine those limits. Why are they so inclined? —2— INTO FLIGHTSPOETRY Taken on its own, the fickle doorbell has no particular score to settle by Thomas McCarthy (a reluctant clapper? an ill-at-ease dome?) were it not part of a whole syndrome: the stubborn gate; flaking paint; cotoneaster Tara Bergin This is Yarrow camouflaging the house-number. carcanet press, 2013 Which is not to say the occupant doesn’t have (to hand) lubricant, secateurs, paint-scraper, an up-to-date Jane Clarke The River shade card known by heart. bloodaxe books, 2015 It’s all part of the same deferral that leaves hanging baskets vulnerable; Adam Crothers Several Deer although, according to a botanist, carcanet press, 2016 for most plants, short-term wilt is really a protective mechanism. Paula Cunningham Heimlich’s Manoeuvre But surely every biological system smith/doorstop books, 2013 has its limits? There’s no going back for egg white once it’s hit the fat. ight now it is very difficult to begin and the undergraduate poetry audience, Yet, some people seem determined to stretch, to redefine a published life in Irish poetry: the then surfacing from a ten-year infatuation those limits. Why are they so inclined? market is fractured into regional, with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club almost sectarian, groups; and those Band, was chilled and nurturing. Nowadays, Rreaderships are sharper than at any time in the new poet must become like Lois in the last half century at least. One feels that Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September, guilty even the major publishers are vulnerable of emotional straying and wondering how to cliquish ‘capture’, shutting out any un- to begin a valued life. The answer must connected new poets. I may be wrong. I surely be: make an impact or die. Nowadays hope I am. Those of us who took flight a poet is forced to make an impact even into poetry in the late 1970s were blessed before they can settle into that singular indeed. The world was wider and kinder; personal narrative that’s the consolation —3— of a life in poetry. Now, you must be toned Only I speak. and impactful from the start. These four Only I say: Shh, shh. debut collections, from three influential Only I say: It’s so hot, little one, publishers, are exemplary types of that it’s so sour, little thing. necessary new tone in poetry. One can see why they got published. Is it possible to Roethke in I Am! Says The Lamb could teach such a tone in a workshop situation, hardly have done better than these. Her I wonder? Is it possible to make someone ‘Sonnets for Tracey’ are also a marvel, the sound as good as this: rhythm and tone here are like some of the best lyrics of the late Patrick Galvin; Here is your talisman I say, I whisper painfully aware that life is staged, dramatic. hold it in your good hand and sing one Her Tracey poems are beautiful, bohemian of your songs for me. in the manner of Carolyn Forché’s ‘Burning How does it go? Oh how does it go again? the Tomato Worms’ or ‘Alfansa.’ For sure, There is blood on my hand, la la, Tara Bergin’s the real thing. There is blood on my hand, la, la. Your talisman, I say, a foul flower. Jane Clarke won the prestigious Listowel Writers’ Week Collection Prize for The Tara Bergin’s This is Yarrow really is a River, now published with accolades masterpiece. The poem quoted above, from Paula Meehan, Gillian Clarke and ‘Himalayan Balsam for a Soldier’, is clear, Anne Enright – making any further clean, mystical – not just one part but modest review seem superfluous. But it’s something emotionally interlocking the important to mark the book’s presence in parts, something between tone and setting, our bookshops, and to mark it hopefully, sets her clockwork turning on the page. because this is poetry of exceptional beauty ‘Once Aoife ceases to argue / about the fact and accomplishment. Her material is not that we have nothing in our mouths, / we beautiful; she is keenly aware from the can get on with the task of learning’ is how evidence here that she has exchanged the she puts it in ‘Acting School;’ and there’s hard slog of a Western farm for the wide this impatient energy everywhere, giving Eastern barley-fields of poetry; knowing, as her poetry a special charge, a linguistic Heraclitus wrote, that she cannot cross the propulsion. Her method is sometimes a same river twice: Medieval riddle or an Elizabethan song, the sound of a dulcimer being plucked beneath The wire-meshed sunlight on lime- washed the surface of life. Hers is a really intriguing, walls, questing technique, both destructive and slash hooks and scythes, the rusted biscuit gifted, seen flashing in ‘Portrait of the tins Artist’s Wife as a Younger Woman’: of clout and stud nails on a sagging shelf … —4— – ‘Harness Room’ would be tygers burning Blake, would be the book begging the self- This is the enriched material of very little. publisher for edits, for heaven’s sake, It is almost a lost world, but with a sharp, breath-taking irony of being one of the very would be the reciprocation of the love few poetic witness-documents of an almost that seeketh wealth to please. Pilgrim Brethren eye cast upon Irish rural There’s no time not to know your place. I material. This is the Irish farm, but not smoke the breeze. Kavanagh, it is the Pilgrim place: And that’s less than the half of it, but it’s the Zacchaeus in the sycamore tree, book in microcosm, a work of tremendous the loaves and fishes that grew energy where each half-line is made a song entire by the decorations and grace notes and grew to feed the multitudes. around each word. As in Muldoon, the Stories for people who worked the soil, meanings fire and backfire like wayward firecrackers. Never was so much meaning who watched over flocks of sheep. packed into small verses; pour the oils – ‘The Blue Bible’ of reading on almost anything in this collection and whole worlds mushroom. It Bells toll here from ‘Enclosed’ to ‘Dust,’ but is annoyingly impressive and, I must say, Jane Clarke has broken away into a world I hate this young fellow whatever club he’s where formal and near perfect lyrics are playing at tonight. The technique and the created. Here is a poet who has survived tomfoolery is reminiscent of Muldoon, family and farm to hear ‘choirs make frosty certainly, but there’s a Martian riff or two nights sing’ (‘Sing’), a poet who has ‘left the going on here, a touch of very early Craig grip of poverty / on the bench’ (‘Every tree’), Raine; that onion, the memory of past to arrive at that point of city cross-currents poetic glories in sunlit England, can still where strangers find love: make a young poet cry technically, as in ‘Come’: We persist with talk What used to be right is now wed. as if we didn’t know the river rises The sheep in their sheet-dresses, bullet- and falls with the tide, holed; centuries of dark-muffled grasp-ache, revealing, here held. then hiding the walls. The window is widowing. Her pane a – ‘First Love’ migraine of white. Clarke’s work here is a marvellous kind of Need I go on? Not really. Several Deer is arrival, a redemptive act where memory has such a mixture of irony and malaprop, meaning and the heart need never be kept of MacNeice splendour and Audenesque indoors. knowingness, that it will annoy as many readers as it thrills. But I’m in Crothers’ Adam Crothers, another insufferably good fan club, I have to say, and I would never Ulsterman, is a street blackguard like want to refute a poet like this, a poet of the Muldoon. His ‘Blues for Marnie Stern’ goes new post-Troubles era, who, unmistakably like this: assembled on Ulster soil, has been given a metallic spray-job in some garage near the Its face is stocked with tics. To break it English fens. —5— And yet again, for something completely word) of life’s vulnerabilities; a sort of wise different, there’s Paula Cunningham. Her pity for the human condition. The poetry Heimlich’s Manoeuvre teems with abundant here is a very long prayer – much further life, absolutely teeming with encounters than a mere meditation – upon life, upon and obsessions, with things as various as time passing and physical deterioration. birds of Sri Lanka and lumps of radium in This gives her sensuousness a special power; Pierre Curie’s breast pocket.