Prose 1

When Derek Mahon joked, in 1974, that “The time is coming fast, if it isn’t here already, when the question ‘Is so-and-so really an Irish writer’ will clear a room in seconds”, he was predicting, albeit tongue in cheek, a backlash again the sudden success of Irish poetry on the world stage. Such a backlash did not materialise, but the modern developments in Ireland, coupled with the steady dissipation of the Northern Irish Troubles, has led poets in Ireland to seek a broader cultural heritage for their work; being an italicised ‘Irish’ poet, in other words, is no longer enough. Gerard Smyth, Matthew Sweeney, Peter Fallon and Frank McGuinness, all in their fifties with numerous collections published, have looked to European and American models for influence and subject matter; their newest collections exhibit this in international landscapes and histories, while also revealing a return to their own localities, their past and present homes.

The poems in Gerard Smyth’s sixth collection, The Mirror Tent, evoke people and places that, in the words of ‘Written from Memory’, have “vanished/into nostalgia, reminiscence, a lament for the past”. The Dublin he admires is the Dublin of his father’s generation and earlier, of long-gone brewers, cobblers and bargemen, cloth merchants and Singer sewing-machines; of a grandmother who “never allowed the electric in” (‘Dollars’); of emigrants who became “slaves to the Manor Lord” (‘From the Archive’). This terrain is well-trodden by other poets, but Smyth writes with great fervour and revels in relaying these memories with all the senses. In ‘Old Haunts’ he contends that “Old haunts are best” and so takes us on a journey around Dublin where “bellringers ache in the Dean’s cathedral” and the “whiff of Liffey sediment,/risen from the riverbed, hangs over the market”, while in ‘Dreamsong’ a grandmother holds “ingots of turf”, an image that cunningly suggests both their shape and worth.

Concern with the past can often be unsettling, suggesting, as Smyth does, a lack of hope for the future, or enjoyment in the present. It is refreshing then to find some poems that offer a nod towards present contentment:

the kitchen is the best place to be

with its coffee aroma, brewing tea,

prattle of the family and purr

of the icebox working its alchemy.

(‘Vladimir Holan was Right’)

In contrast to this, the home of his childhood was quiet, for in ‘Written from Memory’, the immaculate recreation of men returning home from the pub, “dressed in the livery of their Sunday wardrobe”, ends with the lines “Over dinner they’d say nothing./Sometimes it was wise to be taciturn.”. That taciturnity is a mark of Smyth’s poems too; there is a constant sense that, intentionally, something is being held back. Leaving things unsaid can often be effective, but it can also result in readers wanting more. In ‘Once, on Long Island…’, for example, an “octogenarian” telling “a long family narrative” has “unlocked a big portmanteau of family recollections”, but we are not invited to share these recollections, and are thus denied the real nuggets.

Matthew Sweeney’s poems also end rather abruptly, as if the last sentence is intended as a punch-line, or, more accurately, a comic’s deadpan understatement. This has been the signature of Sweeney’s humour throughout his career, and Black Moon is a very funny (and dark) book, leaving one chortling without entirely knowing why. In ‘Coming Home’ a man floats on a coracle towards Ireland, and the comic-timing, mixed with social and political currencies, is perfect:

and as he veered for the pier

he stood up and saluted

the statue at the harbour mouth,

while whistling ‘The Soldier’s Song’.

This earned him a few shouts

from a staggering drunk

and cheering and clapping

from a gang of smoking girls.

Other poems, such as ‘Moscow’ and ‘Practice’, where a person plays golf on an iceberg with “the penguins staring/but not applauding” before simply returning to the boat again, give one the sensation there must be some greater underlying meaning, while at the same time leaving one wondering if they are merely whimsical.

That is possibly a criticism that is levied at Sweeney too much, and unjustly in the light of what this book is saying—and how it says it—about the times in which we live. War, weaponry and needless death proliferate; again and again poems open with violent images: “Over the heads of the firing squad” (‘The Snowy Owl’), “Somewhere in these woods a crashed plane/is buried in undergrowth” (‘Excavation’), “Alongside the blown-up tank/wearing a too-big, bloodstained uniform/sleeps the boy” (‘Sleep’), “Punching and kicking the tall man/ who held her off the ground” (‘Captured’). ‘Primetime’ examines the media-representation of war and the saturation of war images through the horrific vision of a dead soldier’s head being controlled by “the leading ventriloquist,/fluent in American/after a year at Stanford”, and saying:

‘I have a message

for holiday-king Bush’

[…]

‘We need a holiday from here,

all of us, right now’.

The anger towards the current conflict in Iraq here is evident (and that fluency in ‘American’ particularly galling). It is increased by the fact that only this poem, and the Second World War poem ‘The Soldiers’, refer to real events directly. Masking his poems behind undefined geographies and chronologies, Sweeney highlights the repetitious nature of conflict, but there is an overwhelming sense that, for him, things are worse now than ever:

and nothing would

surprise us less than to hear a gunshot,

and as things stand we wouldn’t

be able to do a single thing about it.

(‘The Thing’)

There is, however, a more optimistic vein that creeps in halfway through Black Moon. Poems such as ‘The Ascent’ and ‘Procession’ document the brazen pleasure of old men keeping going, while ‘Sunrise on the Black Sea’ ends “time, then, to speak to the sun,/tell it today’s show was a stunner”. Perhaps responding to his poem ‘The Soldiers’—“Send the soldiers in, mein Kamerad./That immigrant den needs cleaning up”—‘Borders’ details a journey across Europe, from the Ukraine, through Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, then Berwick in northern England (“hearing Scottish accents in English mouths”), until, finally, “I decided I needed to be born/as my mother approached the Irish border”. It is the chance of birth that dictates many of the poems published here: the vitriol of the conflict pieces, and the inter-national as opposed to national outlook of his poems of human experience.

Peter Fallon’s The Gallery Press has been producing superb books for nearly forty years, and his own collection, The Company of Horses, the first since a new and selected in 1998, is no exception. Reveries to trees and animals and the daily grind of farm life, Fallon’s poems are reminiscent of Ted Hughes’ Moortown Diary, especially in the commotion between love of nature and the realities of agricultural practice. It is courteous verse, both to its readers and to the world it is evoking. Where there are poems that seem to suggest the current global environmental situation, such as ‘Sacrilege’ and ‘November Rain’, there are also poems such as ‘Proprietary’, which asks who owns the land and buildings, before being met with “the verdict/of the wind—/trees and brambles,/weeds and grasses.”. In ‘Fair Game’ the instances when humans and animals come into conflict is depicted without sermonising, and with great precision:

As if he’d hit

a wall in air,

or slipped on ice,

or simply tripped mid-

flight,

a pheasant stumbles—

then we hear the shot.

All this beside

that stretch of land

in which a farmhand’s

fencing.

We see before we hear

the thud.

He’s straining wire

as if he’s tuning strings

of a long guitar.

And then we come

across the body—a fluster

in the mud,

a final flare

before the fire falters.

In many of the poems, such as the vignettes ‘Ballynahinch Postcards’ and the excellent ‘Depending on Water’, Fallon employs this intricate yet unforced rhyme scheme, often irregularly changing the scheme’s order to achieve rhythms and intonations of natural speech. The spirit of Robert Frost, in fact, is present throughout the collection, especially in ‘A Flowering’, a delicately written meditation on man’s relationship with the natural world:

I knew them shy, prized,

arboreal,

from the realm of heraldry.

Were they real at all,

I wondered, till I stood,

a spellbound witness,

downwind of a pair of them.

To have watched them is a richness

I’ve hoarded

of all my days and doings […]

Birds too are a popular subject for Fallon and he beautifully captures their flight and song, such as “Owl wings/say hush to evening light’s/witherings” (‘Silver Fir’), the “one part/chatter, two parts cackle” of starlings (‘A Refrain’) and the crane which “unfolds/the parcel of himself/and starts to gather up//the vast contraption of his wings” (‘Crane’). The return of starlings in ‘A Refrain’ evidently fills the poet with glee: “‘Where have you been, starling?/What tales you’d have!’/Our pleas and prayers for you are, Sing!”. As with Smyth and Sweeney, however, there is a sense of an impending loss. Fallon ends his book with the line ‘I have loved my term/on earth’ (‘Day and Night’), which is surprising both in its suggestion of finality and its simple rendering of satisfaction. There are, indeed, few collections that look at the world with such warmth and uninhibited optimism:

The days will stretch and we survive

with losses, yes, and lessons too,

to reap the honey of the hive

of history. The yield of what is given

insists a choice—to live; to thrive.

(‘A Winter Solstice’)

Frank McGuiness’ Dulse, also from The Gallery Press, is altogether different in tone. Often enlisting the voices of historical and mythological characters, he examines sexual and gender politics to brutal effect. Personal life, too, becomes mythologized, in poems such as ‘Dulse’, ‘Not’, and the moving ‘Galleon’, where a motif of the Atlantic swelling around the poet’s Donegal birthplace puts his parents’ differences down to a preference for living above or below the water: “Sent from Atlantis to forage soft dulse,/she was my mother, my father was dulse.” (‘Dulse’). McGuinness is best known as the writer of groundbreaking political plays such as Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme and Carthaginians, and something of the emphases in theatrical language comes through in the poet’s stark iambs and austere consonant sounds:

Fresh milk from the plains of Islamic Armagh

quenched the thirst of circumcised alcoholics

who once had the gumption to rise and poke sticks

at brutes and beasts dolled to the nines, ra-ra

skirts up, body stockings down, shaved of all hair

raising Cain cross the border in the land of Nod,

dirtying the temples of Chaldean gods

carousing till cocks crowed the fate of Ur.

(‘Ur’)

This short piece is both funny and chilling, and, like many of the poems in Dulse, brings with it a satisfactory sense of mystery, of a need to question. It is striking that while the language is old-fashioned (“gumption”, “dolled to the nines”, “raising Cain”, even “brutes and beasts”) the tempo and tone make it extremely contemporary—snappy, to the point, like a modern advertisement.

The best pieces here, however, are McGuinness’ longer historical poems, laden with intrigue and juicy facts. ‘Calcium’ patiently details the life of Johann Gutenberg, who, half-mad with abandonment and abuse, discovered “that paper—printing—printing on paper/stemmed from the lack of calcium/as he chewed on the stubs of his fingers” and “From this/revelation he wrote his Bible”. ‘The Doctor’s Daughter in Antwerp’, set in a similar period, does two things with great skill: it truly brings to life the Belgium of yore so that you can almost taste and smell it, and, through the voice of the eponymous daughter, it creates a measured philosophical debate about faith and science. The layering is wonderful; faced with a world where “the rough consolation of science” was of less use than patients believing her father was a miracle-worker, the daughter changes her position, asking at one point “Was my father god?” then later saying “I no longer believe in Belgium nor in God.”. By the time we arrive at the end of the poem—the end of her physical and mental journey—she is now stoical: “I say to him, You are forgiven, you who died,/who did your best, who did not work miracles.”. It is an engulfing, entirely convincing piece of writing.






	Home \| About \| Publications \| Poems and Links \| Readings \| Prose


		*Gerard Smyth, The Mirror Tent* (Dedalus, 2007), ISBN 978-1-904556-59-6, €11, 75pp Matthew Sweeney, Black Moon (Cape, 2007), ISBN 978-0-22408-092-7, £9, 68pp Peter Fallon, The Company of Horses (The Gallery Press, 2007), ISBN 978-1-85235-423-7, €11.95, 65pp** Frank McGuinness, Dulse (The Gallery Press, 2007), ISBN 978-1-85235-437-4, €11.95, 70pp Originally published in The Warwick Review Vol. 2. No. 1 2008



		When Derek Mahon joked, in 1974, that “The time is coming fast, if it isn’t here already, when the question ‘Is so-and-so really an Irish writer’ will clear a room in seconds”, he was predicting, albeit tongue in cheek, a backlash again the sudden success of Irish poetry on the world stage. Such a backlash did not materialise, but the modern developments in Ireland, coupled with the steady dissipation of the Northern Irish Troubles, has led poets in Ireland to seek a broader cultural heritage for their work; being an italicised ‘Irish’ poet, in other words, is no longer enough. Gerard Smyth, Matthew Sweeney, Peter Fallon and Frank McGuinness, all in their fifties with numerous collections published, have looked to European and American models for influence and subject matter; their newest collections exhibit this in international landscapes and histories, while also revealing a return to their own localities, their past and present homes. The poems in Gerard Smyth’s sixth collection, The Mirror Tent, evoke people and places that, in the words of ‘Written from Memory’, have “vanished/into nostalgia, reminiscence, a lament for the past”. The Dublin he admires is the Dublin of his father’s generation and earlier, of long-gone brewers, cobblers and bargemen, cloth merchants and Singer sewing-machines; of a grandmother who “never allowed the electric in” (‘Dollars’); of emigrants who became “slaves to the Manor Lord” (‘From the Archive’). This terrain is well-trodden by other poets, but Smyth writes with great fervour and revels in relaying these memories with all the senses. In ‘Old Haunts’ he contends that “Old haunts are best” and so takes us on a journey around Dublin where “bellringers ache in the Dean’s cathedral” and the “whiff of Liffey sediment,/risen from the riverbed, hangs over the market”, while in ‘Dreamsong’ a grandmother holds “ingots of turf”, an image that cunningly suggests both their shape and worth. Concern with the past can often be unsettling, suggesting, as Smyth does, a lack of hope for the future, or enjoyment in the present. It is refreshing then to find some poems that offer a nod towards present contentment: the kitchen is the best place to be with its coffee aroma, brewing tea, prattle of the family and purr of the icebox working its alchemy. (‘Vladimir Holan was Right’) In contrast to this, the home of his childhood was quiet, for in ‘Written from Memory’, the immaculate recreation of men returning home from the pub, “dressed in the livery of their Sunday wardrobe”, ends with the lines “Over dinner they’d say nothing./Sometimes it was wise to be taciturn.”. That taciturnity is a mark of Smyth’s poems too; there is a constant sense that, intentionally, something is being held back. Leaving things unsaid can often be effective, but it can also result in readers wanting more. In ‘Once, on Long Island…’, for example, an “octogenarian” telling “a long family narrative” has “unlocked a big portmanteau of family recollections”, but we are not invited to share these recollections, and are thus denied the real nuggets. Matthew Sweeney’s poems also end rather abruptly, as if the last sentence is intended as a punch-line, or, more accurately, a comic’s deadpan understatement. This has been the signature of Sweeney’s humour throughout his career, and Black Moon is a very funny (and dark) book, leaving one chortling without entirely knowing why. In ‘Coming Home’ a man floats on a coracle towards Ireland, and the comic-timing, mixed with social and political currencies, is perfect: and as he veered for the pier he stood up and saluted the statue at the harbour mouth, while whistling ‘The Soldier’s Song’. This earned him a few shouts from a staggering drunk and cheering and clapping from a gang of smoking girls. Other poems, such as ‘Moscow’ and ‘Practice’, where a person plays golf on an iceberg with “the penguins staring/but not applauding” before simply returning to the boat again, give one the sensation there must be some greater underlying meaning, while at the same time leaving one wondering if they are merely whimsical. That is possibly a criticism that is levied at Sweeney too much, and unjustly in the light of what this book is saying—and how it says it—about the times in which we live. War, weaponry and needless death proliferate; again and again poems open with violent images: “Over the heads of the firing squad” (‘The Snowy Owl’), “Somewhere in these woods a crashed plane/is buried in undergrowth” (‘Excavation’), “Alongside the blown-up tank/wearing a too-big, bloodstained uniform/sleeps the boy” (‘Sleep’), “Punching and kicking the tall man/ who held her off the ground” (‘Captured’). ‘Primetime’ examines the media-representation of war and the saturation of war images through the horrific vision of a dead soldier’s head being controlled by “the leading ventriloquist,/fluent in American/after a year at Stanford”, and saying: ‘I have a message for holiday-king Bush’ […] ‘We need a holiday from here, all of us, right now’. The anger towards the current conflict in Iraq here is evident (and that fluency in ‘American’ particularly galling). It is increased by the fact that only this poem, and the Second World War poem ‘The Soldiers’, refer to real events directly. Masking his poems behind undefined geographies and chronologies, Sweeney highlights the repetitious nature of conflict, but there is an overwhelming sense that, for him, things are worse now than ever: and nothing would surprise us less than to hear a gunshot, and as things stand we wouldn’t be able to do a single thing about it. (‘The Thing’) There is, however, a more optimistic vein that creeps in halfway through Black Moon. Poems such as ‘The Ascent’ and ‘Procession’ document the brazen pleasure of old men keeping going, while ‘Sunrise on the Black Sea’ ends “time, then, to speak to the sun,/tell it today’s show was a stunner”. Perhaps responding to his poem ‘The Soldiers’—“Send the soldiers in, mein Kamerad./That immigrant den needs cleaning up”—‘Borders’ details a journey across Europe, from the Ukraine, through Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, then Berwick in northern England (“hearing Scottish accents in English mouths”), until, finally, “I decided I needed to be born/as my mother approached the Irish border”. It is the chance of birth that dictates many of the poems published here: the vitriol of the conflict pieces, and the inter-national as opposed to national outlook of his poems of human experience. Peter Fallon’s The Gallery Press has been producing superb books for nearly forty years, and his own collection, The Company of Horses, the first since a new and selected in 1998, is no exception. Reveries to trees and animals and the daily grind of farm life, Fallon’s poems are reminiscent of Ted Hughes’ Moortown Diary, especially in the commotion between love of nature and the realities of agricultural practice. It is courteous verse, both to its readers and to the world it is evoking. Where there are poems that seem to suggest the current global environmental situation, such as ‘Sacrilege’ and ‘November Rain’, there are also poems such as ‘Proprietary’, which asks who owns the land and buildings, before being met with “the verdict/of the wind—/trees and brambles,/weeds and grasses.”. In ‘Fair Game’ the instances when humans and animals come into conflict is depicted without sermonising, and with great precision: As if he’d hit a wall in air, or slipped on ice, or simply tripped mid- flight, a pheasant stumbles— then we hear the shot. All this beside that stretch of land in which a farmhand’s fencing. We see before we hear the thud. He’s straining wire as if he’s tuning strings of a long guitar. And then we come across the body—a fluster in the mud, a final flare before the fire falters. In many of the poems, such as the vignettes ‘Ballynahinch Postcards’ and the excellent ‘Depending on Water’, Fallon employs this intricate yet unforced rhyme scheme, often irregularly changing the scheme’s order to achieve rhythms and intonations of natural speech. The spirit of Robert Frost, in fact, is present throughout the collection, especially in ‘A Flowering’, a delicately written meditation on man’s relationship with the natural world: I knew them shy, prized, arboreal, from the realm of heraldry. Were they real at all, I wondered, till I stood, a spellbound witness, downwind of a pair of them. To have watched them is a richness I’ve hoarded of all my days and doings […] Birds too are a popular subject for Fallon and he beautifully captures their flight and song, such as “Owl wings/say hush to evening light’s/witherings” (‘Silver Fir’), the “one part/chatter, two parts cackle” of starlings (‘A Refrain’) and the crane which “unfolds/the parcel of himself/and starts to gather up//the vast contraption of his wings” (‘Crane’). The return of starlings in ‘A Refrain’ evidently fills the poet with glee: “‘Where have you been, starling?/What tales you’d have!’/Our pleas and prayers for you are, Sing!”. As with Smyth and Sweeney, however, there is a sense of an impending loss. Fallon ends his book with the line ‘I have loved my term/on earth’ (‘Day and Night’), which is surprising both in its suggestion of finality and its simple rendering of satisfaction. There are, indeed, few collections that look at the world with such warmth and uninhibited optimism: The days will stretch and we survive with losses, yes, and lessons too, to reap the honey of the hive of history. The yield of what is given insists a choice—to live; to thrive. (‘A Winter Solstice’) Frank McGuiness’ Dulse, also from The Gallery Press, is altogether different in tone. Often enlisting the voices of historical and mythological characters, he examines sexual and gender politics to brutal effect. Personal life, too, becomes mythologized, in poems such as ‘Dulse’, ‘Not’, and the moving ‘Galleon’, where a motif of the Atlantic swelling around the poet’s Donegal birthplace puts his parents’ differences down to a preference for living above or below the water: “Sent from Atlantis to forage soft dulse,/she was my mother, my father was dulse.” (‘Dulse’). McGuinness is best known as the writer of groundbreaking political plays such as Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme and Carthaginians, and something of the emphases in theatrical language comes through in the poet’s stark iambs and austere consonant sounds: Fresh milk from the plains of Islamic Armagh quenched the thirst of circumcised alcoholics who once had the gumption to rise and poke sticks at brutes and beasts dolled to the nines, ra-ra skirts up, body stockings down, shaved of all hair raising Cain cross the border in the land of Nod, dirtying the temples of Chaldean gods carousing till cocks crowed the fate of Ur. (‘Ur’) This short piece is both funny and chilling, and, like many of the poems in Dulse, brings with it a satisfactory sense of mystery, of a need to question. It is striking that while the language is old-fashioned (“gumption”, “dolled to the nines”, “raising Cain”, even “brutes and beasts”) the tempo and tone make it extremely contemporary—snappy, to the point, like a modern advertisement. The best pieces here, however, are McGuinness’ longer historical poems, laden with intrigue and juicy facts. ‘Calcium’ patiently details the life of Johann Gutenberg, who, half-mad with abandonment and abuse, discovered “that paper—printing—printing on paper/stemmed from the lack of calcium/as he chewed on the stubs of his fingers” and “From this/revelation he wrote his Bible”. ‘The Doctor’s Daughter in Antwerp’, set in a similar period, does two things with great skill: it truly brings to life the Belgium of yore so that you can almost taste and smell it, and, through the voice of the eponymous daughter, it creates a measured philosophical debate about faith and science. The layering is wonderful; faced with a world where “the rough consolation of science” was of less use than patients believing her father was a miracle-worker, the daughter changes her position, asking at one point “Was my father god?” then later saying “I no longer believe in Belgium nor in God.”. By the time we arrive at the end of the poem—the end of her physical and mental journey—she is now stoical: “I say to him, You are forgiven, you who died,/who did your best, who did not work miracles.”. It is an engulfing, entirely convincing piece of writing.