POETRY: BORBÁLA FARAGÓreviews My Lord Buddha of Carraig ÉannaBy Paddy Bushe Dedalus Press, 94pp. €11.50 and Echoes of a River: Poems of New Orleans and BeyondBy Gordon Walmsley Salmon Poetry, 75pp. €12
PADDY BUSHE journeys through diverse physical and psychological landscapes in search of identity and faith in his new collection, My Lord Buddha of Carraig Éanna.The volume is divided into six sections that gracefully trace the poetic voice's passage through time and space.
The first group of poems visits familiar scenery and childhood memories, an era "before time coarsened". These poems are suffused with a childlike search for meaning, "for a language antecedent to its words" that could express the profanely human experience of the passing of time and the inevitability of death, as beautifully expressed in The Search:
The falling tones of curlews, disyllabic
In the evening light, insisted that something
Needed to be said, but the words eluded him.
The second group of poems takes the reader to Nepal, where a rapt poetic voice reproduces snapshots of Himalayan life. Although on occasion veering towards sentimentality, these poems succeed in personalising an exotic foreign experience, particularly when news of his mother’s impending death cuts short the poet’s trip:
What can I do this sleepless night but cling
To the throwaway kindness of the lodge-owner:
When is big trouble, is no need to tell sorry,
And pray safe passage for you and for us all.
Metaphysical and spiritual ponderings take over the third section, where the poems concentrate on a plaster-cast Buddha sitting at the edge of the poet’s garden (which is also delightfully reproduced on the volume’s cover). These poems are funny and frail, bitter-sweet and deep at the same time, capturing “all this betwixt and between” that characterises human life. The personified Buddha contemplates and considers his environment, making philosophical observations about time, the tiny scale of human existence and “All the growth, the loss. / The comings and goings. Stories voiced and unvoiced.”
The poems in the fourth part, elaborating further the metaphysical theme, are set at the deserted monastic settlement of Skellig Michael. Tracing the sacred sites set within the breathtaking scenery, Bushe ponders the dichotomy of sacred and profane, continuously searching for an elusive faith that, “with all due resistance”, would make sense of it all:
To know that what you see is not possible
And still to see, and still to stand upon
That whole impossibility set in stone –
Is this what faith means, is this the leap
Into the unknown you know is safe
Because the abyss is more impossible?
The poetic voice journeys inwards in the next section of the volume, where the poems capture small and intimate moments and "embrace fragility, regeneration". The natural environment is beautifully represented in poems about animals, among which an encounter between a dog and an otter is particularly poignant. The book finishes with a new translation of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire (The Howl for Art Ó Laoghaire), which brings a fresh urgency to the voice of Eilín Dhubh. The keening tone is skilfully captured throughout, which makes the poem a captivating read, as, for example, at the moment when Eilín runs to the horse that has returned to the house covered in the blood of its missing rider:
My first stride cleared the doorstep,
My second flew through the gateposts,
My third step found your stirrup.
My Lord Buddha of Carraig Éannais a gentle, lyrical volume, which nevertheless eruditely considers metaphysical and existential questions. Bushe's voice is full of humanity, and his work demonstrates an enviably effortless craft.
THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT and questions of identity also feature in Gordon Walmsley's Echoes of a River: Poems of New Orleans and Beyond. Walmsley, originally from New Orleans, revisits his birthplace after Hurricane Katrina to search for meaning amid the senseless devastation of the storm. In some poems the city and its waters are personified as the "yawning Louisiana girl" or "the beast sleeping heavily below", to drive home a sense of spiritualised interpretation of loss.
Walmsley has a tendency to mythologise and adopt a sermonising tone; nevertheless his “spirit of compassion and empathy” shines through the pages. The shorter echo poems that are placed like waves in the volume lend a visual interpretative layer that helps the collection in imparting more complex readings (“something can arise / from a wave that falls / among the sounding words”).
The best poems in the book, however, are the ones that are not straightforward elegies for New Orleans, such as the sophisticated Things, which considers the frailty of human perception:
And there are so many ways of
understanding things. Let
us start with the making of a map.
Cartography. Start with
movement, panning a world we begin to see.
A map.
Borbála Faragó is a critic and the co-editor of Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland
