PoetryNick Laird's third collection, Go Giants (Faber, £12.99), begins with Epithalamium, a poem to celebrate a wedding, which contrasts the bride and groom's qualities – "You're beeswax, I'm birdshit. / I'm mostly harmless, you're irrational"– and ends, winningly: "If I'm the rising incantation / you're the charm. Or I am. Or you are." This is a witty, turbocharged love poem, but it is also about difference and similarity, marrying one to another so that even the speaker can't tell them apart. It's a defining, happy resolution that the book would like to find for the other, social kinds of conflict and violence that are its main subject.
Go Giants makes good the achievements of Laird’s impressive second collection, On Purpose. Like that book, it features secular lyrics, tightly knit sound patterns, allusive titles and close observation of particulars. The poems travel the world but are oriented towards Northern Ireland: adult knowledge of other places – Rome, New York, London – is tested against memories of adolescence in a small Northern Irish town. But Laird is at his best when the poems carefully assemble more low-key and subdued dramas, scenes that are often whispered aftermaths to events he does not describe. Condolence sees a mother “slip the ruled sheet // behind the front page of her pad to write out in good / phrases to wives and the parents of husbands // with such slow deliberation the slack is blanched / and collapses, and the fire is consumed by its ashes”.
A sequence of six poems, The Mark, conjures up another kind of aftermath, the body of Marsyas after he was flayed. Laird’s precise images and controlled direction of his poems make us see things we might rather we hadn’t: “There was the child who thought the darkness / in the branches was some stag that had got / its horns entangled” eventually gives way to “when the rug of flies shook out / he understood that all the skin / had been torn from him by some animal”. The Mark also features a talkier, more insistent voice (“Also Apollo, the racist, cheated” and “all pain’s non-fictional, // based on the true story of pain”) before it returns to the body again with a scene whose suggestive tones and images demonstrate how cycles of violence continue: “We wrap him in the swaddling cloths / and lug him uphill to an olive grove // that someone knows and in a little clearing / stack rocks around the body, then walk back / to a houseful of the vengeful and drunk.”
Paul Muldoon
Go Giants has a two-part structure, which resembles the shape of a Paul Muldoon collection, the most obvious influence on Laird’s work. Its 37 short poems are followed by Progress, a 37-part closing poem that ambitiously attempts to rework Muldoon’s signature “exploded sestina” long form (reusing a set of rhyme sounds in a particular order) and his splicing together of narrative strands. With subtitles drawn from The Pilgrim’s Progress, Laird’s poem intercuts compelling accounts of sectarian violence in his home town, Cookstown, with sections set in Rome that discuss, among other things, Galileo’s lens-grinding (Laird’s focus on Galileo’s telescopes explicitly asks us to reconsider perspective, vision and blindness), Allegri’s Miserere and Hugh O’Neill’s flight to Rome in 1607.
Brian Friel’s Making History has previously used O’Neill to analyse the difficulties and poisonous consequences of “imposing a pattern on events that were mostly casual and haphazard”, and O’Neill’s self-conscious critique of pattern-making historians might also apply to Laird’s poem, which occasionally seems hemmed in and overdetermined by its different materials and frame. Laird’s formal machinery and wide set of references should act as a set of co-ordinates for the reader, as a series of lenses or a prism, but can lead into bland, Wikipedia-style lines that pad out his three-line stanzas: “Allegri composed it at the commission / of Pope Urban, who reserved it for use // in the Tenebrae service during Holy Week” or, on O’Neill, “the greatest danger to the English / since the time of Silken Thomas”. And in attempting to address Rome, transcendental music, Protestantism and Catholicism, nationalist Ireland, heresy, scientists and historiography, there are awkward analogies and transitions, as when Italian and Irish names meet in “in a shuttered ground-floor stanza / of Palazzo dei Penitenziari // (where 400 years ahead / I would hear Eiléan Ní Chuillenáin read / still with no clue how her name was said)”.
Progress strikes new notes too, more meditative ones than in Muldoon’s long poems. And at its best, when it trains its “novel apparatus” on violence in Cookstown, Laird’s poem brings the book’s concerns with conflict and resolution to a head, initially through its account of an older friend and mentor who was “only travelling back from Omagh / with the others, dayshifting with a roofer” when he was murdered, before the violence moves closer to home in a suspenseful retelling of a sectarian beating in a meat factory.
These central sections of Progress are powerful and immediate and, like the book’s best lyrics, they are darkly precise about the impact of violence. Progress and Go Giants are interested in saying what happens afterwards; in this way the book is also an emigrant reconstruction of the self, putting different things together – Rome and Cookstown, adolescence and adulthood, war and peace – in new yet familiar ways. Like the work of his contemporaries, Leontia Flynn’s Profit and Loss and Alan Gillis’s Here Comes the Night (recent collections which also feature ambitious long poems), Go Giants is both passionate and thoughtfully constructed. Anyone with an interest in the continuing evolution of Irish poetry will want to read it.
