In her introduction to Even the Daybreak (Salmon, €25) Jessie Lendennie promises she is writing a memoir: but anyone can now see the story of her life as a publisher in this big anthology, which begins with poems by her, her partner in Salmon's initial life as a magazine, M.G. Allen, and their son, Timothy Allen. Since 1981. Salmon has been a small miracle. Like the other small presses of recent decades, it is an index of cultural independence.
And it is astonishing to see how many books Lendennie and, since the 90s, Siobhán Hutson have published – more than 400 poetry collections. Among the established poets whose work they first aired, Rita Ann Higgins remains a defining figure, but in the index, readers will find old friends, books like Anne Kennedy's The Dog Kubla Dreams My Life, Eva Bourke's Litany of the Pig, Moya Cannon's Oar, Michael Gorman's Up She Flew, Leland Bardwell's The White Beach, as well as a brilliant series of occasional Salmon poets, who include Jean Valentine, Andrea Cohen, RT Smith and Dorothy Molloy and those poets now better known as novelists like Nuala Ní Chonchúir, William Wall and Paul Kingsnorth. I will not be the only reader using this anthology as a buyer's guide to Salmon's extensive back catalogue.
It would be impossible, even for a book as large as this which includes both excerpts and new work, to be wholly representative, but the originality of Rita Ann Higgins’ work stands out as she relishes how the sounds words make conjure meaning. Her punchlines, often brutal and very funny, are only one part of her best poems’ effects. Among its more recent publishing adventures, the strong performance work of Elaine Feeney, Sarah Clancy and others defines one strand of Salmon’s continuing contribution to Irish literature, but this is not a single-minded publisher.
The anthology actually showcases for the most part the more lyrical work of its contributors. Other recent finds include John Murphy's finely detailed and musical poems, while Salmon's debut books this year include Kerrie O'Brien's Illuminate (Salmon, €12) represented here by a poem which imagines the suicide of the artist Mark Rothko. The poem has a striking opening, "They found him / Hunched over a / White sink", although its respectful and interested shift to a description of Rothko's work sets itself a tougher task: "Weighted hum / Solemn yet violent / Fire, heart / Bloodsweat" (Rothko).
In Fermata: Writings Inspired by Music (Artisan House, €25), Eva Bourke and Vincent Woods have collected together work by Irish poets and prose writers on the subject of music. There is much terrific work here: this is, like the Salmon anthology, the kind of book that belongs in waiting rooms and loos, and on bedside tables. Perfect for dipping into, no reader will be unsurprised by the poems and short memoirs it includes.
It begins with poems that find music in the world about them, from Thomas Kinsella's great sequence, Song of the Night, to Dermot Healy's John Clare-like imitation The Litany of the Wagtail, "morning tuning fork, / skiff of the field. // Breast of the hailstone". Then, we hear the poets on instruments, Seamus Heaney on the fiddler whose "full violin" brings tunes "Out of wind off mid-Atlantic", or, possibly, "from nowhere" (The Given Note), Derek Mahon's Andean Flute "piercing the twilight like a mountain stream", while Pearse Hutchinson transforms "clogs into fiddles" in The Miracle of Bread and Fiddles. Later sections bring poems on musicians, on concerts, on historical snapshots, on music and memory.
It is an always engaging selection, but many of these music-oriented poems come back to something specified by this anthology's unusual title, Fermata, which refers to "a musical notation indicating a prolonged note or rest": these poems are often most at home in the silence that music makes them listen for. Thomas McCarthy on Scriabin's Piano sonata: "Listening to no one, letting the melodies run adrift / To settle like a heavy tank in a distant wheatfield"; Leontia Flynn's imagining lyrics in Country Songs: "If the phone doesn't ring, baby you'll know it's me…"
A third anthology also suggests itself to those of us who still like to buy books as gifts at Christmas, for ourselves as well as others. Marie Heaney's All Through the Night: Night Poems and Lullabies (Poetry Ireland, €16.99) is a more mysterious affair, bringing together a wider range of poems, some gorgeous lullabies and ballads, all on the subject of sleep, sleep that is wished-for, or won't come, or falls suddenly upon a poem's speaker or dreamer.
Heaney's introduction accounts for night "as a time of peace, rest and relaxation" but also as she says, "A time when, to borrow a phrase from Keats, conscience burrows like a mole and we are haunted by fears and regrets." This is, then, a book of surprises, and Gabriela Mistral's Midnight, translated by Shirley McClure, is emblematic of the magical night spells this book weaves: "I overhear the knots of the rose bush: / the sap pushes rising to the rose", she writes, and then "I hear / somebody's verses, / and they swell in the night / like a sand dune." And
I overhear
my mother sleeping
with two breaths.
(I sleep in her,
my fifth year).
Throughout, old classics nestle up against more recent work, Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy and Robert Burns alongside beautiful poems by Sara Berkeley Tolchin and Gerard Smyth and Tony Curtis. Handsomely produced and charmingly illustrated, this is a book of wonders.
John McAuliffe's books include The Way In (2015) and the anthology, Everything to Play For: 99 Poems about Sport (2015)
