In Poetry, from Gerard Smyth's new collection, A Song of Elsewhere (Dedalus, €11.50), we meet:
Neighbours, strangers, the country doctor
who on the first day of every month looked in
on the woman from the eighteen hundreds –
Grandmother who lived only
for the Mysteries of the Rosary
and told me once not to look for poetry
in the stars but out in the mucky yard.
Skating quickly across the material world, the poem then – typically – hooks onto a particular remembered detail which it reads for significance.
Formerly managing editor and now Poetry Editor at this newspaper, Smyth has travelled widely and, as its title suggests, the book leaves his native Dublin to move across the American midwest and through Russia, France, Portugal, all the while remembering those he encounters, friends and family as well as "Like an old scarecrow / that no longer scares the crows / Lenin on his plinth" (Red Star, Black Gates).
But Smyth is wary of how memory can foreclose on our experiences of the world: the book’s most powerful poems arrive at places where memory cannot help the speaker to understand the situation he is in.
The Memory Stick tells the story of a marriage via a photo album, but with the nagging sense that its markers of time are like the years he "shut out the world's disturbing news / by listening to Radio Luxembourg", while Millennium Ode remembers how, on millennium eve,
I slipped outside into the harsh night air
where like the actor who forgets his lines
I listened for the whisper from the wings, the prompt,
the hint, that bit of the script that gets us to the next scene.
Smyth is at his best when he discovers those "off-set", passing moments when the material world looms strangely, as in How goes the Night?
It goes like this: sleepless since
the thumping beat of a car stereo
broke the peace and headlight beams
crossed the ceiling, going east
then disappearing in the corner
where the spider lives.
"Twice since midnight / sudden cars have failed / to photocopy the ceiling", begins Frank Ormsby's Dailies, capturing the same scene that Smyth describes. His Goat's Milk: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, £12), a gathering from his four collections with new work, is enthusiastically introduced by Michael Longley who focuses on the poems' concern with the lives of others, with Ormsby as a latter-day Romantic who is observant and wryly sympathetic about the old men and women, children, soldiers, and others who feature in his first books.
Those portrait poems, especially the terrific long sequence A Northern Spring (which imagined the lives of US soldiers stationed in the North during the second World War), read, like so much Irish poetry of the 1970s and '80s, as part of the "historical turn" in Irish writing after the publication of Séamus Heaney's North.
Their clarity and "disenchantment" (as Longley terms it) remain evident in increasingly autobiographical poems, as does Ormsby's mordant humour. In Home, he closes his eyes and thinks of Ireland and "the multiple meanings of here":
When I opened them I was little the wiser,
in that perhaps, one
with the first settles in the Lagan Valley
and the Vietnamese boat-people of Portadown.
Self-aware, funny and sceptical, as you might expect of the editor of The Honest Ulsterman, one new poem refers to "the one patch on the planet / where the poppy is a sectarian flower" (The Eleventh Hour), although he is kinder in Some Older American Poets when he addresses and praises the kind of company to which he will be easily conscripted himself: "sprightly mortals, you rowdies at death's door, / for whom the last moment is not too late to begin! / I can't get enough of you, bright-eyed and poetry mad / in the fields next to the cemetery."
Ormsby and Smyth write poems whose speakers observe and remember; carefully selected images speak to larger themes than their titles let on; there is a sense that the poems, formally laid out as they are, are written from a place slightly to one side of their subjects. Occasionally, Enda Wyley adopts similar forms and modes in Borrowed Space: New and Selected Poems (Dedalus, €14.50), but her poems more often seem to be written out of an experience, rather than afterwards or at some distance from it.
The poems back small words and visual precision with lyrical statements. "On the Lloydiana we should have sailed / with those eight packages rolled / between futon slats and feathers," begins the litany of Home from Sydney. It ends, "On the Lloydiana we should have sailed / with our beloved things – not separated from them / with a foolish half-year wave."
Later poems revisit, with gusto, that idea of “beloved things”, which serve not as mementos, but as spurs to seeing the present moment.
Although Wyley's early poems look back to literary antecedents, mentioning Akhmatova, Raymond Carver, Orpheus and Mandelstam, she has increasingly chosen instead to submit her poems to the things and people around her. On My Father's Birthday relishes the sounds it makes as its images absorb and improvise associations with great assurance:
The dog whelk shell I blew sand from
and later placed on the bath edge,
the fluorescent pink dome of the Italian circus tent
far across in Booterstown, its lions roaring like sea,
sky-larks singing spring in,
sand under our nails and grating
the backs of our throats like arguments
Brent geese on mud-flats feeding on eel-grass
far from a Greenland peninsula,
bladderwrack sticking to stone
with a glue scientists crave.
The same exultant and often comic note is struck and held in later poems, where a baby is "testing the sky / with her sounds" (To Wake to This), and lovers are happy and (almost) oblivious – as these poems often are:
While others might relax after love,
he is up and about in his boxer shorts,
watering flowers on the balcony –
not caring that it’s overlooked
by a hundred windows opposite.
(Emperor)
John McAuliffe teaches poetry at the University of Manchester. His fourth book, The Way In (The Gallery Press), will be launched at Listowel Writers’ Week
