Poetry: Greg Delanty expresses a temporary desire to become sea-horse in the sequence of poems which make up his most recent collection, The Ship of Birth, while Frank McGuinness's The Stone Jug exhibits openness and honesty, writes Colin Graham.
"I,/ being the male, would be the one in the family way," he writes, and this gender-bending metaphor is at one end of a wide spectrum of considerations inspired by the imminent arrival of his son. From the first poem, 'The Alien', it is clear that the coming experience of fatherhood will be deeply felt and honestly rendered. The poem's tone is nicely poised between the loving welcome of an expectant parent and the "alien" nature of a person not yet known, or even fully formed: "Our alien who art in the heavens, our Martian, our little green man, we're anxious/ to make contact."
Delanty manages the sequence of poems through the development of a voice which is often informally turned towards domesticity and family - he uses nursery rhyme language and refers to the child's "ma" and "da" throughout, for example. One of the simplest and most effective poems is 'The Road Hazard', which ends with a vision of multiple "rookie parents" on night-time drives, hoping that their child, "their sleep-depriver is asleep". Delanty gently slips into his series of childbirth and parenthood poems an underlying dramatic tension - the child's paternal grandmother is dying of cancer, and so new parental experiences mix with vivid childhood memories.
A companion piece to 'The Road Hazard' is 'The Joker Family', which remembers the poet's mother's reluctance to open the window of the family car for fear of disturbing her hair. Now the mother, wearing a wig, is able to drive the Ring of Kerry with the window down. And following this is the collection's most striking poem, 'The West', in which the beauty of the botanical landscape of Kerry is underlain with a sense of threat and invasion, by rhododendrons, which parallels the welcome invasion of the "alien" child and cancer's invasion of the grandmother's body. Delanty's poetry here is fascinatingly intimate, open and unashamedly domestic.
Frank McGuinness's The Stone Jug exhibits openness and honesty in a very different form. At the centre of The Stone Jug is a long sonnet sequence, entitled 'Gyrfalcon', written from one male lover to another. The sonnet form, particularly through its Shakespearean heritage, is used by McGuinness as a vehicle for a lover's voice that is capable of being either tender or unforgiving, painfully in love or utterly demotic. In keeping with these extremes the sonnets in 'Gyrfalcon' use their 14 lines in ways dictated more by the tenor of the emotions expressed than any poetic tradition or convention. And so in many of the poems there remains just a subtle hint of a final rhyming couplet, that urge for tidiness, exactness and completeness of thought which might pacify the violent extremities which this poetic voice lives through. The gyrfalcon of the sequence's title comes from a rare sighting of this passerine bird of prey in Ireland. In the poems the gyrfalcon is the poet's lover; mysterious, exotic, and a visitor. This lover is mourned for his absence, while his presence throws a new light on Ireland. 'Shamrock' needs to be explained as a symbol to the gyrfalcon and is initially "love, hate and lies" before becoming "rock, famine and clay" "in no holy land". This prepares the ground for the next poem, 'Clay', in which such "love, hate and lies" are a raw emotion, as the poet asks his lover to "Forgive me" because he cannot bear to bring him to his parents' graveside.
McGuinness's capacity for rage, and for an energetic, unstinting ability to face up to pure darkness have always been characteristic of his writing. The Stone Jug tells us that what's required of "the poor in spirit" is "Envy and lust and magnificent hate". As the object of love, the gyrfalcon, seems to slip away at the end of the sequence, the poet finds himself "enraged, emotional, impulsive, stained". It's an energy, a capacity for self-analysis and self-loathing which is disturbing and compelling.
Colin Graham lectures in English at NUI Maynooth. He is the author of Deconstructing Ireland and co-editor of The Irish Review
The Ship of Birth. By Greg Delanty, Carcarnet, 61pp. £7.95
The Stone Jug. By Frank McGuinness, Gallery, 96pp. €11.40