IN the recently published Krino anthology, Brendan Hamill recalls hearing Padraic Fiacc read in a house in Belfast in the late Sixties. "Immediately," says Hamill, "I sensed Fiacc's urbanity and humiliation - the poet as victim. Of what, I didn't know." He goes on to say that Fiacc's poems "had the depth of sonic echoes. I knew then he would be mocked, because people didn't want their corners of the cobweb shaken..."
I'm not happy with the notion of eulogising the poet as victim, for it tends towards myth making, and we can do without that. There remains no doubt, however, that Fiacc has balanced on the rim of the Northern poetry scene, a constant and highly imaginative voice which has sounded - out steadily through the North's poetic din, though he is not at all typical, in terms of style or vision, of what we more easily recognise as Northern Irish poetry. Ham ill seems closer to the mark in his Krino essay when he mentions Blake and describes Fiacc's poetry as talking "the language of wrath" - a Blakeian wrath, a thriving visionary energy.
Red Earth, dedicated, incidentally, to the memory of that other marvellous Ulster poet, Norman Dugdale, comprises five sections, "Conor", "Mac Cuhal", "Mac Erca," "Brian," and a differently toned "Adam Street". Mythology features strongly here, interwoven with more contemporary under currents. Fiacc's poetic style is almost abrupt, veering towards European poetry in the way it conceals meaning just under the surface of words. One feels the poem rather than reads it. The result is a transmitted sense of movement and vitality which is almost hypnotic: "Wakening to a steep/Cliff of an Autumn//Lug-arm Long/I Wound-widening/Winter-sea day//Under bed sheets of/Ice at all dark gale/Of the horizon put/Pale with your eyes - ("The First Day of Summer") Aware, perhaps, of the power of myth to in some way undermine, as well as enhance, Fiacc examines the process in "The Poet Myth": "Now/ tearing up some old love letter//I know/the man she made/I made/I up out of/bits of/torn into strips//writing paper..."
Some time in the future we may come to understand Fiacc as one of our most modern poets, his work transcending local politics yet grounded in a deep and very Northern - and urban - significance. We need to hear more of him; we need the occasionally chilling newness of his Belfast Blakeian voice.
Gerard Beirne's first collection might have waited a little while longer. Good things though there are in here, their impact is somewhat muffled by the noise of very wordy poems. And the shadow of Paul Durcan's poetry hangs, however loosely, over too many pages.
Like others before me,
I have perfected the knack of walking on water.
It is nothing for me now to take a short stroll across my swimming pool or to go for a brisk walk upon the calm lakes that sur round me.
("Walking on Water")
Just for now, it might be advisable for Mr Beirne not to stray too far from the shore; this sort of cleverality is top heavy and can drown the best of poetic intentions. Then there is "A Quiet Few", with the rather liquid opening: "I am a moderate drinker by all accounts/drinking only to moderate/the inconsistencies of this world ..." A poem such as "Obscured by Heavenly Bodies (i.m. Brigid Cleary)" is a tantalising glimpse of what Beirne can accomplish when he stops trying so hard: "On the night of your removal/the earth stepped in the way of the sun/dragged its shadow across the moon/for a while blocked out its light." Prosy, but effective and tending more positively towards poetry. Perhaps Mr Beirne might consider learning to swim before attempting all that water walking. Just in case.
Enniskillen born Francis Harvey is one of those mature, consistent poets who seldom disappoint and who retain a clear and enthusiastic poetic voice over a considerable number of years; born in 1925, Harvey has published two previous collections with Gallery, Light on the Stones (1978) and The Rain makers (1987).
The title here refers to a stone figure on an island in Lough Erne. There is a hint of John Hewitt in some of Harvey's work; "The Seedbed" is in memory of the Ulster poet William Allingham, of whom Hewitt was also conscious and with whom he acknowledged a kinship as an Ulster poet. Harvey too has a distinct feeling for his own place, its small and big inconsistencies, the relevance of the local; Harvey can be called a "local" poet in the most positive sense. His language is articulate, open, poetic at all times, and his concerns are the observed tragedies and victories of the everyday as well as that particular twoheadedness of Ulster rural and small town life, and the deeper and more damning rifts of myth and history: ... the barbed languages of tribes,/Norseman and Norman,/Planter and Gael,/and the terrible incubus,/history, riding the present Funeral").