Trains, cars, rowing boats and punts. John Redmond's poems are always on the move. In the most finely crafted poem in this collection, `The Hearse', Redmond's recurrent themes of gazing, perception and judgment are brought together with real poignancy. The most significant moment on the hearse's journey is when "A woman, behind glass, seems to wave as she cleans". The poet and his brother watch "the city pass . . . our faces like lightning in each other's shoes", and in every possible meaning of the word this becomes a poem about reflection.
At its worst, the combination of travelling and looking makes Redmond's voice that of the "tripper", as Louis MacNeice liked to disparagingly describe himself. When Redmond writes on the west of Ireland, he can come dangerously close to a Robert Flaherty-like vision of nostalgic realism. But when his writing shows an awareness of the distance between himself as poetic tourist and the objects of his gaze, the effects are memorable.
`Bead' is a character sketch of a fisherman's wife met on an Adriatic beach. The poet is deferential, even awkward, in the presence of her colourful turn of phrase, and helps her look for a lost rosary bead among the pebbles. The sense of foreboding created by NATO planes and helicopters, and a reminder of the story of Jonah, is given a moving, though ultimately indefinable, resonance in the last lines. The poet, truculently annoyed at not being thanked for looking for the lost bead, leaves the beach "completely oblivious to the star pushed in to the sole of my shoe".
An odd thing to say about a poet perhaps, but Redmond writes best when he knows that he doesn't know. The "thumb's width" of the title is that tiny, inch-sized gap between understanding and misconception. When Redmond puts his poems in that little space they are capable of sounding beautifully discordant.
Colin Graham is lecturer in Irish Writing at Queen's University Belfast