Poetry: This first collection of poetry from the young Co Tyrone-born writer who looks set to become something of a literary light in 2005 - his first novel, Utterly Monkey, will appear in May - is born of a confident hybrid of voices and styles, an approach which proves memorable and troubling in equal measure, writes Belinda McKeon.
Memorable enough, upon first reading, to stitch themselves into the mind and to be found there days later, still smarting, still holding strong, are the poems in which Laird braves exploration of a father-son relationship which is not so much damaged by dread and guilt as sustained by them. The first poem, 'Cuttings', is a tender and brilliant portrait of a certain sort of masculinity, distant and taciturn, minding "not to mention/ the troubles or women or prison", accepting close contact with another man only in the barber's chair and in the trenches. Words which bear painful currency in Northern Ireland invade the poem not on the father's bidding, but on that of the son: "the missing", "the long dead', "the police" are ushered out of silence or indifference by the poet's eye. Made explicit once more, these matters render the father, in a powerful line, "angry and beautiful . . . / tilted, expectant and open as in a deckchair", both proud and pitifully vulnerable. But in later poems, he is revealed as himself a source of fear, of danger; by the soundwaves of his shouting, his child learns to measure the playground's width, and the sounds ranked alongside it are those of "the bomb", "a struck match's dry whistle", "the domestic slap of the rifle's crack".
Born when the Troubles were still young, and having grown to adolescence in their most savage years, Laird approaches violence without fanfare, even without gravitas. While poems such as 'Remaindermen' and 'The Signpost' leave the reader in no doubt as to the distaste with which he surveys the decades of "cemeteries filling up/ like car parks on a Saturday", the boys holding bombs equal to their own weight as babies, the commands "to disappear and stay that way for good", yet his perspective on sectarian bloodshed seems so close, so accustomed as to be almost neutral, venturing no judgments and offering no polished laments. Pervading the collection, however, is an anger which is interesting, though unsettling, in its lack of focus.
Frequently and frankly expressed, this anger ricochets off most of the themes Laird touches upon, from family and religion through a clutch of poems set in parties and pubs, on through relationships and the loss of them, on to 'Appendix', the final, meditative tracing of a sleeping lover's scar. It is an emotion he seems tied to, regardless of circumstance, and in places it comes across as forced, or tragic - or both. But shadows from the first poem - not just that of the father, but of the idea of missing sons, lost children - pervade many of these defiantly angry pieces, and their strange strength may lie in that numb irresolution.
A tendency for formal irresolution, though, is less absorbing; too often, metaphors, once introduced, spirit Laird's poems away from themselves, distorting their shape and leaving them apparently abandoned for another. Though requiring refinement, however, this tendency may come to be the hallmark of this poet's technique - "He took me aside to show me the world," he writes of the author of the marginalia in an ancient Ulster manuscript - may come from that interest in the borders of things, the side-effects of larger matters, which is evident throughout this collection.
Belinda McKeon is a journalist and critic
To A Fault. By Nick Laird, Faber and Faber, 54pp. £8.99