An impressive collection

For quite some time in the 1980s, Trevor Joyce was known among the few who still knew his work as "the best poet in Ireland, …

For quite some time in the 1980s, Trevor Joyce was known among the few who still knew his work as "the best poet in Ireland, not writing". Then in 1995 appeared his formidable collection Stone Floods, announcing a welcome new burst of productivity.

His new and collected work, With the First Dream of Fire They Hunt the Cold, contains both the old and long-unavailable volumes and a singularly impressive collection of works from the past decade. For anyone debilitated by the typical pap of what passes for contemporary Irish poetry, this collection will be a delight. To that poetry's lovers, it will seem an outrage. The old warcry, "it ain't poetry", is sure to disgrace its utterers once again.

Here are no rural anecdotes, no repetitive returns to the lyric effusion and fabulistic narrative, no consolatory childhood yarns.

Here, at last in Ireland, is a body of work that increasingly liberates its language from the despotism of reference and the pabulum of the well-made poem-tyrannies that should surely have been made redundant by the work of Beckett, Coffey, Devlin or even, for those who could read him, Yeats.

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Joyce's earliest collections, brought together in Pentahedron in 1972, already bespoke a poetics with quite other resources than those common in Irish poetry of that moment. Betraying an urban - and urbane - voice for the most part, with darkly returned echoes of Kinsella, these early works bear traces of readings in constructivism and expressionism - a curious but interestingly productive confluence. 'Gulls on the River Liffey' and 'Diagram + Sun' are typical of these, or the exquisite 'Christchurch. Helix. 9th Month': "Passages of labyrinth repeat;/the crypt gives vellum thighs to the dead,/mark our return in this way;/again we hollow dust-caves, ankle-deep."

Arch and relentlessly knowing, the poetry verges on mannerism in the best sense that designates an art tired of the habits of a style that has become commonplace in its very common sensicality and that forces the limits of style at the risk of excess and artificiality. Mannerism as one recognizes it in Baudelaire, Kafka, Mangan, the early Beckett, all of whom used conventions to burst conventions. Signal throughout Joyce's work is his refusal to fall back into the tired conventions of late-romantic lyric, which is not to say that the poems do not at times sing resonantly, but that those effects are secondary to the main purpose which is - and this surely is the only legitimacy of poetry in our moment - to extend the significant use of the language.

Stone Floods represented a remarkable simplification of the language, at least on the surface of things, for though less apparently baroque in their effects, the poems are rich and complex, echoing with the variety of influences that Joyce had absorbed - Lorca, ╙ Rathaille, Meng Jiao and other Chinese classics - and witnessing a new poetic range. Secreted in that volume were a couple of poems, 'Turlough' and 'Chimaera', both based formally on the Japanese "renga", with its patterns of ambiguous and recursive movements of sense. These poems foreshadow a number of poems in the latter sections of this new collection - most notably 'Syzygy' - which deploy the procedural possibilities of computer generated assemblages to produce forms that emulate the compositional possibilities of the medieval plainsong (the basis of the familiar "round") or of serial music.

These new works compellingly explore the pleasures of a non-narrative poetry that can accommodate both the multiple resources of contemporary languages and the fundamental poetic resources of repetition, echo, internal rhymes, ambiguity. Though at times uneven in the yield of the experiments, their pleasures lie precisely in jettisoning the old and exhausted fiction of the unified poetic voice and in the opening of new possibilities.

Joyce is constantly willing to experiment and to risk failure. The risks pay off above all in the final work, 'Trem Neul', an "autobiographical essay in prose and verse from which everything personal has been excluded", a work which juxtaposes in parallel text deceptively simple lines of everyday speech and dense prose paragraphs.

It is a tight weave of many recurring and blending voices organized contrapuntally, with effects at once dreamlike and almost scientifically precise. Its marbled textures resonate continually and long after the first readings of the text are done: here, without doubt, Joyce reaches a new terrain of language.

And it is surely no accident that this collection is book-ended by the two prose and verse works that draw most deeply on Irish matter - the 1976 collection with which it opens, 'The Poems of Sweeny, Peregrine', a "per-version", as Mangan might have said, of the old Irish Buile Suibhne, and 'Trem Neul' itself. Both works release Irish materials - translations, citations, allusions, interlingual puns- in ways that allow the language to take off, to "peregrinate", to release itself from the trammels of obvious referents and neatly packaged meanings.

However much some of the techniques may resemble things happening in European and American post-modernity, this is a volume that extends irrevocably the range of what Irish poets can do. (Perhaps that is what Cork County Council is acknowledging by having had the foresight and courage to select Joyce as their current Writer in Residence.) Though rarely work that yields its pleasures easily, this is a collection that must be read and come to terms with. If your bookshop is reluctant to carry it, order it at the website of Wild Honey Press (www.wildhoneypress.com), where you can also hear Joyce and other contemporary poets reading samples of their poetry.

David Lloyd is Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College, Claremont, California. He is the author of several books of criticism, most recently Ireland After History, published last year by Cork University Press