Poetry: When Gerard Smyth's last book, Daytime Sleeper, was published two years ago, it marked the full restoration of a fine Dublin poet who had removed himself from the scene for far too long.
A poet of the milieu of Trevor Joyce and Michael Smith, of the personal style of Michael Hartnett - I'm thinking of Anatomy of a Cliché - and of the sardonic, impulsive lyricism of Gerald Dawe, Smyth's long silence was a mystery.
Dublin-centred, and washed clean of sentimentality like the wet cobblestones of Guinness's Brewery, Smyth's voice is the natural inheritor of that rain-cooled genius, Thomas Kinsella. Stylistically, it could be said that John Banville, the poet in prose, is the true inheritor of Kinsella. But Gerard Smyth has loitered in that old Dublin neighbourhood as well, with all the patience of an apple-seller.
He has taken his time and ingested the material of Dublin, creating for himself a rooted, outward-looking and sanguine voice:
Twice a day I carry my soul over water.
The seedy canal blackened by car
exhaust.
When first I came to the footbridge
at the lock, as a child
with fishing net and pinkeen pot,
it was through Little Jerusalem:
the avenues of exile,
past the synagogue that is now the
mosque.
- 'Portobello Bridge'
Smyth traces a distinctive map of Dublin life in A New Tenancy, from 'Portobello Bridge' to 'Mount Argus', from "the house/where I was born" to 'In The Noonday Yard' with its coolness and precision:
A zinc bucket rattles the wind.
And billowing like a length of silk
a nettlebed crowns the golden dungheap.
When he journeys in his poetry, as he does many times in this fine collection, it is most decidedly a journey from the Dublin centre outward. Images of Dublin are inextricably linked with a narrative of domestic life.
He creates a perfect geography of marriage and nesting. In 'Housewarming' he writes:
For luck we brought a nugget of coal
and salt: the double talisman
to protect our four walls and fire-hearth.
In the title poem he relates the love story of moving into an old house, the rubble and the romance of it all. Contrasting himself with the English officer who took possession in 1911, "We came back to peel layers of paint,/ to create a new tenancy".
One of the most poignant poems in the book is 'Geographer's Landscape', written in memory of the indefatigable Dick Walsh. At the house of Elias Canetti - rooted in Dublin but at ease while on the road - he thinks of Walsh, his colleague in the newsroom, the geographer of the shifting bogland of Irish politics:
Yes, I think of you as the man
who followed the Danube: a journey of crossings
through the geographer's landscape.
With this book Smyth's cool poems find purchase again in the machinery of Irish poetry. A New Tenancy operates at several levels, personal, historical, geographical, but it all coheres as a perfectly beautiful book, full of wisdom and lyricism, but with the added spice of a rediscovered Dublin voice.
Thomas McCarthy is a Co Waterford poet who works in the offices of Cork 2005. His new collection, Merchant Prince, will be published in November by Anvil Press Poetry, LondonThomas McCarthy
A New Tenancy By Gerard Smyth The Dedalus Press, 80pp. €12.95 hardback, €7.95 paperback