Many good poets get halfway, or further, into their careers before they realise they could have better planned the route and put more effort into pre arranging the wayside publicity. James Simmons is, such a one. In a small and rather sad preface to Elegies he "looks forward to the day when I find a publisher who will reprint all the old books," adding immediately, "It is fortunate that small presses appear with humility and enthusiasm to save old heroes and foster younger talents." This would be presumptuous, were it not for the fact that it's true: Simmons is an unsung hero of Irish poetry (and not very old either).
This is not a major book some of the pieces verge on being ver's d'occasion - but when his craft (schooled by the spirit of Auden) is married with a subject that touches him deeply the result is wonderful and will not fade away. The "Elegy for a Deadborn Child" here is such a poem. A poet this good deserves to see all his old books in a Collected Paenis, and soon.
PETER SIRR's work has inclined to be somewhat stiff until now.
The Ledger marks a great leap forward, placing him at the forefront of the younger poets in these islands. Much of the first section of the book still smells of the ink horn, indulgent more to the pleasure of words than their meaning. This is particularly evident in the many lists: for example, "Rowans plums sapphire emerald in wine", and "brocade, castor, marten, swords", and "chandeliers, cruets,/ baskets, claret jugs,/epergnes and lanterns". And so on.
But as the book unfolds one discerns depths beneath the Keatsian embarrassment of surface riches, a Wallace Stevens like awareness of presence, both real and unreal, in the world: "the stars/that are not stars at all but light glinting on chrome chairs". This coming into possession of a "language in which the word for family/is also the word for departure" is most at home when most lost, and is especially evident in the second half of the book, which deals with the end of a love affair.
Ecstatically regretful - "Let's stay in bed and never get up/let's drink all the wine we can lay hands on" - and even neo proverbial - "if we drown we drown/but if we float we burn" - Sirr's best work marries considerable linguistic talents with a real sense of loss, producing verse that is, in the widest sense of the word, erotic. In the narrow sense too there are poems which are more than, in his own words, "roused on the page", such as the brilliant "Lioneloth": "Scoured by desire, I hear/our voices turn to roar/and afterwards, reaching for something to dry you with/I find the god's gift to rub you down/until, astonished by the cloth, your body groans/your, head rears up, we begin again".
MICHAEL O'LOUGHLIN is, like Sirr, at the forefront of the younger poets. Despite their obvious differences - Sirr is all personal past and esoteric history, while O'Loughlin is perpetually engaged with, and enraged at the social and cultural they do connect in their concern with words. For O'Loughlin, "Language is a listening glass./A lung breathing the earth./. . . a dog howls/like a god remembering the world/He meant to create/but couldn't find words for", which barks up against Sirr's own brand of desperation: "the crazy, desperate thing/the heart achieves/on nights like this".
O'Loughlin has two difficulties. In the first place, his work relies too much on cultural referencing - Mandleshtam, Cuchulainn, Babel, Hamlet, Tsvetaeva, Matt Talbot, Frank Ryan and many others, which presupposes the reader's knowledge and a congruence of assumptions about it. Secondly, there is a degree of uncertainty about flying what he calls "the rhetorical flag of myself".
Sometimes the rhetoric leads him into the prosaic: for instance, "I hesitate/to use the obvious; ostblok/diaspora metaphors".
Sometimes the lung of language breathes peculiarly, though memorably: for instance, "the velvet crunch/of mirrors mating".
But when he succeeds, as he often does, in marrying social anger to personal emotion, the result is as striking as Sirr's best work and not dissimilar: "This is different./This is the diamond we were born with/Or better, the diamond we are".
THERE are only 12 poems in Martin Mooney's book. Nonetheless, despite its size and signs of technical strain - a sentence in one poem, for instance, runs to a staggering 122 words - the talent is evident: "And you call up Walter Benjamin Yangel of history, who would like to stay awake/the dead, make whole what was smashed, except/that a storm blowing from Paradise has/got caught in his wings with such violence/that the angel can no longer close them".