Poetry: James J McAuley reviews a selection of poetry volumes including Tommy Frank O'Connor's Attic Warpipes and Nourishment by Anne Le Marquad Hartigan.
From Cork, the 18th-century Augustinian friar, Uilliam English, reminds us that good poetry delivers the universal in localised particulars. English's translator, also a friar-poet, provides a brief introduction for poems which are mystical and lyrical, not averse to having a go at the sacred cows or singing the sensual praises of a lively lass. Friar Daly uses a suitably quirky assonantal versification, with lots of grammatical inversions, to keep us in tune with a poet who seems to have been Cork's answer to Scotland's Burns.
The title of Kerry writer Tommy Frank O'Connor's book of poems suggests something in the Greek classic mode. Far from it: the attic is above the speaker in Bedsit Land; the warpipes disturbing his peace are played by the female tenant he fancies.
Many of these poems have this comic twist. Quite a few are versified character sketches. Nearly all are contrived, awkwardly phrased, and rhythmically lame. There seems to have been an awful hurry to get them onto the page, and then to abandon them, virtually at birth. Even the Contents list is deprived of page numbers. Didacticisms, unconscious ironies, and bad grammar deface even the most promising verses. Yet most of the contents have been published in periodicals and won awards.
Anne Le Marquand Hartigan begins with an invitation-poem: "Here, take this/scatter of poems before you . . ." Is the reader addressed? No, the ironic last line - "The full abandon" - reassures us we're not literally included.
From the first line of the second poem, we are immersed in a sequence of dramatic love-alogues. We find ourselves, like voyeurs, reeling precipitously through so many amorous moments that the lovers must have felt wearied by the time they reach The Weather Channel, Florida, 2001, where they move "into this, still carry between them/their own personal weather".
The sequence has formal and rhetorical flaws, but avid readers won't be deterred. The poems achieve high marks for two of Milton's criteria: only a C for "simple" in the Puritan sense, but A's for "sensuous" and "passionate".
Hugh McFadden, a Derryman, long a Dubliner, brings wit and deep sensitivity into his poems of the city, as well as those addressed to figures like John Jordan, Paul Durcan, and Pearse Hutchinson and his memories of figures like Kavanagh and Hartnett.
He gives us a whiff of London in the Blow Up days; but from 1973 to the present he provides insights into - and from - Dublin. Here too are quiet poems for and about family: his low-key irony carries undertones of familial affection, anger, and grief. This selection takes us right up to the 2004 Sky News "take" on machines versus human flesh in Iraq. Several pokes at the Bloomsday boom and a number of urban-nature lyrics signify that this poet has been his own man from the word go.
James J McAuley's New and Selected Poems was published recently by Dedalus
Without Shoe Or Horse. By Uilliam English, translated by Pádraig J Daly, Waxwing Poems, 64pp. €7.95.
Attic Warpipes. By Tommy Frank O'Connor, Bradshaw Books, 82pp. €12
Nourishment. By Anne Le Marquand Hartigan, Salmon Poetry, 70pp. € 12
Elegies & Epiphanies: Selected Poems. By Hugh McFadden, Lagan Press, 87pp. £7.95