The Company of Children by James Simmons. Salmon, 95 pp, £7.99
Starting at Purgatory by Janice Fitzpatrick-Simmons. Salmon, 55 pp, £6.99
In a moment typical of his new collection, The Company of Children, James Simmons ponders on the way some of his poems seem to have lost him friends over the years. Simmons attributes this to the uncompromising frankness which is the drive of his writing ("insight isn't killing"), though there is a guileless irony here; the poem in which this thought appears dissects yet another friendship with an almost embarrassing exactitude.
While Simmons's poetry has always been characterised by sexual and personal openness, The Com- pany of Children has few of the virtues or shockvalue of saying the unsayable; instead, these poems are dominated by a plangent self-justification. The charmless indiscretion of this collection is made more disappointing when Simmons shows, in his comic songs and his sparky `Deirdre's Lament for Neisha', that he can write with precision and humour. However, the bulk of the poems find Simmons insisting on his own importance as a poetic voice and the more he asserts it, the less he shows it.
`Supporters' discusses (and patronises) one of the board members of the Poets' House, which he runs with Janice Fitzpatrick-Simmons, and describes how he relies on these "quiet men/ and women: Edgar and Kent and Gloucester", since "nothing can prosper without them, not genius even". The metaphor hovering here, unspoken, is Simmons as King Lear, proud and bombastic; unfortunately, it is all too apt for the Simmons who stomps through this collection.
Janice Fitzpatrick-Simmons's Starting at Purgatory is as autobiographical as The Company of Children, and so, necessarily, deals with so me of the people and places from that volume. Both collections have poems which refer to the removal of the Poets' House from Portmuck, Islandmagee, to Falcarragh, Co Donegal, a change in location brought about when a planning application was refused by Larne Borough Council. Fitzpatrick-Simmons refers to this relocation in the joking title of one section of her book ("From Muck to Muckish") and in several poems, though there must have been more for both poets to say on this subject's underlying clash of literary and political cultures; the sense of outrage they both express, while understandable, doesn't find its most effective voice in poetry.
Fitzpatrick-Simmons's best poems treat the Irish landscape as at once familiar and settled, foreign and traversed, a place of constant arrival and departure. The deft `Dark Water' sees a qualified sense of home as comparable to a maternal instinct complicated by a relationship with a step-daughter, and embodies both in the figure of Grace O'Malley, whose castle and ghost overlook the poem. Here Fitzpatrick-Simmons is at her best; technically calm and thoughtful, and for once letting go of the reader's lapels, which she and James Simmons so often feel the need to take hold of.
Colin Graham lectures in Irish Writing at Queens University and is author of Ireland and Cultural Theory, published earlier this year.