Poetry: For Philip Casey, who last published a book of poems almost 15 years ago, the light of experience seems to have changed.
The sun's rays struggle through dust and cloud, the masks of moonlight are hidden, and the glare of electric bulbs drain energy from the core of the earth; in his new collection, looking again and again to the troubled places from which light now comes, Casey is very much writing in the shadows. From there, he wreathes his words in memory and reflection, breaking through at times to an image or a phrase that is both true and memorable: the moon's "chilled zenith", a butterfly "like a hand/ conducting a silent adagio", the way "a child's yellow gansey jibs/ above the thunderous pool", brothers gripping "adhesive stars of frost/ on the aluminium milkcan", or the sight of a bomb victim blasted on to a rock, "her body on fire".
He coats those words too, however, with heavy disapproval of the forces which have dimmed the sky's luminosity, and the weakest poems are those which declare a concern for the environment without displaying any original or intimate engagement with that environment; there is no advance on catchphrase or common parlance in a poem which carps of how "the sublime/ is hawked to market the superfluous" (Trashed) or in one which contrasts "an ancient, holy place" to traffic jams and profit-seeking (The Time of No Time).
Meanwhile, Casey's yielding to nostalgia in his interrogation of place becomes a bandwagon even more tiresome, adhering frustratingly to the formula which insists that a sight triggering a memory is, in and of itself, work enough to be called a poem. Nostalgia, in Casey's poetry, seems either to weaken or to sedate his language, delivering him into the hands of cliche and sentimentality - a waste, given the sharpness of eye which shapes his words at points in this collection.
Skim over the generic homecomings, the misty-eyed homages to a poet (Eternal Water) or a pastor (In Loving Memory of a Country Priest) and savour instead the force and tightness of poems like An Indian Dreams of the River - "sleep comes like a caravel of conquistadores" - or Starling, with its vision of a mathematician plotting the flight of birds:
". . . her study darkens with the noise
of thousands of wings, of wheezing,
chucking and clicks, of whistling, coughs
and kisses, and a bewildered flock
blunders into the room through the screen."
Just as Casey's language does its best work when he looks away from the past to which his poetry seems instinctively rooted, so too does the Mayo-born poet Ann Joyce write most freshly when she exchanges the lens of reminiscence for those of reinvention. While, once again, there are scenes of gentle beauty in Joyce's tapestries of landscape and remembrance, real richness comes in the change of pace and perspective achieved by a poem like Leningrad Woman, which traces the brushstrokes of Boris Ugarov as skilfully as it renders the destitution of his muse, and of his love for that muse:
"his hand moving
over every inch of her until he could
bear it no more; then he would place her
outside in the snow, surrounded
by three-storey buildings, grey with hunger,
dragging her sledge through the streets."
Joyce's poetic heartland, however, is the Ireland of her birth and girlhood, an Ireland of fields and orchards, of earth and stone. Several of the poems in this volume are quietly moving, especially those dealing with the old age and death of her parents and their generation; a woman looks west to "that place her husband/ waits as she waited evenings for him", six sons burying their mother see "the dust, that was once their father, dance", a mother fills a bag with her burial clothes, "breathing life into them". Other portraits of womanhood, of the land, and of home, are of the more generic nature, and mirror the slipping into safety of Casey's language in his weaker poems. Where Joyce steps out of this trap, however, is in a couple of interesting poems (It is Ordained, Fallen Silence) which interrogate her uses of the past, her skirting towards cliche, and her efforts in poetry themselves, forcing a momentary filter of self-consciousness on that dulling, nostalgic gaze. "I take whatever comes," Joyce writes in The Freedom of It; but sometimes with what comes, as she writes herself, it is better to let go.
Dialogue in Fading Light: New And Selected Poems, By Philip Casey, New Island, 66pp. €12.99
Watching for Signs, By Ann Joyce, Dedalus, 70pp. €10
Belinda McKeon is a writer and journalist