Poetry: Mark Roper's third collection is like an accidentally discovered bird's nest of eggs: warm, beautifully coloured, pulsing with life.
He looks with extraordinary care at the natural world, its force, variety, proximity and difference.
Nothing seems to escape his cool, affectionate, understanding gaze. As his senses take in what's there, his feelings and his intelligence manage a language that conveys the complicated richness of the relationship between the human and the creaturely, finding in the heron's cry an "utter lack of meaning and hope", "erratic flames" in the "too gorgeous for gravity" wings of butterflies, or the way owls come "ghosting the lowness, all grab and glamour". Even the elder tree can trigger a depth charge of meditation, prompt a lovely inventiveness of language: "Rubbledrudge, thicketskivvy, your mild moons/ wax where they're left, part of the undergrowth,/ swagged with bramble."
I love (and don't mind its occasional hints of Heaney) his mix of modesty and verbal panache, apparent not only in his response to birds, animals and trees, but animating such poems as Van Gogh's The Farm (its light a "sage blessing"), or capturing (in Saturday Morning) the satisfactions of loving domesticity, its tangle of truths: "Tea in the pot. Old dried leaf, fresh water./ Given cups. Us two in deep."
The sustained compression of his sequence of haiku-like sketches in the title poem, Whereabouts, provides a rapid shorthand account of his gifts, each small segment striking a clean, decisive, original note, each carrying his signature of observation and interrogation, letting (in Keats's phrase) "the warm air in". A few of the poems in this collection don't achieve the high voltage of his best work: All of Me, John Condon, The Hospital Foyer and Magwitch, for example, seem a bit too deliberate for their own imaginative good; they lack the lyrical, rhythmic ease so much in evidence elsewhere. But the vitality and the pleasures of image, language and thought more than compensate.
At the heart of Roper's imagination resides the celebratory impulse. He ends Swan House with the lines, "we both were and were received into/ The house of our astonished praise". The Home Fire ends with the line, "Darkness and stars raining down on my bared head". Such praise and such astonishment, such accommodation of darkness and light, make Whereabouts a place we should all inhabit for a little while.
"Look yourself in the eye", a line from the last poem in James J McAuley's New and Selected, could serve as epigraph to the poet's whole enterprise, the end of which is a rigorous, richly orchestrated self-examination. Moral allegories, lyrics of erotic, natural, or domestic affection, angry satires, dramatic monologues, expansive meditations - all become vehicles for the writer's own deepening self-awareness and amplifying sense of the world and its given mysteries.
The arc of McAuley's career stretches from Dublin (where he published his first three collections, the first in 1966) to America (where he spent more than 30 years as writer-teacher, and where he published a further five volumes) to his current retirement in Co Wicklow. While the early poems display verbal energy, are honest confrontations with real issues (faith, sex, social conditions, portraits of the artist as an angry young Irishman), the shadows of Clarke, Kavanagh, and Kinsella fall heavily across their expressive habits. Though the material is McAuley's, the voice rarely seems comfortably his own. A mannerism rather than an authentic manner, it produces rhetorical flights ("Sensuous black branches posing/ In sibilant mime the thunder in his blood") rather than a securely grounded, rhythmical speech.
Emigration to America, exposure to a new way of life and a fresh array of near-contemporary literary influences (poets of the generation of James Wright, Richard Hugo, Galway Kinnell, the older Roethke), allowed McAuley to achieve his own best voice, one in which feeling, intelligence and speech achieve a rhythmical union in muscular free verse or tighter formal structures.
Among many fine poems from the two breakthrough volumes (After the Blizzard, 1975, and Recital, 1982), I particularly admire the self-exploratory After the Blizzard, the lovely brief lyric How Many Wings Has the Hummingbird, the tonally varied (humorous, literary, affectionate) Letter to Richard Hugo, and the dramatic monologues Cheiron, Deposition of Harold Moore and Dust Devils ("I dream nights of those burning trees, the shouts/ Of the firefighters; wake with a dry throat.") Here, in a number of different modes, McAuley exhibits a fresh mastery of his craft.
Though his moral interrogation can at times be blunt rather than subtly tempered, I like his willingness to ask the big questions. The most recurrent of these concerns faith and loss, as the unquestioning Catholicism of his early upbringing - its rituals, its beliefs (in language, in habits of mind and feeling) - collides with the scepticism of his educated intelligence and the imaginative reflexes that have to confront a world without much appearance of any morally meaningful design. The selection we have here keeps ringing changes on this recurrent theme, revealing the persistence, strength and stubborn, "post-Catholic" honesty of his imagination.
While adept at both formalist and free verse, it's when a simple plainness of need takes over from the more arbitrary imperatives of the will, so the formal becomes the natural, that McAuley achieves his strongest note, as in The Sorrowful Mysteries, the remarkable God's Pattern, the strangely angular Requiem for My Mother or the parental affection of A Picture of Little Rory in a Municipal Park. The later poems best sustain this note, and one of the main pleasures of the collection is seeing how in the New Poems section he's doing his best work, poem after poem demonstrating the ease of an imagination (tuned by both the Irish and American sides of his inheritance) at one with itself, accommodating the world rather than irritably or sadly or angrily interrogating it. In this zone of creative ease (especially felt in Sixteen Nocturnes") McAuley seems finally, and fully, at home, knowing "The air so still between two weathers,/ That the mind's work, thought itself, rests/ between light on water and light on cloud." Rests, yes, and goes on.
Eamon Grennan's most recent collection of poems, The Quick of It, was published by Gallery Press earlier this year
Whereabouts By Mark Roper Abbey Press/Peterloo, 60pp. £8.95. New and Selected Poems By James J McAuley Dedalus, 196pp. €16 Paperback/€26 bound