Poetry: No doubt about it, the short lyric has come to be the predominant form of verse in this world of the sound-bite, the slogan, the e-mail and the text message; though it was long before the advent of high-speed communications that Richard Eberhart complained about "the tyranny of the one-page poem".
All the same, so long as the poems are as snazzy, and sharply focused, and ingeniously rhymed as Iggy McGovern's one-pagers in The King of Suburbia, we can't complain. This first collection, from one whose reputation has preceded it, consists mainly of umpteen variations on the sonnet, one sestina at the end, and nonce-forms that read like resurrections of long-lost rhyme schemes. The Bony, for example, combines a spine of short-lined vertebraic stanzas cunningly connected by a spinal cord of rhyme.
These assured formal techniques serve Prof McGovern's purpose very well, for he's a master of the ironic, the pun, the innuendo, and such feats of word-play as will keep a smile on any visage but that of the incorrigible cynic. We could do with a whole lot more of this kind of well-turned verse and sharply-observed ironies:
Getting everything off our chests
A kitchen knife removed for tests
And neither of us ultra vires
Two people helping with enquiries
(from Breaking up with Inspector Morse)
Doghouse, based in Tralee, acknowledges support from private and corporate donors, a tradition as old as publishing itself, for Apples in Winter, Liam Aungier's first collection (though his work has been winning recognition since the early 1990s). And again, not one of the poems strays to a second page.
Unlike the McGovern work, they rely on the Imagist precept, "direct presentation of the thing in itself". This means the phrasal lines give the poems a certain sameness, despite a wide range of subjects, compensated for by a patent sincerity and depth of feeling, ranging from the intimacy of Aubade and other personal lyrics to the reflective tones of Transformations, wherein processes of nature also evoke religious experience:
an offering of rain-water
fills the moss-encrusted font and
as it was in the beginning
vetch and gorse
populate the roofless nave.
There are flaws in quite a few poems, a sense of hurry when more accurate language would pay dividends. Yet this collection is worthy of more praise than complaint.
Roderick Ford's poems in The Shoreline is Falling - another first collection - arrive trailing clouds of fancy, some as exotic as see-through underwear, others as sudden as a shower of confetti on the set of Hamlet. The imaginative leaps are often so daring that the reader must forget interpretation and yield to the excitement of metamorphosis, as with the grandfather fisherman who supports his grave-side widow as "unseen down below/he was part of the curving world/that supported her as she stood there . . . ". The last image of the grandfather - " . . . a fish from the neck down/lazily swimming between the reeds/ . . . feeding on insects/for several precious minutes" - is riveting.
There are marvellous fanciful accounts of "a blind old queen" in Lux Aeterna. The surreal ballads, The Uncles and Bon Voyage, are narrated in flat, matter-of-fact tones. One is a shape-changing nightmare; in the other a death-bed becomes "a little boat" for mother and dying father to sail away.
Though Ford's urge toward witty brevity or cryptic fancy leads him to abrupt or banal endings at times, the reader gets many compensations from a poet with a fine ear and a rangy imagination.
The King of Suburbia By Iggy McGovern Dedalus Press, 70pp. €10pb, €15hb
Apples in Winter By Liam Aungier Doghouse, 69pp. €12
The Shoreline of Falling By Roderick Ford Bradshaw Books, 50pp. €12
James J McAuley's 11th volume of verse, New & Selected Poems, was published by Dedalus Press last year