At Least for a While By Pearse Hutchinson Gallery Press, 69pp. €11.95IN A POEM towards the end of Pearse Hutchinson's new collection - the first since the publication of Done Into English, his collected translations, in 2003 - Hutchinson describes a figure "sitting in the front seat left on the top deck" of a bus, with "all Rathmines spread out before him".
On the Crest of the Bridge at Portobello harks back to the poem Refusals, from his 1969 collection Expansions, which begins with an image of "The bus poised a-crest the bridge". The recurrence of the image clarifies the unity of Hutchinson's vision as a poet who has sought to negotiate the relationship between the present and the past, the immediate and the distant, "from Findrum to Fisterra" (or Finisterre), over a career spanning more than five decades. At Least for a While is a testament to his unwavering commitment to the art of poetry, and a magnificent addition to the rich body of work that has already been published by one of Ireland's most inventive, instructive, and perennially newsworthy poets.
HUTCHINSON'S inventiveness is evident on almost every page of this new collection. A master of lineation and narrative pace, his syntax - particularly in poems such as Of Hell and Happiness and A Full-length Portrait - modulates tone and thought with exemplary precision and care. Ralph Waldo Emerson's claim that "it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem" is useful in understanding the connection between form and content in Hutchinson's work. The formal procedures of his poetry mirror the thought processes and, indeed, augment the arguments that form the intellectual core of his often deceptively plain-saying poems. Moreover, the surface simplicity of some of Hutchinson's lyrics is unsettled by their engagement with difficult and often disturbing subject matter, as in poems such as Sacrifice, which explores a family's reaction to mental illness, and An Evening in Amsterdam, where the poet pits his "sombre, puny words" against the darkness of the Holocaust. In these and many other poems from this new collection, including Crucifixions, The Three-Cornered Hat, and Teaching Mathematics, Hutchinson's interest in personal and public histories and politics demonstrates the expansiveness of his poetic project, but it also reveals the humane generosity of his artistic vision. His poems are often short, they can appear delicate on the page, and they sometimes seem to record glimpses or passing glances, but they always embody and, at their best, articulate Hutchinson's desire for what he once called "true gentleness". As he puts it in Lehmbruck in Lübeck:
Gaudí, Archipenko, González:
they all climb. Soar. Gleam.
Towards some kind of serenity, more than achievement.
But still stay on earth.
Hutchinson's poems also "soar". They strive towards "some kind of serenity" but, like the work of the artists mentioned here, they "still stay on earth", rooted in the real, aware of and bound up with the things of the world.
This is one of the reasons why Hutchinson's poems are "newsworthy" - in the sense that poetry worth reading is always "news that stays news". Hutchinson's poems not only report from the past about things that should never be forgotten, but they also provide a succinct and sometimes cutting record of the present moment. Consider the critique of contemporary Irish culture he offers in Shamrock and Harp:
Music and a small plant
we had for emblems once.
Better, surely,
than lion or eagle.
Now our proudest boast
is a dangerous beast of prey.
There is so much in the six lines of this poem, so much about symbols and the way their meanings shift over time, but the poem also demonstrates Hutchinson's ability to "cut . . . right through the shit/ with one calm phrase" as he puts it in Cockney. That poem explores the poet's love of the Irish language, and At Least for a While reveals Hutchinson's passion for many other European cultures, including Galician, Dutch and Welsh. Is there a contemporary Irish poet who is as completely and seriously immersed in the languages and literatures of modern Europe as Hutchinson?
QUITE APART FROM the seriousness of his enterprise as a poet - the forthrightness of his political points of view, the calculated hardness of his aesthetic procedures - there is also in Pearse Hutchinson's poetry a sense of fun that is quite unmistakable, and this is in evidence here in poems such as April, Calder, and Simple Pleasures.
The latter describes the "quite inordinate pleasure" the speaker experiences watching his hat as it "settles down for the night" on top of an "armless chair piled high with books", while it is dandelions "in all their glory" that capture his attention in April.
Hutchinson has a wonderful eye for the natural world, but like Edwin Muir, whom we should always "admire/ for calling a dandelion a flower" as he puts it in Admirations, he is also a compelling and sometimes moving observer of human nature. In the Front Bar and Letter to Alan from this new collection are just two of the poems that show this, the latter in particular for its acknowledgement of the vastness, and precariousness, of the thing we call "happiness".
In Lehmbruck in Lübeck Hutchinson writes: "don't be so hard, poet looking back,/ after so long a time, on that young self".
In some respects, At Least for a While is a book of backward glances, but it is also a book that looks forward and possibly anticipates more work to come from a poet who has achieved great clarity and insight in this new collection, published in his 82nd year.
In the final poem, the speaker finds himself
at surprising ease in the small hours
with mind and body, even himself -
at least for a while, once in a while.
Readers of poetry everywhere should be grateful for this book, and for books of this kind, which only come along every "once in a while": "Gach siollab chomh cneasta glé/le teocht na spéire Aibreáin".
• Philip Coleman is a lecturer in the school of English, Trinity College Dublin