Privacy. Justin Quinn. Carcanet 63pp, £6.95 in UK.
The Beauty of the Moon. Anne Haverty. Chatto Poetry. 42pp, £7.99 in UK.
The White Battlefield of Silence. James McCabe. Dedalus. 96pp, £9.95/£5.95.
Contemporary neo-classical verse was dubbed "The New Formalism" by American academics in the late '70s. These three poets might be so classified, although they are not abandoning "free verse" to adopt "formal" versification. They are neo-classical insofar as they moderate the emotional content of their poems with a reasonableness which echoes the Augustan rationality of the Age of Enlightenment. But true classicism tends toward Aristotelian irony, whereas the use of reason at the end of our terrible century tends to create a sense of emotional exhaustion, of powerless anger or bitter amusement.
These poets compensate for muted, often uncertain tone by fretting and distorting the syntax and inventing unorthodox combinations and associations of words. The three "ages" of the poet are said to be an infatuation: first with language; then with image and meaning; then with metaphor - the relation of image to the universal. All three collections, representing relatively early work, are firmly rooted in that "first fine careless rapture".
Privacy is Justin Quinn's second volume. He is unobtrusively didactic, instructing us on the nature of things without depriving us of the pleasure of his rococo rhyming and clever uses of traditional forms. He is full of surprises, planting a nuclear reactor in a sequence called "Six Household Appliances":
Although it's rigged up in the middle
Of nowhere, it's our new cathedral,
Dead centre of a complex model
Of lines and cables, where polyhedral
Chains break down, the national griddle . . .
And, though an exemplar of current metrical practice (he is editor of the periodical, Metre), he slips in a couple of prose pieces toward the end of the book.
Quinn's travels and literary studies have provided him with original approaches to such well-worn topics as the new address, "Autumn Evening," and the obligatory "down memory lane" poems. One might quibble with some straining for effect and awkward or elliptical phrasing to tease out the metre; but this is a strong showing by an interesting poet.
The 38 poems by Anne Haverty, biographer of Constance Markievicz and award-winning novelist, include several "formal" poems, among them the villanelle printed recently in these pages. But her strengths are those of the novelist: acute observation of character and circumstance, of the social interchanges and familial dynamics of poems like "Hayboy", "Mother and Daughter in Bewley's Cafe", and especially "Llewellyn Powys in Davos", a kind of precis of Mann's The Magic Mountain.
Several of her poems are enriched with vivid description, though she sometimes lapses into superfluous comment on the observed image, or relies too heavily on cognitive modifiers. Her honesty, risk-taking, and delight in her craft compensate somewhat for these shortcomings.
James McCabe attacks his subjects with commendable directness and spirit. His first book contains quite a medley, including teaching, religion, and the second World War. He can be refreshing and tiresome by turns: the thirty-poem sequence "Cliara Haiku" reads like random snapshot captions. Others need attention to unintended effects: "Your face swimming like wine/In my papercup eyes". But there are as many competent, resonant poems like "Soundings" and "Etymology," and his two tributes to Thomas Kinsella - a fine model for any Dublin poet in his 30s.
James J. McAuley is a poet and academic specialising in poetry.