Poems 1975-1995. By Micheal O'Siadhail. Bloodaxe Books. £9.95 in UK
Begin. By Brendan Kennelly. Bloodaxe Books. £8.95 in UK
Bloodaxe Books - with Carcanet, Anvil, and others - has not only taken on poets affected by OUP's shameful decision to drop its poetry list, but it also provides outlets for Ireland-based poets who haven't found publishers in the curiously fragile Irish book economy. A lesson in risk-taking there, somewhere.
Micheal O'Siadhail offers an economy-size collection: 240 pages of tightly-packed verse, including the author's introduction and an index of titles and first lines. The introduction suggests a way to read these poems, as a movement away from the personal "angle of vision" to poetry of "community", "trust", and "caring".
But unfortunately this aspiration is overtaken by a struggle between philosophical musings on the relation of Self to Other and the need to render these abstractions in recognisably contemporary language and figuration. Though often in ingeniously contrived forms, many poems are so clogged with Latinate cognitives that they cannot survive as poetry. There's hardly a poem that doesn't rely on words like "loneness", "fidelity", "innocence", "freedom", "dominance" to convey what needs to be presented as image or metaphor.
The first poem in the book (after the epigraphic "Hail! Madam Jazz", which has more to do with eighteenth-century manners than with twentieth-century syncopated music), from 1978, ends "Oh, praise me, praise me, praise me/And I live forever." (The voice is that of a sunflower.) The final poem, presumably from 1995, the last of a dance sequence, begins, "Rhythm of now. Now the beat./Forever. Forever." Over a span of 20 years, the author seems not to have learned that such phrases formulate a rhetoric, which invites argument. Poetry invites assent.
Brendan Kennelly's new book also supplies an introduction for poems which add new work to materials culled from volumes going back to the early 1960s. These "Echoing Notes" restate Shelley and others: writing poems "is a lifelong enterprise in dedicated failure". On these terms, even easily won poems like "The North County Dublinman's Invitation" or "Therese" or some rather slight quatrains, have interest. He provides enough variety to have all the begrudgers he so eloquently decries up all night working to put him in their place.
"The Fool's Rod", "The Swan's Curse" (invective worthy of O Bhruadair), and "Sebastian" exemplify this variety. As a kind of footnote to "The Tree's Voice", wherein the Cross speaks, he offers "Party":
Joseph made the chairs and table
with customary skill and care
Mary welcomed in the neighbours
Jesus lit the fire
"Lislaughtin Abbey" validates the whole "lifelong enterprise", inviting favourable comparison to Grey's "Elegy" in its carefully balanced handling of irony. Kennelly risks using "hymnal" quatrains, usually associated with ballad, or pious expression, or Emily Dickinson's witty conceits; he sustains one well-wrought sentence over seven stanzas with truly moving effect, giving the poem a timelessness that "has to do with the logic of passion . . . the ability of the mind and heart now to shape the experience of the heart and mind then." Not much more to be asked of a poet.
James J. McAuley is a poet, editor, and critic