Poetry: In Michael D. Higgins's new collection a number of different selves take centre stage. Each self prompts the writer to a different sort of language; each results in a different measure of poetic success or failure.
One self is that of the troubled son and father. These poems revisit the pain of a childhood scarred by a father who, for whatever reason (Higgins is sparing of facts), separates himself from the family; or they probe the poet's own state as a father in his relations with his children. Another self is that of lyrical memoirist, recording with affectionate nostalgia certain details of an earlier, simpler (rural) world. Yet another is a self which may be more recognisable to those familiar with Higgins's public persona, containing as it does his articulate humanitarian compassion, his fervent commitment to human rights, his political vocation. Finally, this compendium of selves includes the spiritual philosopher, seeking in a season of dryness and doubt (his own and that of the world at large) some enduring consolation, some healing balm for a troubled soul.
So much for subject matter. As to the poems themselves, as poems, they vary in quality. Affecting moments recall the writer's mother and father, moments when some remembered fact releases a feeling, and the language is up to the task of simply recording it. There is a metal badge, for instance, that the departing father gives his child, or the old suitcase out of which the returning father produced "magic in parcels". Or there is the painful lack of communication between the poet-father and his own son:
The shared moment is over.
Turning their backs to the sea
They drive
Away from wonder
Father and Son
In silence.
Or the palpable memory of 'The Ass' stirs recollection: "I recall the soft velvet of his ears,/ As he bent in habit/ For the winkers." In such moments the writer trusts plain statement to carry the ordinary experience, and the result is something we share, can trust.
But though Higgins declares in one poem his dedication to "the blinding light/ Of the ordinary", too many of the poems are damaged by his use of a language that doesn't practise what he preaches. So even a poem of affecting memory can slide into a language that distances us from its experience, is clotted with abstractions. This sort of thing, replacing plain speech with cumbersome rhetoric, does most damage to the poems of spiritual questioning. In them, passage after passage - no matter what the reality of thought and feeling any of them seeks to register - dissolves into verbal gestures emptied of truly communicable content. So while it's easy to respect the enterprise and to sympathise in principle with the speaker's predicament, a characteristic passage such as the following (from 'Nocturne 1') - where the lines lack rhythmic force, and plain (or even grammatical) sense is hard to come by - prevents us getting a felt sense of either:
The sick grey feeling
Of despair
Lodges in the stomach
Short of great loss
That might release
A long sigh
It remains.
A dark shadow
Over my whole being.
However real its source, this sounds hollowly melodramatic, and can be of little interest to anyone except the speaker himself, who alone can translate its generalities into their original hard particular facts.
The most successful pieces in the collection are those emerging out of Higgins's political experience, in which we hear the refreshing sound of a genuine speaking voice. Poems such as 'Pol Pot in Anlon Veng', 'Meeting', and the exuberantly satiric 'Revivalists' have a vivid verbal energy missing from the more calculatedly "poetic" private meditations. They are animated by the voice - humorous, intelligent, passionate, compassionate, at once practical and utopian - that comes, I'd say, most naturally to Higgins as a poet, and the one he might turn to more frequently. Here are the final lines from one such poem, decently balancing the poet's political anger and social sympathy in a gesture of stoically understated understanding:
Carrying a bag at night,
Fighting for the shoe polishing in the morning
With competitive brothers,
Little Fikri said
Goodbye Mr Michael.
On television
General Evren spoke for the length of two episodes of Dallas;
In the Hotel I was packing again,
For my return home.
In this and other poems cut from similar cloth, Higgins manages to bring his moral experience and his language into an honestly telling alignment. Given the nature of our politics and politicians, to hear this happening in any poem by a poet who is also a public man and political insider/outsider is distinctly satisfying.
• Eamon Grennan teaches at Vassar College. Gallery Press will publish a new collection of his poems later this year