Quincy R. Lehr

Some years ago, Dennis O’Driscoll remarked in Poetry that Ireland is one of the easiest places in the world to publish a collection of poems. And while O’Driscoll said this as a complaint, there is a certain truth to that. For a nation of somewhat over four million inhabitants, Ireland does produce a lot of books, even while being small enough for often rather disparate poets to rub shoulders when, in a larger nation such as the U.S., they would run in completely different circles.

And in recent years, the nation has seen a crop of younger writers emerge, not only from the universities, but also from a live scene that has grown across the country and which is, perhaps belatedly, starting to come to the attention of the island’s literary establishment. While I am only discussing four authors here, many others could — and perhaps should — be mentioned. But with a relative embarrassment of riches, one must be selective. The four poets here have all recently come out with their first full-length collections and all, to one degree or another, show great promise.

Dave Lordan’s The Boy in the Ring (Salmon, 2007) is an important collection, though, perhaps almost by its very nature as a first collection with something to say, an uneven one. Lordan is a poet of strong gestures and strong statements, often from an explicitly left-wing perspective. When he focuses on local, specific characters, the effect can be shocking and intensely powerful, as in “Death of a Handyman”:

All their gardens clamping shut
behind their high electric gates
while ulcers gnaw your colon
and you learn to shit through plastic tubes
wearing nappies like a new born
and to queue queue queue queue
and wait wait wait wait
to fill in never ending forms
pleading thin cold mercies of the state.

These lines, and many others throughout the collection, are absolutely fantastic, and they are worth the price of admission.

Unfortunately, there are also moments where Lordan’s desire for the sweeping statement and grand gesture results in rather appalling lines. Throughout the book, there’s an overreliance on anaphora, and Lordan can at times oversell his ideas and at others fail to deliver them artfully. In the wildly uneven “Excerpt from Reflections on Shannon”, we find lines like:

Can I be happy if others suffer?
Can I be true if the world is a lie?
Can I be good if I allow evil to rule over we?

These are rhetorically heavy-handed lines with little that rises to the level of poetry. Lordan too often seems willing to raise what he considers to be important issues and leave it at that. It’s a shame, because there is more substance here, more relevance to the lives we live and the Ireland in which Lordan finds himself than in the collected works of many poets — and there’s ample evidence in Boy in the Ring that Lordan could pull the prosody up to the level of his subjects consistently if he made the effort.

Billy Ramsell, like Lordan a thirtyish poet with one foot in the performance scene hailing from Co. Cork, has put together a rather more intimate collection in Complicated Pleasures (Daedalus Press, 2007). There are some weak moments, such as the amateurish villanelle “The Connoisseur,” and an occasional tendency toward preciousness. Nonetheless, Ramsell’s is a collection of no small power that deserves greater attention, mainly because its confessional urges, far from being a laundry-list of misfortunes or solipsistic attention-seeking, draw the reader into the life of the narrator and remind us that emotions do ultimately emerge from an individual’s life. And the effects can be striking, as in the oddly sensuous “Middle Distance”, which takes jogging as its central trope:

I realised you would always be somewhere
in the middle distance,
that I could no more reach you
than I could my reflection in the gym’s mirror,
that I could repeat these steps forever and never come close.

Ramsell is not shy with his emotions and, taken as a whole, that’s a damn good thing.

Susan Millar DuMars, an American-born fixture of the Galway literary scene, likewise draws on her own life in her poems in Big Pink Umbrella (Salmon, 2008). Of the four authors under review, she is the eldest, which gives her an outlook that is much more wry than that of Ramsell or Lordan, both of whom are nothing if not earnest. Perhaps her greatest strength is her ability to wed a pleasant narrative voice to lines in poems such as “Fourteen”, where she begins by declaring ‘John Lennon is dead/and I hate everyone’ and ends by describing her fourteen-year-old self walking down Philadelphia’s South Street:

rehearsing for apocalypse
in doorways.
Kissing the world goodbye
every night.

How annoying
to find it still there in the morning.

At times, Millar DuMars’s tendency toward autobiography can fall a bit flat. In “The Goddess and the Chickpea”, for example, we find the lines:

At my same age, Dad was in Toledo
sleeping in his car.
Mom a clerk who lunched at Woolworth’s counter
on tomato soup made
from ketchup and hot water.

While the situation is not without its inherent interest, one feels, as one often does with contemporary free verse, that a few more sonic tricks, or trope, or something, could liven the lines up as poetry. But while Millar DuMars’s poetry does, on occasion, lack a certain aural verve, she makes up for it in spades with a good sense of humour and a good eye for detail.

Caroline Lynch’s Lost in the Gaeltacht (Salmon, 2008) is a somewhat mixed bag. Lynch has a fine eye for description, as in the collection’s opening poem, “The Match”, in which Lynch and an English woodsman compare cricket and hurling and which ends with a downright lovely image:

…Then I picked up
a sliotar on a flick of air held like a hurley

and pucked the tight was of nothing: high, long,
over the cathedral spire’s great struts of Irish oak.

Lynch’s “The Commonplace Mother Plays Medea”, a sestina in which a housewife loses it in an act of violence, is hardly unprecedented in its rhetorical strategies, but it is not a bad read.

However, too many of the poems fall into the category of what Donald Hall famously termed the McPoem. They are well-crafted bits of free-verse lyric that are fairly unambitious and over quite quickly. Take “Up Above, Meanwhile”:

The wind hurries down the Royal Mile and
Tartan rugs for sale in shop doorways break
Into a swirl of a small skirmish for freedom.

And that’s it. It is a nice image and an evocative one, but it’s just a bit slight for a whole poem. It shows Lynch’s potential while at the same time crying for a greater rigour that the reader hopes subsequent collections will provide.

While all of these collections are not entirely even (most first collections aren’t), they kick the living crap out of the bulk of what emerges from American MFA programs and the ubiquitous first book prizes that dot the universities. None of these writers is patting him- or herself on the head for being clever or fashionable. No, they are plying their craft and generally engaging in life as they find it. While all of them could use a bit more ambition and/or formal precision in one area or another in subsequent collections, this modesty does have a certain virtue, a vitality that is refreshing and even cleansing somehow.