POETRY: A Village Lifeby Louise Gluck. Rough Musicby Fiona Sampson.
LOUISE GLÜCK'S 12th collection, A Village Life, is a striking departure in form from her usual spare, chiselled style – instead relying upon longer lines and a Spoon River- like narrative coherence to achieve an impressive novelistic effect.
The poems focus on an unnamed Mediterranean – possibly Italian – village and the reader quickly feels rooted there. Tributaries, for instance, is a powerful poem of place. The villagers gather near the fountain and there is a sense of joy. The husbands may be off at work, yet "by some miracle/all the amorous young men are always free –/they sit at the edge of the fountain, splashing their sweethearts". But the mood shifts and we come to see a people "exiled by the world of hope" – the poem suffused with an anguish that is prevalent throughout the book.
In Twilightfor instance, we feel sympathy for the exhausted mill worker feeling robbed by work of time to dream. "Living – living takes you away from sitting." We feel empathy too for those in Pastoral who flee the village only to return thinking "they failed in the city". Glück's response is hard-edged: "To my mind, you're better off if you stay;/ that way dreams don't damage you". But for all the tough intelligence at play here, this is a far from heartless collection.
In Noon,a boy and a girl on the brink of adulthood "know that at some point you stop being children, and at that point/ you become strangers. It seems unbearably lonely".
Thankfully, A Village Lifealso possesses a wry humour. Most memorable is the narrator of In the Café poking fun at his friend who too easily falls in love. "Every year or so a new girl –/ if they have children he doesn't mind –/ he can fall in love with children also".
Louise Glück is a commanding poet and these are rich, varied, memorable poems – “intense pleasures,/ like the figs on the table”.
Fiona Sampson's new collection, Rough Music,takes its title from the old English custom of scapegoating and, at her best, these are poems which share with Glück a directness, an honesty of expression which is compelling.
Sampson's world is one of flux. She is a poet who dwells on water, "that endlessly-adapting ground/ whose instinct is motion". Remembering her childhood in her poem At Käsmu, she concludes, " People who have minds can change them,/ my father used to say./ I love whatever changes".
That Sampson was once a concert violinist is apparent in this collection which embraces the carol, folksong, ballad and charm form in poems that never lose their contemplative nature or musical allegiances. In the excellent The Door,there are references to guitar playing, a polka, "sour familiar songs" and "the plural beat of the city", concluding with "Buried tunes/ like grief, but walking". While in the lyrical poem Schubertiad, the "world slips from beat to beat/ like a song".
Sampson can also be a fine love poet, unafraid to define “the hurdy-gurdy heart”.
In the title poem, Eurydice has the last say, her words powerfully depicting the poignancy of love, the cruelty of death. “I swam upriver to my heart/ looking for a harbour/ till Death took me at last,/ like a lover.”
Where the collection jars is in the poet's need to intellectualise sometimes, which can render meaning unclear. In Nel Mezzofor instance, the poet pronounces "when Hegel called history/ dialectical/ surely he meant that the human era,/ each three-score and ten,/ works the same way", in a poem which otherwise triumphs in its simpler descriptions of a garden where "sun spills coins/ between the ash-leaves".
In fact, it is when the language of Rough Musicis at its simplest that Sampson's poems excel – as in the opening clarity of Betrayalor in the pitch-perfect Envoi, where "the sudden rightness of a room" and its memories makes for a "rightness" of poetry too.
Enda Wyley is a poet. Her fourth collection, To Wake to This, was published by Dedalus Press in 2009
