The idea of Belfast and Queen’s University as a nursery for new poets first took root in 1963, when Philip Hobsbaum set up a Belfast section of his London poetry Group. The Belfast Group met for a decade, with Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, the critics Edna Longley and Michael Allen among the many contributors.
A more recent generation of poets, including Leontia Flynn, Alan Gillis and Sinéad Morrissey, has been identified with the city and the university, and a new anthology co-edited by Morrissey and Stephen Connolly advances the claims of a further group. The Future Always Makes Me So Thirsty: New Poets from the North of Ireland (Blackstaff, £14.99) includes some of the poets featured in Poetry Ireland Review's recent Rising Generation special issue and again gives notice of how lively and proactive this new generation is.
Growing up as writers in such close proximity to internationally significant poets generates an unusually skewed, half-possessive, half-competitive relationships. So it is not unexpected that the presiding figures in the anthology are, understandably, the local poets.
Ciaran Carson's formally adept yet wonderfully digressive collections Belfast Confetti (1990) and The Irish for No (1987) might be seen to license to the witty and expansive storytelling of young poets such as Stephen Sexton and Padraig Reidy, while Paul Muldoon's boundary-pushing early books shape the way that Miriam Gamble and Adam Crothers approach their material.
If these poets, and Paula Cunningham and Manuela Moser, stand out as particularly accomplished, the most impressive aspect of this anthology is how finished the work is as a whole, how high the bar has been set for inclusion, and how many poets (18) the editors have chosen.
Sexton's Daydream of the Jacket is a brilliant example of the lightness and skill with which these poems operate:
“My new vintage houndstooth jacket was catching eyes
in the aisles of the supermarket. I felt like someone else,
an older man perhaps, a taller man, a man without a beard
and when I saw myself reflected in the freezer glass, I was.”
(To find out who exactly the speaker has turned into, you will have to read the anthology.)
While it can sometimes feel as if there is more hype about the anticipation of new projects than there is about the finished project itself, this anthology is more substantial than a trailer or an appetizer. And, no doubt, individual full collections will soon emerge from the poets gathered here.
The sole Irish representative in this month's Forward Prize ceremony is Ron Carey, whose Distance (Revival, €12) has been shortlisted for the Best First Collection prize. Carey's poems often draw on childhood and imagined encounters with family members, as do many first books. His best poems combine the kind of detail we might expect in the work of fellow Limerick writers Kevin Barry and Donal Ryan, with workaday phrasing and a sort of tonal overload.
Moving describes a horse and cart taking the young speaker to the new estate:
“its black tar
Barely solid under the wheels, Joe put the reins
Into my electrified hands.
In her eagerness, my mother ran ahead; keys flashing
And a 100-watt Solus in her fist.
The black eyes of the front-room suddenly blazed.”
Other poems generate mystery by withdrawing from these scenes before anything as explicit as those fists and black eyes appear. In The Letter, "Like a blind dentist, my mother searches in the red mouth/ of her purse, while our irregular postman waits at the door."
Poems in a later section, New Oceans, imagine a more exotic location, but are less convincing than the poems where Carey introduces curious, glinting images into familiar scenes.
Afric McGlinchey's second collection, The Ghost of the Fisher Cat (Salmon, €12), begins with a poem (Cat Music) about catgut, ie the making of strings for musical instruments from animal intestines: "organs separated/ from fat and manure,// soaked overnight/ in alkaline water;// scraped once more,/ then stirred // through sulfuric fumes; rolled into elongated// strings; attached/ to an instrument// and tuned."
It is a striking opening, its confident, short-lined couplets handled without fuss. McGlinchey is a poet who looks and listens, and her poems come to life in touches and dabs:
“There are benches.
I sit, waiting for answers,
for the come-and-go comfort of another
headlight taking a bend in the distance.
Then it’s back to the kissing
darkness again, and silence.”
The poems know that it is not always a pleasure to be so attuned to the world; Scratch remembers a "long-/remaindered intimate", the memory providing a sharp thought on the speaker's current state: "my solitude. A kind/ of coupling, my freedom and this."
McGlinchey has chosen to use the motif of a cat – as familiar creature, as inhabitant of different worlds, as a sort of gothic other – across the book. She is so careful and precise in the detail of her best writing that this imposed motif does not always ring true: there may be too many cat cameos in this book for all but the most ardent cat-lover, but it pays off in the sustained charm-like intrigues of A River of Familiars:
“I have a cat that sharpens her scent on men.
I netted her from the river, called her mother. [. . .]
I have a crazy city cat with a lightning dart
across her lazy eye.
And my lightning cat has an earring, just the one,
mother-of-pearl. Call it intuition.
And seven secret positions, the last
a chanting locust. I have a cat that doesn’t exist.”
John McAuliffe’s fourth book, ‘The Way In’ (Gallery), was joint winner of the Michael Hartnett Award this year. He teaches at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing.
