There’s an undercurrent of suffering to Aoife Lyall’s second collection, The Day Before (Bloodaxe, 64pp, £12), much of which coheres around the disorientating days of lockdown; its odd rituals, barriers and a looming atmosphere of bureaucratic dread.
The words “penance” and “martyr” crop up several times, often in unexpected, seemingly benign places: “a single Dairy Milk, its purple wrapper full of promise, penance, sacrifice”; “I crush idle amethysts to dust, martyr the front door”. There’s a sense of bodily decay throughout, the breakdown and putrefaction of the organism woven through poems which seem, on the surface, to be rather more well behaved than they are.
There’s a relishing of grotesquerie which is set up early, in The Early Shift, “curls of pork fat unfurling in the morning sun – /the pink lilies of an insatiable lover” while a stroll through an aisle of mirrors results in further mortification: “each one grabs//a piece of me for itself”. There are times when it feels like Lyall’s sackcloth and ashes lexicon runs a little counter to the architecture of the poems themselves, straining a little for heaviness but not quite letting the implicitly dark undertow rise organically to the surface.
Going in circles pushes a scene of a washing line’s rotation into something, once again, grimly sacrificial: “walking it around like a mule at a millstone” but the effect is, ultimately, in keeping with the poem’s closing line: “all of us are crying and none of us knows why”. There’s an elegiac strain to some of the work too and here, the use of gesture and withholding, of feeling by absence, is more effective, especially in a poem like Day Return where we feel what’s not being said is really where it’s at: “I give them something to do. So I buy them/a keychain teddy bear and tell them it’s for you”.
Eamon Grennan’s latest collection, Of Shards and Tatters (Gallery, 56pp, €11.95/ €18.50), also operates largely in the realm of the Covid days, but tonally it’s a long way from any sense of put-upon penance. Instead, Grennan consistently looks on the bright side, and the poems here aim as much at an almanac of “hope/in this otherwise darkling time” as anything.
Grennan tends towards the long, clause-heavy, sentence, his poems spooling out a thought across several lines, almost whole poems at times, which can work as a means of taking his internal monologue for a walk but can also lead him into meandering. There’s an at-times forced cheeriness, a thread of “good enough ... to be going on with” which becomes something of a refrain, a form of willed bonhomie which risks becoming cloying but manages to largely avoid it through Grennan’s enthusiasm and apparent guilelessness.
It’s somewhat bold to attempt to capture ordinary, domestic happiness as Grennan consistently tries to, writing of “the happy cold contented/lot of us” and gritting his teeth while making the best of it. This instinct receives its most difficult test in elegies for his brother, some of the best work here, especially On Mourning which allows us to tune our ear a little and see quite how much rapid pedalling is going on under the surface for Grennan to maintain his optimistic notes.
While Grennan’s eye is often tuned to flora and fauna, to nature’s motto of “More life! More life!” he looks to write poems that say yes to all of it, and set about celebrating “ordinary/wonders of the world”. Occasionally, as of the “plague-ridden time” he sets about memorialising, there’s a sense that one poem “bleeds into every other”, but as in several here on memory, and a kind of haunting via childhood, this can also lend time itself a certain degree of fluidity in this benevolent, mindful book.
K Patrick’s debut, Three Births (Granta, 96pp, £12.99), is one in which the biggest debt is to pleasure. This can lead to arresting writing, as in the opening poem Pickup-Truck Sex where “Pleasure will continue/to fold us up”, in which there’s something muscular to the tone, as well as the scene portrayed: “Two strong/people in white t-shirts f*** across the bonnet/of an old pickup truck”. There’s a solipsistic streak – acknowledged and wilful as it may be – which can begin to grate at times. In David Attenborough, Patrick writes far from the only version of the sentiment “I essentially find myself/everywhere”. There’s a deliberately political aspect to this, on top of the sense of persona or mask; Patrick’s pronouns are they/them and the book is as much a case of “finding sex in everything” as it is about “queer recognition” and “horrid little gods”. Even so it can be wearing to feel like one is regularly being asked “Do you appreciate the absolute beauty of my life?”
Patrick is interesting and self-aware enough to amp up this thread of the work with a tongue-in-cheek, commentating instinct; ‘Narcissism/runs in the family you see!’
A poem such as EB, nominally in dialogue with Elizabeth Bishop, highlights the stark contrast in the approaches of the two writers to prosody, the world around them and much else: “I don’t pretend/to have anything in common with nature. Everything alive is/only an anecdote”; this seems to chime with the obviously provocative but flippant “A blackbird is boring./Looking at nature is a sickly British feeling” in Morning.
Patrick is interesting and self-aware enough to amp up this thread of the work with a tongue-in-cheek, commentating instinct; “Narcissism/runs in the family you see!” and “Self-love is like sky writing,/it is me: I am the embarrassed theme”. The writing here is alive, and at its best it can be electrically charged, as in the one-line poem Summer, offering us a “Big almanac of longing!”
Armen Davoudian’s debut The Palace of Forty Pillars (Corsair, 96pp, £10.99) announces a gifted new voice. Davoudian is Iranian-American and seems most at home within formal structures – there are crowns of sonnets, ghazals and other tightly-rhymed and patterned poems throughout the book, all sympathetically handled and refreshingly spry.
At times he tackles politics overtly, using Robert Frost’s old maxim about good fences to bind together time spent at a German language camp with the rise of Trumpist border wrangling, ending with an earned flourish: “The roads remain divided./Undercuts are in./Something that doesn’t love/burns on the streets again”.
More than in God, I believe in the nameless wife/of Lot, who knew she would never find a home/outside of Sodom, and therefore choked on salt
— The Palace of Forty Pillars
The ghost of Auden is invoked and never too far from hand in some of the poses struck, but James Merrill is also one of the presiding spirits, not least in the beautifully made Coming out of the Shower where the speaker is “unable to/resume old customs, unlike you” before navigating a sense of shame, or at least dislocation, caused by his burgeoning homosexuality: “on the cracked floor you’ve polished with such zeal/we’re mirrored in each tile./Yes, you’d forgive the spillage or forget./What else will you love me despite?”.
A feeling of being displaced is double-edged, “daily I renewed my prodigal choice” and the narrator wrestles with a desire to stay away, having left: “I’m always going back/on going back”. Despite the emotional pull of Iran, signified in the title sequence about Isfahan, he is most drawn to speaking in an “anguished English”, and possesses a complicated sense of thwarted nostalgia: “More than in God, I believe in the nameless wife/of Lot, who knew she would never find a home/outside of Sodom, and therefore choked on salt”.
Historically and symbolically literate, this is a book of poems which “settled/for what was difficult” and succeeded impressively in making challenges sing.
