Imagine you’re walking down a bright street in Rome when the sun flicks behind a classical statue with anti-polizia slogans graffitied blackly on its base: the chafe of ancient and contemporary may be something like the experience of reading Jamie McKendrick’s Drypoint (Faber, £12.99).
Time skids between chasm, fright and boon throughout these poems: in Part 3 of Inheritance, a grandfather’s monocle (“an affectation”) fitted to the speaker’s eye works a magic unspecified (though guessable), the poem finishing, without punctuation, “and lo and behold”. These are poems open to such unanticipated gifts, though equally susceptible to more unsettling possibilities, as in Afterquake, which begins: “By some cosmic quirk the disconnected phone / unleashed a scarlet squeal”.
We’d expect connectedness from such a celebrated translator (from Italian), and these are poems keenly aware of other poems, flexing an impressive array of linguistic precedence. As with many long-career writers (McKendrick was one of 1994′s New Generation poets), many poems here are thinking about poems and poetry, sometimes with humour (a poem titled Doing Nothing follows another titled Nothing Doing); sometimes a little more pointedly, as in Neither Fish nor Fowl, which begins:
Sometimes mending a poem can feel like freeing
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Waking up to Christmas
a large fish from a caul of plastic netting
Even the apparently inconsequential can yield a depth of meaning in poems that play the personal off against the impersonal, as in Court of the Lions, when, hearing cicadas’ “tiny anvils” at the Alhambra:
… the metal plate
screwed to my femur vibrates to their call, my heart
to the murmur of marble, the patter of water.
Cosmopolitan, self-aware and sumptuously elegant, this is a collection of riches which, despite the short poem, trigger warning (first in the sequence Anti-Social Media Shorts), consistently offers more dappled sunlight than freighted shadow:
Report this poem
for its lack of empathy,
its relentless gloom.
Mary O’Malley’s 10th collection, The Shark Nursery (Carcanet, £11.99), brings a fine lyric sensibility to subjects as diverse as Greek mythology, marine biology and the time/space continuum. Serious in intent, the writing is often marvellously funny in execution (“I called into the marine library to see what the fish / are reading these days” – The Marine Library), recording profound environmental damage alongside cherished glimpses of a delicate world.
Its central section comprises poems about the Covid pandemic. The Lucky Ones, commissioned for the National Day of Remembrance and Reflection in March 2022, both marks the losses of the pandemic and finds room for a welcome image of release:
… Still, the swallows arrived from their warm galaxy.
They cut windows in the sky and raised our flat world up
like a blue circus tent.
Vivid, surprising imagery characterises the book, with many poems offering a kind of intriguing visual proposition, such as In The Dark, which concludes:
The friendly sky is full of night animals.
They mean you no harm but only the moon
can grant your wish and pull the tide
across the plain, up to your house on the hill.
Other poems push all the way into a lyrical surrealism rare in Irish poetry, harnessing metaphor’s capacity to rough up our sense of the world as fixed and predictable. House begins: “There is a house where at certain times / the rooms fill up with swans”, and the opening of section iv of Shorts offers this unsettling version of a Big House scene:
There’s a skeleton behind me
and a rich man on the wall,
I’ll ride bareback to escape them
on the racehorse down the hall.
This strain of startling, eye-catching description makes for poems delightfully in earnest about human and non-human habitats, and the danger zones between.
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In Joseph Woods’s Veld Fires (Dedalus Press, €12.50), poems track their narratives across several continents, touching down in various locations in Ireland during Covid and, further afield, in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Rangoon. There’s a certain exoticism to each lived-in place (strange birds, wild animals, dramatic mountain ranges and picaresque characters), all gathered into a homely domesticity centred on the poet’s family and, especially, his young daughter whose wise-child sayings run throughout this collection. In Game Drive, for example, the glamourous array of hippos, lionesses and elephants is nicely undercut by her response, “Look, look over there, a rabbit”.
These are poems of affection and adherence. Faithfully narrative, they write journeys, objects and places into shared significance, but are also careful to record those more glancing moments when speech eludes, connection fails or the best intentions drain away. In Enough to get us to Marondera (quoted here in full), feeling is signposted, but left gently and tactfully unexplored:
An adopted saying in our household,
meaning; on an empty fuel tank there’s enough
fumes to get us home, and when I said this
at a filling station near Limerick,
your tears welled up.
Family narratives being as liable to complexity as any other histories, the dislocation of homecoming (especially during the weirdness of Covid) and its attendant feelings of belonging or estrangement are nicely captured here. African Night Train addresses a returned uncle who reads from a library book titled Lion Hunting, “in your mock colonial / accent, for far too long for it to be funny”.
Amid the mis-steps of colonial aftermath, these poems offer sincere if, betimes, overly modest, illustrations of how, against the overwhelm of both history and geography, even the slightest human connection might offer redress of sorts.
Occasionally, a poetry book seems to capture the zeitgeist. At a time when housing, soaring rents and the scarcity of rental properties are all pressing issues, Ella Frears’s Goodlord (Rough Trade Books, £14.99) offers a timely exposure of the vulnerability of being a renter in a volatile market where the basic premise of home as a place of refuge seems an impossible ideal.
Goodlord is a different kind of poetry book. Shortlisted for this year’s Forward Prize for Best Collection, it’s written in the form of a sustained, book-length email from a London renter, to Ava, her real estate agent. “I’ve often felt my brain/… put on a lab coat and observe”, the unnamed narrator tells Ava, and observe she certainly does, chronicling not only a sequence of awful living situations, but also the ways in which they cramp personality and compromise the idea of a good life.
One house has “Big windows with a big sea view that nobody, including me, would bother looking through”. In another, with every space in a house turned into a bedroom, she writes of her flatmates, “We might have been good friends had architecture / allowed”.
She tells Ava about so much more than accommodation. Sexual exploitation, loneliness, failure, bullying, bad smells and toxic fumes – there’s a lot to be angry about in the lot of the renter, and Goodlord is certainly angry.
It’s also very, very funny in its account of how a young woman navigates the bear-pit of pub work, bad housing and the many situations where her body is expected to yield various pleasures to a variety of predatory men (“I struggled in the cage made of their bodies”).
Expansive as a novel, fine-tuned as a good poem, its edgy, whip-smart narrative makes Goodlord a great read, as well as a timely one.
Vona Groarke recently won the Michel Déon Prize for her latest book, Hereafter: the Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara
