PoetryIn one of the brief lyrics that distinguish this, his sixth collection, Gerard Smyth - remembering how it was to work in a bakery - talks of "work that became a ritual".
It's precisely this sort of transformation that marks the best poems in The Mirror Tent, summoning into the celebratory present not only that bakery but a remembered teacher of English (whose voice was "ceremonious"), a picturehouse ("all of us close together in a dark hush"), a bar in the 1960s ("where we revelled . . . in denim and corduroy"), or some dead friends, among them Michael Hartnett ("bony as the Rock of Skellig").
Stretching beyond such purely personal memories, Smyth's imagination can also take in the wider world, a world often tinged with political implication, whether responding to Irish social ills, to John Field, Chopin, Jan Palach, or to "some of the forgotten of the Great War". In each case his lightly brooding, lyrical eye plucks out a salient feature and polishes it, letting something of the truth of the subject be, in little, known.
As well as its clear-sighted, unsentimental, sometimes exasperated love of Dublin, what I appreciate in Smyth's work is its muted sense of elegy, its plainspoken "nostalgia for the world" (as the title of one poem puts it), and the way its decent lucidity of expression matches the honesty and (moral) clarity of his thought, the direct, discreetly understated sincerity of his response. What at times can limit the poetry is when these signature virtues fade into mere mildness, so that some poems remain flat on the page: the overtly celebratory note seems too easily achieved, the religiously inflected responses seem slight, or the poem, in stretching for significance, only reaches platitude.
But there is enough here of lyrical immediacy, social awareness, and a winning celebration of married love; enough liveliness of language that can give us the spry eroticism of how "The beeswax glaze of the wooden floor/ reflected your gipsy skirt/ and the brass buttons of the concierge"; enough of how this poet is part scrupulous, detached eye, part sympathetic archivist, part involved participant in the doings of the everyday, part cartographer of a few telling spots on the landscape of a marriage - enough of all these to make Smyth's best poems into small rituals of morally alert, memorially affectionate attention, their unshowy working language satisfyingly in tune with what he has learned about the nature of the world he lives in.
WHILE SMYTH'S TERRAIN is the city, the poems of Francis Harvey lodge us deep inside a rural (south Donegal) landscape, the overlapping emotional and physical maps of which Harvey knows with startling, at times corrosive, intimacy. In the rinsed light of his minute observations a world is brought to vivid life, animated by compassion, understanding, and a tough grace of observation. It's impossible in a short review to do justice to this life's work (his first book, In the Light on the Stones, was published in 1978 when he was 53, followed by The Rainmakers in 1987, The Boa Island Janus in 1996, Making Space in 2001 and now this impressive Collected Poems). What's is possible is to touch on some of those qualities that make Harvey's a rich, even unique contribution to contemporary Irish poetry.
Beautifully grounded in the actual, his language bristles with facts (often spiced with astringent opinions), generating a direct speech mostly pared to the bone of meaning, formally astute but rarely seeking high-flown "poetical" effects. "The mystery of love is flesh and bone," he says, and this enlightened, sceptical materialism informs not only his poems, but the way he thinks about and practises his art, at his best stripping expression down to abiding habits of rhythmically clean epigrammatic speech (often braced into the form of the sonnet).
His subjects - to which he returns with the compulsive ardour of the solitary, the naturalist, the philosopher, the lover - are the landscape (its flora, its fauna, the human figures that inhabit it), the weather, and the enduring vagaries of love, of family ties, and of political and social circumstance, to which he adds shrewd reflections on his own nature and the nature of his curious vocation. Some of his best work is contained in a portrait gallery of sympathetically observed neighbours, including Condy, Condy at 80, Information for Tourists, More Information for Tourists and The Deaf Woman in the Glen, all of which are searing miniatures of anti-pastoral rural tragedy, in the line inaugurated by Kavanagh's Patrick Maguire
The speaker of these poems (descended, he says, "of bridge-builders whose/ stones, plumbed, spanned more than water"), comes of mixed Protestant and Catholic stock, a line of descent that marks his amphibian view of the Northern tribal conflict, its heart-blindviolence a prompt to many outspoken poems of outrage. Inhabiting a world between the solitary and the civic-minded, he can at times resemble the more politically decisive John Hewitt, while as a connoisseur of "love's climate of kiss and touch" - a mostly unsentimental celebrant of sexual love and marriage - he can make his own light-footed country music, that has here and there a touch of Thomas Hardy's mix of colloquial and formal speech. Another influence to be heard occasionally is that of Robert Frost. Like the work of these two masters, Harvey's homegrown, homespun poems persist in their own dogged honesty, instructing us in the very consciousness of a time and place he's made his own.
He begins one poem (Dorothy Wordsworth in Belfast) with the line "To see things as they are". It is a commitment from which his imagination never falters, but never ignoring how hard it is for an imagination even thus tutored to deal with the savagery of the world of sectarian hatred. It is his willingness to do both of these things - to see the poet's double imperative of celebration and horrified recoil - that lends distinction to the best work of this wide-awake imagination. Speaking in a "serious matter-of-fact way," his sharp lyrical eye is ever alert for "things that tangle with the light," such as "the wake of a hare/rising like smoke from long wet grass." With a quiet musical eloquence of his own, he is local geographer, meteorologist, social chronicler, and always the keeper of his own quirky, independent counsel.
In a book of this length it'd be impossible not to find notes that are less well tempered, less adequate to their various occasions. Sometimes the celebratory instinct can rely on tired religious imagery or become merely whimsical: Harvey's imagination flags, then, and originality of response gives way to conventional counters of image and diction. And sometimes the journal tone achieves no more than a pedestrian record of an action that wills itself into significance, but without imaginative conviction. From time to time, too - waxing philosophical - he hits a facile note and pose, while at times (straining for an idiom to match his political outrage) he can stumble into rhetorical excess.
And the "New Poems" section, though it has a few fine meditations and a number of lovely haiku-like epiphanal notations, seems over-padded with poems that are of a lower voltage and that seem more forced, willed into a hollower lyricism than that which prompts his best work and springs from some genuine imaginative need.
But in that best work - well seeded throughout this collection, and which came as such a satisfying surprise to the rest of us when those early volumes of his first appeared - he creates poems that are, as he says of his own landscape, "dense / with ordinariness and deity". Representing a life given over to the work of making poems, this collected volume is a handsome testament to the fidelity with which Harvey has pursued, wrestled with, and mastered, his craft.
Eamon Grennan's most recent volume of poems is The Quick of It. A new collection, Out of Breath, is forthcoming
The Mirror Tent By Gerard Smyth Dedalus, 75 pp. €11 Collected Poems By Francis Harvey Dedalus, 224 pp. €28