The Parchment Boat by Moya Cannon Gallery Press 45pp, £11.95/£5.95
Selected Poems by Medbh McGuckian Gallery Press 94pp, £13.95/£7.95
The Parchment Boat is Moya Cannon's second book of poetry. Like her first, well-received collection, Oar, it displays a fascination with matters aqueous, from the eponymous "Patched Kayak" to effluvia of every imaginable kind: rains, moats, wells, "bright waves", a tidal "rush and tug", not to mention a comprehensive selection of suitable receptacles. The collection shows a perhaps greater reliance on the element than is healthy, since there is little evidence of the kind of ballast that could be supplied by a profounder engagement with the objects or events which habitually provide the occasion for these poems. Thus, in the short poem "Milk", while wonder-struck that the cry of a "stranger's baby" can induce spontaneous lactation in her companion, Cannon makes her metaphorical exertions extend no further than an utterly unsurprising meditation on "kindness": "This is kindness/ which in all our human time/has refused to learn propriety . . ." Similarly, "Viol" tritely declares "Wherever music comes from/it must come through an instrument" and then proceeds with the nearest simile to hand: "a long neck,/a throat that loves touch,/gut,/a body that resonates . . ." The chopped-up lineation is clumsy and unjustified, calling to mind what the critic John Kerrigan has remarked of Eavan Boland's later work, its tendency to "confuse terseness with intensity".
Reading Cannon is frequently a frustrating experience. One senses a distinct unwillingness to go the distance with language, and a too-easy acceptance of the flat figuration that results. Metaphoric lassitude is occasionally overcome, in poems such as "Crannog", "Murdering the Language", "Driving through Light in West Limerick" or the lovely "Thole-Pin", in which Cannon's preoccupation with "shards" and fragmentary knowledge gives way to a greater verbal assiduity and assuredness. There is a distinctive sensitivity and musicality about these poems which, when allied with a braver, more ambitious scope, should make Cannon worth watching.
The appearance of Medbh McGuckian's Selected Poems provides a long-awaited overview of her career to date. Inclusiveness has always been McGuckian's hallmark; her capacious imagination and protean vision give her a seemingly effortless ability to accommodate experience and return it to us invigorated, in the diction of exhilaration. Although "omissions are not accidents", any selection of work entails a sacrifice, and in this case the reader is cheated of one of the principle pleasures of a McGuckian collection, the chance to enjoy its intricate structural resonances. What is gained is the appreciation of a development which is never forced or over-conscious.
McGuckian was 32 when her first collection, The Flower Master, appeared from in 1982. It was immediately apparent that here was major work, with language and technique fully equal to its intentions, an already mature style. It is still arguably her best book, as the selection in this volume testifies, from the simple lyric "Smoke": "They seem so sure what they can do./I am unable even/to contain myself, I run/till the fawn smoke settles on the earth", to the truly masterful title poem. The quotation from "Smoke" sheds light on much of the work included in this volume: its vatic quality is strongly in evidence, particularly in "The Most Emily of All", "The Dream Language of Fergus," or the gooseflesh-inducing "She Which Is Not, He Which Is".
These are felicitous poetic moments when control is an irrelevance; as Wallace Stevens wrote, "not balances/That we achieve but balances that happen". The pacing of these poems is precise and instinctive, as though McGuckian were allowing language simply to occur; the result is that when concerns with gender and national politics begin to appear in the later verse, they do so with a sense of decorum and are never tacked-on or gratuitous. This is poetry high on the evolutionary ladder. McGuckian's intense, improvisatory movement owes much to Marina Tsvetaeva, and there is in general a considerable debt to her sources, in particular to Mandelstam and the Celan of Mohn und Gedachtnis. Such influences contribute to the work's slightly dislocated quality, many poems reading like translations from the Russian, but the even and consistent level of achievement in these poems is McGuckian's alone.
This volume achieves exactly what a Selected Poems should: it is a splendid introduction to a lavishly gifted, complex writer, a point of entry into the manifold treasures of her oeuvre.
Caitriona O'Reilly is an editor of College Green magazine