PoetryWhen given new collections to review by three poets in their young to middling years (the youngest being 30, the oldest 50), the temptation is to try to find the common ground between them to arrive at a neat and persuasive narrative for the state of contemporary Irish poetry. Happily, each of these volumes resists such spurious attempts, offering distinctly different responses to the dilemma of modern living.
Next Door is John McAuliffe's second collection; as with his first, A Better Life, there is a constant attention to the precise details of everyday life, a sense that nothing is beneath the notice of the observant writer. It is the power of McAuliffe's imagination to transform the ordinary into the mysterious, as in the first poem, A Pyramid Scheme, where an abandoned car is gradually absorbed by its environment and transmuted into a sacred site for the community:
till the rusting shell starts half-stories,
the kind that make it first notorious,
for the children who will have to learn
what goes on at night, or could go on,
The mundane details of another's life are exquisitely caught in poems such as Moving In, where the presence of a house's previous owner lingers in her abandoned garden and junk mail, or The Street, with its soap-opera cast of characters and hints of domestic violence. McAuliffe also powerfully evokes the dilemma of the expatriate caught between the familiar strangeness of the new home and the affectionate tedium of the old, in poems such as Town, where Listowel is pictured " . . . lit up, but no one comes back to reminisce, / intent as some evangelist smashing fossils". Behind these poems there is a sense of a resigned acceptance of real life in all its rich ordinariness, as in The Quiet Life, which questions:
Is it this you wanted, the still centre
of the quiet life, its ticking clock,
the white goods' hum and on/off click.
If McAuliffe charts the everyday in language that is conversational and idiomatic, Mark Granier adopts a more intense and lyric mode for his explorations. The Sky Road is also his second collection and it ranges widely, from Wicklow and Swords to Malaga, Vancouver, San Francisco and Melbourne; whatever the location, the language deployed is sensuous and celebratory. In Footholds, an unnamed landscape is described:
No one has a hand in this
nature, rust-dark, sap-green, accumulating
wing upon wing, fan upon fan, a map
of smells for the pygmy shrew . . .
In Driving Through The Sally Gap the bleak beauty is perfectly caught in lines such as "Cloud-browsed, darkening shoulders/ go on down into a nesting ground/ for the ghosts of glaciers". Very occasionally, Granier's heightened lyricism strikes a false note, as in The Box, where a TV set is likened to a "watery cloudnest", but such lapses are rare and more often he combines a just-so accuracy with huge inventiveness. How about this for a description of a fruit machine paying out:
till it jammed on three melons, trembled
slightly and spewed
£80, more than a week's wages then,
as if a whole silvery orchard shook itself
and stood still, a drench of what seemed
like actual luck;
Nor is Granier afraid to take on the darker side of the Celtic Tiger. In Foreigners he depicts the casual racism of a brief encounter at a public phone box and provides his solution in A Blessed Curse where he wishes that
. . . your children and your children's
children
marry, again, and again, he or she whose
skin
is unmistakably (even in a dim light) that
shade
that has you most affronted and afraid . . .
Billy Ramsell's vision is the most politicised of the three. Complicated Pleasures is his first collection and in it he demonstrates an awareness of the realpolitik of global marketing and global terrorism. In the title poem, lovers sleep while countries are invaded and the fates of populations decided: ". . . as you sniffed against my neck/ and the drumming, drumming flooded your bedroom,/ on powerful men in offices pressing buttons". Southern Shores echoes Yeats's A Prayer for My Daughter in the speaker's wish for a charm to protect a small child, "to gird you a little against what will come,/ or even against the everyday difficulties,/ let me wish you privacy".
In Silent Alarm the menace comes from the technology of credit checks and Google. Yet set against these fears is the belief that humans must continue to connect, that the "body beside me" is the only constant that makes sense of an increasingly irrational world.
In that, Ramsell shares with McAuliffe and Granier a faith that only poetry can sustain that connection.
Nessa O'Mahony recently completed a PhD in creative writing. Her second poetry collection, Trapping a Ghost, was published by Bluechrome in 2005 and her third, The Side Road to Star, is due next spring
Next Door By John McAuliffe The Gallery Press, 64pp. €11.95 The Sky Road By Mark Granier Salmon Poetry, 72pp. €12 Complicated Pleasures By Billy Ramsell Dedalus Press, 74pp. €11