`We've jumped, now you follow". David Trimble's challenge to Sinn Fein must have afforded Colette Bryce an ironic smile: `Footings', the opening sonnet in this impressive first collection now reads as prophetic parable. Two lovers are getting down from a wall. One dismisses the other's efforts in "monkeying seven, eight feet to the ground;/to slide from the belly, swing there (caught/by the arms, by the palms, by the fingertips), drop' and still hesitates until dared by the other to jump. The sestet concludes equivocally as, both sobbing, the speaker shoulders her lame lover along the parallel tracks towards home.
However, such moral readings are bound to be too neat for a poetic voice that resists finding identity in community strategies of lore, locale or character. Intimacy is itself an estranged condition in these accomplished stanzas which describe the process of demarcating emotional and/or geographical territory, whether addressing lover, saint or a caged griffon in Spain. Odd as it sounds, Bryce uses surveillance techniques to achieve a bifocal vision, as, for example, in `Father, in the Face', when a daughter, staying behind in the car, watches her father through a pair of binoculars and notices his ageing for the first time. She bravely risks clumsy phrasing ("from point of view of passenger") or a missed beat to convey the anxiety of these vantage points and mostly succeeds in pulling this reader into an unsettling proximity with the speaker.
These are vigilant, not confessional, poems, maintaining a detachment perhaps best illustrated in the longest lyric, `Form', where the self-justifications of an anorexic or hunger striker rely on, and implicate, the bystander: ". . . I'd been feeling/strange, somehow encased, the hollow rush/of my own breath like tides in the shell/of my own head. A woman passed/and I saw myself in her glance,/her expression blank as a future."
`Nevers', `Young', `Departure, Spanish Irish Time', `Itch' all bear the hallmark of an assured poet who has defined the terrain in which the uncertainties of self-identity are made happen. This is an original and promising debut.
Selina Guinness is a lecturer in Irish Literature at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology