MANY of Roy McFadden's superbly crafted poems chart ordinary life in urban Northern Ireland before the "Troubles". We tend to forget, rather easily, that such a time existed, and that it had a thriving community of visual and literary artists. Yes, it was a different country and yes, they did things differently there. There were literary magazines, journals - McFadden coedited Northern Ireland's first poetry magazine, during the Forties. His first collection of poems, Swords and Ploughshares, came out in 1943. Michael McLaverty's first novel appeared in 1939. There was the great activity around Belfast's Group Theatre; there was Campbell's Patisserie, Cafe and Snackery opposite the City Hall, a gathering place for actors and painters and writers around which the BBC recorded a programme produced by Sam Hanna Bell, broadcast in the early Sixties.
The notion that Northern Irish poetry began with poetry of the conflict of the past quarter century is a misleading one. A great deal of writing was produced that had not the current conflict to fuel it. Ironically, McFadden was born during a period of civil unrest in the 1920s; the family were evicted at this time and moved to the Belfast suburb of Dundonald. McFadden covers it in a poem, "Evictions", dedicated to that other too often ignored Belfast poet. Padraic Fiacc:
Precocious refugee,
Between the ghettos' fires,
I stopped my tricycle.
A baby in a pram
Held out his penny flag.
I took it. In exchange,
I closed his fingers round
A wooden tomahawk . . .
McFadden is particularly a Belfast poet. His relationship to that city transcends conflict and remains rooted in the ironic, small local things commented upon and having their importances enlarged, local geographies highlighted and detailed.and imbued with very individual significance. Poems of place, such as "Ballyhackamore", read like small maps towards the Belfast consciousness which McFadden guards so warmly. This reviewer was reminded of his primary school days in that suburb:
Paddy Lambe's and its sawdust
Smart's Butchery at the corner
And the church with the iron bell
New poems complement those from a dozen odd McFadden collections in this big and well constructed book. In a concise introduction, Philip Hobsbaum maintains that McFadden remained "a war poet"; that, for me, is to risk lumping him in with the poetry of Northern Ireland over the past twenty five years. And he is more than that, considerably more. Read as I may, I can uncover no other translation of Hohsbaum's conclusion. One explanation for McFadden not having, so far, received the recognition he rightly deserves may be the fact of his remaining outside the mainstream of poetry of this period. Full marks to Lagan Press for restoring McFadden to us and reminding us that Northern Irish poetry did not always need an agenda of any sort to be good and remarkable.
PATRICK CHAPMAN's first collection, Jazztown, was published by Raven Arts Press about five years ago. The New Pornography is a darkly humorous collection divided into five sections with faintly Gothic headings, among then "Necropolis Chic", "Blind Voyeur", "Disease Variations", this last containing poems with equally disturbing titles such as "I Am John's Virus", "Viral", "In Extremis", and including a poem entitled "Robert Mapplorpe: Aspects of Self Portrait 1988":
The dressing gown becomes a coffin;
The large leather armchair, a fire.
The crown embroidered slippers walk away.
Thankfully, it's not all shadow and heaviness, though it must be said that in Chapman's darkest poems a sense of compassion redeems things. Small, funny poems pop up here and there. But overall, Chapman's stylish and crafted pessimism assumes dominance. There is a linguistic and emotional bravery evident in these poems which augurs well for later work. But too much of this dark irony can end up creating a merely trendy writer out of a possibly adventurous and interesting one.
BELFAST BORN John Hughes inhabits a very different poetic world from Roy McFadden. His imaginative approach to poetry walks close to the sort of fantasy territory exploited by novelists such as David Eddings, for a start. And whereas McFadden's territory is recognisable. Hughes's is not. It is the sort of territory one glimpses at the corner of one's eye, disturbing, uncharted, out of immediate reach.
Hughes creates mythology or works up bits and pieces of the genuine thing, some of it with quaintly Biblical overtones, and attempts almost audibly to fuse it on to more familiar or identifiable territory. The result is unsettling; often one is thrown into an indecipherable, coded world. There is, in the end, no country here which we can identify. If Hughes is to be termed a Northern poet, in the sense with which we are all too familiar, the term must be a loose one. Everything here is a territory of the mind and the imagination.
Hughes's often interesting work is seriously fractured by a tendency towards cleverness. "Mary Celeste" is an example of this sort of thing: "It took all of June for us to reach/latitude 22 north, /longitude 23 west. Quite. Not all of us may know, and the poem does not tell us, that this finds one more or less north of Cape Verde and a bit to the south of the Canaries. Nor does one know the significance of the number "ninety seven" in the poem, or why Hughes has apparently turned the ship into a human being with a thing against the King James Bible. One is tempted to be clever too and point out that a vessel such as the doomed Mary Celeste was probably too small to have a crow's nest, as he suggests she bad. Too much poetical rabbits from hats stuff here.
A small number of notes at the back of the book tells us about such things as Stendhal's phrase for homosexuals. I'm sure someone somewhere is interested in this sort of thing, especially in a collection of poetry. But there is an unavoidable sense of Hughes showing off his erudition, his handiness with words and sleight of hand agility around poetic sounding phrases. It gets too much. In the end the cleverness betrays the poetry. "Against the Grain", which contains some lovely phrases, is burdened by, between, quotes a line which travesties the opening of the prayer, "Hail Mary". Unpoetic and unnecessary, to say the least.