POETRY: PAUL PERRY reviews The Mischievous Boyby Maurice Harmon, Object Foundby Gusztáv Báger and Drinking the Colour Blueby Eileen Casey
MAURICE HARMON exudes an empathetic warmth in his third collection The Mischievous Boy. After a distinguished career as an academic, Harmon has dedicated himself to writing poetry. But this is no po-faced scholar turned poet. Yes, Harmon is a serious poet, but one who employs a keen sense of mischief, memory and inventiveness.
From the hilarious Dear Editorwhere an aspiring poet reminds the editor that her husband "says he marked you when you played top of / the left for Louth // He says you were 'a dirty hoor.' / With best wishes // Yours sincerely, / Jasmine. / P.S. That's the name of a flower," to the laconic and heart-breaking When Love is Not Enough, Harmon exercises exact control in his prosody, often using lucid blank verse.
In A Wind-swept Spirit, the opening poem and an ars poeticaof sorts, Harmon confesses what writing poetry has meant to him, "To tell the truth ever since it started / I've never known peace, caught between / one doubt and another, one word and the next."
When To the Sessionsis a tour de force in over one hundred lines. Like The Gentle YearsHarmon displays an ability to combine tenderness and pathos with a fiercely unsentimental honesty. In fact, Harmon's distinctive talent is for the sustained narrative of memory. You see it in poems such as The Unconstrained, During the Warand, of course, in the rollicking title poem, which has been set to music by Derek Ball and is the subject of a stained glass window by Phyllis Burke.
The Mischievous Boyis a rich and rewarding book. In it Harmon "takes pleasure in sight touch and smell." A poet who will soon be entering his eighties, he has "put an end to cursed tightlippedness". He "wallows in joy." And he does it with style.
Hungarian Gusztáv Báger is a poet and economist. He has published several collections in his native Hungarian and has been translated into French and German. Object Found, translated by Thomas Kabdebó, is the first selection of Báger's work to appear in English.
A curious unattributed introduction tells us that "his poems could easily be compared to a bunch of flowers, or a single significant flower." And later that "we learn the poet's likes and dislikes in the material and biological world sooner than his life events or rages over the world's spiritual shortcomings. This is itself refreshing, like a gulp of clear water."
The poems themselves have a delightfully surrealistic lightness to them. Timespacein C-major and The Ballad of Vanishing Doorsare examples of an idiosyncratic and playful sensibility. Ferrying echoes Paul Celan, "we are worse than us, ourselves."
There's humour too in The Metamorphosis of the Knife,
I was rotten at geometry
Which cut me to the quick after fifty:
I was killed by the ruler.
Eileen Casey's Drinking the Colour Blueis a substantial debut of over sixty poems which has similar moments of surreal beauty. A lyrical, myth-making writer with a devotion to creating cross-sensory metaphors, Casey is capable of many memorable lines.
In Synesthesia Sat, she writes, "I am a wheel / circling / skins of scattered stones, / all my senses / turning." Her love of colour and her ability to mix the senses with synesthetic delight is the strength of the collection.
Many recognisable motifs of contemporary life appear in the form of "shopping trolleys", "the Luas", and "t.v.", as well as an ornithologist's range of reference in kestrels, crows, hummingbirds, seagulls and owls. But it is the folkloric force in the poems The Redheaded Whore of The Sea, The Man With Scythes for Arms, The Lion Tamerand the Fisherman and The Woman Who Walked the Belly of the Moonwhich hold the greatest power.
Diminishing the brightness of her best work is a syntax cluttered with semi-colons and distracting demonstratives like "this", "that", and "those". The poems can at times also suffer from a loose control of the line. When a poet uses no metre, no patterned cadence or rhyme, the lines of poetry need to be taut.
The tension of many of Casey's lines is loosened by a poor choice of line length or end word.
Allusions to Frost and William Carlos Williams, together with a sestina, and a truncated pantoum indicate a mature voice at work here attuned to "the great big heart of the universe / beating / no matter what." ( Cinema Paradiso)
• The Mischievous BoyBy Maurice Harmon, Salmon Poetry, pp78, €12
• Object FoundBy Gusztáv Báger Salmon Poetry, pp77, €12
• Drinking the Colour BlueBy Eileen Casey, New Island, pp 62, €12.95
• Paul Perry's most recent book is The Orchid Keeper, published by Dedalus Press. He is currently writer in residence for Dún Laoghaire Rathdown public library service