The long poem is having a moment, with contemporary tastes driving debut poets away from a mixum-gatherum of epiphanic moments towards more formally coherent book-length projects. Dawn Watson’s We Play Here (Granta, 112pp, £12.99) is an impressive example of the latter.
This is a collection spoken in the voices of four north Belfast preteens, conjuring a city by turns drably violent and psychedelically strange. In Nell’s account, a flooded Belfast is a vivid metaphor for the city’s darker undertow: “Pavement slabs rippled like shallows./ Painted kerbs were odd fish strung in a line:/ red, blue and white, red, white and blue.” As Nell’s saturated vision intensifies, she sees her mother sailing a wardrobe down the street, “ ... surprisingly/ watertight for something made of laminated,/ medium-intensity fibreboard.” Her cry of, “But isn’t it like this anyway, sure? Isn’t it always/ the same?” speaks of the cycles of poverty that underpin these girls’ stories.
This is a Belfast in which parents drink and fight – or disappear. The impact on the young protagonists is captured most starkly in Max’s account of her father’s domestic abuse of her mother: “He looked like the moon looks in the daytime”, “There was blood on her brow/ in the shape of a tired giraffe.” It’s a testament to Watson’s subtlety and skill as a poet that the girls’ voices never lose their barbed humour, or their humanity. Max takes revenge on a drunk visitor by pouring Brasso in his tea. Sam, with her penchant for lists, gathers field notes on a local Boo Radley type, the hatchet man: “I wrote, Keeps his hatchet/ in the front hedge”. Ellen, the final speaker, brings the girls together for us, her observations the closest thing this collection offers to a reprieve:
“Let’s go, she said before the whole day breaks us!
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Sam clapped, Yeah! As the shivering bus stopped,
I heard myself think, This day is beautiful.”
Formally assured and immensely readable, We Play Here takes its cues from Ciarán Carson’s acutely observed poems of Belfast city, and the magic realism of novelists such as Jan Carson, to create a new poetics of its own.
Similarly conversational in tone is Maurice Devitt’s second collection, Some of these Stories are True (Doire Press, 72pp, €13). The collection, more traditional in its form, revisits childhood memories and probes anecdotes in search of epiphanies. What elevates the collection is the wry twist of humour that ensures these poems rarely finish where we expect. In The Dark Art of Plumbing, a plumber inspects a boiler installation, bemoaning “Escher-like connections, and, worst of all,/ a failure to respect the vagaries of water”, before his own name emerges on a long-faded receipt for said boiler’s installation.
Suburbia and its rituals are dissected in poems that slip into the surreal. In Animal Husbandry in Dublin 6, a cow taken in lieu of payment for work on the Beef tribunal becomes a symbol for a kind of class complicity:
“ ... on wet days she still stands trenchantly in the middle
of the green, flank turned towards the driving rain,
her mind filled with guilt for each fresh storm.”
Similarly tinged with the uncanny is Walking, a kind of supernatural fable of disappearance into the everyday, where husbands vanish in a local beauty spot, only to haunt their own houses, their wives: “ ... woken at night to footsteps in the attic/ and the front door swinging open”.
There are love poems here too, with Puzzle extending its conceit to an expansive, metaphysical meditation on the world built within a relationship, and the methods used to guide one another: “ ... having first distracted you/ with a jagged island of difficult blue, your eyes/
drawn by the first clinking sounds from the marina.” The fluency of the poet’s voice guides us through these landscapes, slowly revealing their stranger topographies.
Dani Gill is at her strongest when exploring the lived relationships between women, both familial and romantic
Another second collection, Lessons in Kindness (Salmon, €14) by Dani Gill, takes a more minimalist approach, whittling its lyrics down to the bare bones. These are quiet but insistent meditations on the big themes in life that recognise a clean fragment can work to suggest a much more complex whole. The collection is broken into four sections, the first dealing with grief and matrilineal connections; the poems resist a narratively straightforward interpretation, instead evoking universal experiences through deftly chosen details – in the opening concrete poem, Grief, the departed women who circle the poet are “like shrouds”, but also, “scarves”. In The Gardener, the poet, mourning the death of a relative, imagines the natural world extending into the next, connecting them: “and this hedge between us// is life, is death, is continuum.”
Gill is at her strongest when exploring the lived relationships between women, both familial and romantic, and at times her work echoes Watson’s in its cataloguing of the details that animate a subject. In Life (for Mervue grannies), a litany of arresting details (“the old peach fivers/ the loveens/ the ah stop/ the quick flick of the extra potato/ onto the edge of the still full plate”) pins a vanishing world to the page.
Queer love and the revelation of different kinds of physical passion are treated here with insight and ingenuity in poems such as Heart Blown Open and Surprise Visit, with its poignant ending: “how I loved her/ how I hid her/ omission was everything”, which lays the groundwork for the difficulty and disappointment of Referendum:
“you drove to the end of the road
to cast your ballot – No
you said
There is a lot of sickness in the world
my ‘yes’ caught in my throat”
The “lessons in kindness” referenced in the title refer to both the self and others; this is a considered collection, which calls for stillness in a crowded world.
It would be remiss not to finish by celebrating the humour in these poems, in particular Stopping the White Man March, a brilliantly deadpan account of a counter-demonstration in Blackpool
A debut, Luke Samuel Yates’s Dynamo (The Poetry Business, £10.99), brings the New York school to the English midlands. In this quirkily humorous collection, the poet’s unique observations of the everyday interactions of lovers and neighbours make the familiar delightfully strange. Witnessed scenes of domestic life are rendered in Edward Hopper-like light and shade in poems including the titular Dynamo, in which the speaker watches the neighbours discuss a mysterious item: “like a Ouija board, or more likely/ a tin of children over which/ they were busily establishing ownership”.
These are poems that interrogate the easy promises of domesticity and suburban bliss; petty slights are catalogued, love affairs become soured, but unlike some poets writing in this vein, Yates doesn’t shy away from the emotions simmering beneath the poems’ droll veneer. The fraught trajectory of a relationship is encapsulated in the short poem They’re Quite Famous, Apparently, where minor friction over an unrecognised celebrity leads inexorably to life-changing events: “Suddenly she’s moving out/ and I’m getting into swimming.” More poignant still is Can’t, with its title’s pithy wordplay transmuting into a portrait of disappointed middle age:
“She is a can of implacable butter beans.
All kinds of possibilities
are slipping away.”
It would be remiss not to finish by celebrating the humour in these poems, in particular Stopping the White Man March, a brilliantly deadpan account of a counter-demonstration in Blackpool, replete with chips, souvenir shops, a fascist “falling / into a stand of fridge magnets,” and this ringing endorsement of the whole experience:
“It was at least as good
as any other time
I’ve been to Blackpool.”
Dynamo is a superb first collection; funny, original, and wonderfully weird.
