There’s a pleasingly spiky quality to the poems of Aifric Mac Aodha in Old Friends (Gallery, 64pp, €11.95/€18.50), as translated by David Wheatley; something to do with the veracity of the spoken, seen and subsequently dissected rubbing alongside a fresh, sardonic tone.
Mac Aodha’s delivery has a little in common with “the woman vet on the television/who puts her interviewer off his stride/with her dry, honest voice” in Young Man’s Choice; there’s a matter-of-factness that undercuts, or at least resists, easy poeticisms or any plangent straining towards epiphany. Among the many things that entice a reader is the sense of self-awareness, of the pleasure of encountering good, witty, undeceived company in Mac Aodha’s addresses, apparently offering “Full permission to the ‘good for you’ crowd” while mercifully withholding any sense her poems themselves might be misread as a balm.
One senses that this voice could comfortably make room for more or less anything; there’s a certain capaciousness with which her cool-headed, steadily observant work embraces the world as it is: “I’m fond of you all,/from the priest to my enemies’ list”, all the while playing it cool, or at least refusing any sort of lazy, bardic grandiosity: “Distrusting my own narrow knowledge base”.
Her subjects range from bloody killings to a common – or indeed putative – lizard, but what she’s most adept at is “Always the feel of a thing,/never the fact”. Her atmospheres are built through diction, the adroitly handled syntax and vernacular control with which Wheatley has rendered this work into an entirely contemporary, European, supple voice in English.
Untrustworthy, in a positive sense, Mac Aodha is at once “the/ good Irish colleen,/the class prefect” but entirely herself, too and all the better for it. This is a short book, but repays lengthy revisiting, and leaves its residue: “The splinters of an old door/you called my subjects”.
[ Athoscailt, a poem by Aifric Mac AodhaOpens in new window ]
Sasha Dugdale’s latest book, The Strongbox (Carcanet, 88pp, £12.99), is simultaneously a set of 14 smallish sequences and a single, book-length operetta, cohering around ideas of repetition, memory and – on a more overarching level – abduction, or at least displacement.
Dugdale brings in retellings, glosses and commentaries on classical mythology, figures such as Helen of Troy, Europa, Baucis and Philemon, who get varying degrees of airtime, but the real star of the show is her own movingly handled narrative voice, and her ability to render speech that is at once stately, haunted and naturalistic.
There’s a barely restrained anger behind much of the graceful phrasing, some of it commenting on the trading and brutality of the classical myths but no less pertinent to the more up-to-date stories of kidnap, transport and trafficking that power the longest, opening sequence, Anatomy of an Abduction in which “a woman entwined in fine cloth/may herself be purchased, or stolen”. The shift between a magnified, poignant, child’s eye view, largely done through memory “We are so close to the ground in childhood/we weave the tiny sappy strings of daisies/gather the broken china of an egg”; “baby fists/resting on superhero sheets” is contrasted with the unfeeling intrusions and denials of the captors, and the fetishising of “purity” that attends much of the dialogue around women.
Elsewhere, Dugdale breaks the fourth wall, with meta-commentary on her own opening poem, cleverly staged as an actors’ workshop and their attempts to “action” the previous scene. Throughout, dreams are often the only places of refuge, and the elegance of Dugdale’s writing is a finely tuned counterpoint to the darkness of the stories being told in highly visual, propulsive imagery, which blurs time across millenniums, to our present moment’s discredit: “In August tyrants send their men to the villas/where bare-chested rivals are sipping anis”.
Ellen Cranitch’s new book, Crystal (Bloodaxe, 80pp, £12), is one in which personal dissolution, and chaos, are – at least to some extent – counteracted by fleeting, often occluded, moments of calm, and at times through the act of poetry itself.
Cranitch writes about a destabilising life crisis, the discovery that a life partner is addicted to drugs, and to sex with strangers, at times through various lenses; allusions to Bonnard’s paintings; Eliot, Cavafy and the Iliad also find themselves as useful means of exploring some of the fallout from such a rupture: the idea of distortion, of becoming a subject not narrator, and later an urge towards a peaceable stillness.
When the work is at its most stripped back, and hovering around the barriers of prose poetry in certain moments, there’s a sort of purgative honesty but it can come at an understandable cost to the writing’s subtlety, in favour of what seems like a necessary unburdening: “Is addiction a moral weakness? Is it an illness or genetically determined?”
Elsewhere, Cranitch proves herself an adept formalist, and some of the writing here is beautifully rendered, well-seen and rich in clinching details; “Is she unchanged now that his art distorts her,/the sapphire figure etched in lines of light”. As the book works its way towards discussions of ambiguity, and forgiveness – via a well-judged poem revolving around Pontius Pilate – it makes room, also, for a sense of regrowth, of the shield between a person and their experiences, and environment, “It has come back again, the separation which permits/a relationship between the self and the world.”
Much of the book displays the skinlessness implied by this later return, or repair; there’s a porousness and unfiltered quality, for good and ill. Sometimes a poet writes a book primarily because they must, and that seems the case for Cranitch here.
Christine Roseeta Walker’s debut collection, Coco Island (Carcanet, 128pp, £11.99), is one in which a single place comes to feel like the world. In this case it’s Negril, Jamaica and Walker gives the reader a myth-tinged tour of its sights, and “characters”, with a recurring cast of figures who grow familiar, or at least are fleshed out in the way one might expect in a novel.
Negril has more than its share of would-be mystics, at least Walker’s take on it does, and this can lend an unusual energy, and forcefulness, to her writing: “When he spoke the next day he said he had seen the Christ/standing in a ring of light/with bloodstained palms and hair matted into dreads”. The gap between the living and the dead, the real and the conjured, is paper-thin, but the heart of the book isn’t so much its ghostly surface as the many versions of power struggle that underpin its interactions.
The island is listening and measures its residents by their “attentiveness” but there’s a constant negotiation between sacrifice and submission, whether through force, poverty or the need to escape, and failure to do so. Family histories intersect with those of the island: an errant, then returned mother; other figures who leave and ones who stay, but it’s a poem whose coda is “all this happened before you were born”, which most successfully flags up the ideas of inescapability and legacy central to Walker’s conflicted portrayals.
At times, the writing can lose momentum and has a tendency towards flatness, its urge towards storytelling prioritised over compression, poems moving at times towards slightly summary endings: “That morning he fed us the meat with fried rice for breakfast then for lunch and told us he was considering pimping”. There’s a loving, documentary quality throughout, however, and an eye for portraiture.
Declan Ryan is a poet and critic. Crisis Actor, his first collection, is published by Faber.
