Tom French’s latest collection, The Convent of Mercy (Gallery, €12.95pb, €19.50hb), takes place when “the centuries of modesty are past”. This is a contemplative, meditative book, but one still full of the clatter and bash of modernity.
Rather than retreating, French looks to reclaim moments of calm, or at least to take a clarifying step back, turning a packed suitcase into a wider metaphor: “You’ve hit, I think, on how we ought to live –/on the verge of departure, everything weighed” or three plasterers on a site in New York, who might be mistaken for “looking at nothing”, “until it dawned that they were utterly aware/of how beautifully they were moving as one/and felt no need to draw the least attention”.
There’s a sense, too, of being prey to larger forces, which animates and disturbs. In a poem about a digger in the opening sequence, The Back Field, the narrator is aware not only of what’s been lost, but of the possibility of further removals, and his own vulnerability in the face of them: “It took the willow we liked/to look at moving in the wind./If it had kept coming/there is nothing we could’ve done”.
Behind much of these poems’ urgency is a wish to bear tactile witness, most explicit in Writing the Names, which touches on the war in Ukraine and in which a villager “is gouging out the epic of her people” in rock. French has his own losses to attend to, also, and in two affecting poems he makes a pilgrimage to honour a lost brother, in “the last place he’d been alive on earth”, while a well-judged portrait of an uncle captures his attending the fights at London’s York Hall, before going home to “sleep enough to rise again at dawn/and go at the world again with his bare hands”.
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“There is only the past”, Paul Perry writes in Speak Again, in his latest collection, Clockhammer (Doire, €16). While he doesn’t fully adhere to that statement, there is certainly an undertow of memory, and a desire to revisit scenes, people and times now past.
Nostalgia, and youth, are conflated with artistic beginnings, in the vivid All Good Things: “So young. Half the age I am now./Imagine that. O the desire to go back./I haven’t written for months. What of it?”; “I remember as a young man/cycling through the German countryside,/past a field of sunflowers./That to me is what poetry is.”.
With the shift towards the present, and the shading of an adult’s lived-in perspective, Perry looks back with complicating ambivalence, avoiding idealisation in favour of defiant affirmation of choices made and artistic commitments adhered to: “I have not wiped the blood from my hands/and I won’t stand down, not now, not ever” he writes in God’s Spies, a poem which turns its ire on “poets looking for a story/in the frames of another art form/with a hunch and a microscope/from the comfort of their own bedrooms”.
For Perry “experience trumped the imagination” even if some of that experience was to do with erasure or defeat, “Blessed are they/who have lost/what they once longed for”, he notes elsewhere, and there are several poems here to do with suffering or “the bitter fragrance of forgotten days”.
At times an archness creeps in beneath Perry’s wry insubordinations, a prickliness of tone: “Yes, that is what I am comparing/birdsong to: computer protocol,/which is another way of saying/the handshake is not an artefact” or a warning against too much self-analysis, “Leave meaning to the critics”. “I’m hallucinating and calling it memory”, Perry writes in Cold but these are poems operating somewhere in-between those two urges.
Susanna Galbraith’s Morsels (Macha, £15.99) is a visually arresting debut made up of three disparate but interrelated, at least thematically, sequences. The opening one, Bears, is the most linguistically and formally experimental, to do with a slippage of words, built from a smallish palette of repeating statements to create something that feels part fairy tale and part word puzzle.
The sequence, at its core, is to do with mothering and attention, built on a series of slightly modified phrases or part-phrases, “you shouldn’t take ____ so personally”, “Can we be extra gentle with each other”, “When a child dies it’s rarely something to do with ____”. It’s more of a cycle than a narrative but if it doesn’t resolve, as such, it does help to set up an atmosphere for the two sequences that follow, introducing ideas of loss, shame and grief, which will later be made somewhat more explicit.
In the middle section, something the birds mean, Galbraith returns to and begins to unpack ideas of grief, loss and release, with an overarching motif of birds and song, throwing open/the windows of what I believed and letting/go of any small thing that might fly away”.
At times the poems feel a little private, difficult to gain entry to. One wishes for a touch more help in unpicking addresses that seem like they had to be written, but which can, in their conspiratorial tone, keep the reader at arm’s length. When Galbraith does open up more, the results can be powerful, “you turn the same age you will every year”.
The imagistic final sequence, as though an island, feels like Galbraith at her best, marrying her visual, imagistic impulse with a more directly narrative drive that helps to locate, surprise and include the reader, “We walked through a crack in the world/to the ancient city”.
Phoebe Giannisi’s Goatsong (Fitzcarraldo, £14.99), translated by Brian Sneeden, is also a book in sequences, but in this case book-length units, presented together to serve as her introduction to English-speaking readers. The opening, Homerica, is an excavation of the Odyssey, more in line with Christopher Logue’s modernising, highly-visual, approach than anything dutifully literal.
It abounds with imaginative, unexpected phrasing, and is suitably full of light, reflections on memory, home and loss, all with a syntactical velocity. Giannisi writes that “life is nostalgia for lightness”, but there’s a heaviness here amid the seemingly casual, or at least conversational, diction.
Throwing her sympathy towards Penelope, Giannisi writes “if there wasn’t old age then she wouldn’t be afraid to lose you/losing the other isn’t quite as terrible/as utter annihilation and loneliness”, and this sense of mortality, particularly in a realm where gods walk among the populace, gives useful counterbalance to the longing, food and silence which are key ingredients.
There’s a plangency behind the fragments, “couldn’t ignorance of happiness be/a mortal’s shield?”. Elsewhere, we have Cicada, a sequence about the titular insect but largely a means to discuss transformation, metamorphosis and slippage – “is each growth/painful as the first?”. For all their interest in change, and flux, these are also poems to do with holding on, setting down – “The objective of this preservation is memory, the opposite of forgetting”.
Chimera, the final sequence, looks at goat-herding and the language of nomadic shepherds, tonally bringing a flatter, more scientific approach, to show that “Man is a beast. If he wants something, he/takes it”. For all its clarity around power dynamics, and the imperious assigning of names and value, it’s not without hope, noting that “caring for another saves you/from your dominant self”, finding love amid the transactions and objectifications of humanity in nature.
