“In Moscow once, in the month of summer snow,/five of us entered the house of Marina Tsvetaeva,/but first we stood outside repeating her name to get it right, speak it like a Muscovite.” These lines from Gerard Smyth’s Inhospitable Hostess are a moving representation of The Irish Times poetry editor’s lifelong dedication to getting it “right” in this, his 11th collection, The Turn for Ithaca (Dedalus €12.50).
Smyth honours an extraordinary number of writers and singers here, “The boy with a biblical name/counted them in, counted them out.” (Luke Kelly’s Dublin). Kelly is counting boats in the Dublin docklands but he could be Smyth carefully counting out his own lyrics, “While others spent Sunday in the park … he stayed indoors and fine-tuned the melody.” (Song of the Tortured Poet).
Smyth’s palpable sense of Moscow as a great literary city mirrors a constantly unfolding vision of his native city – Dublin haunts almost every page. His finest poem, the eerie Eavan Boland’s Dublin, “a remembered city of wet umbrellas”, summons Boland instantly while succinctly charting Dublin’s transformation in the second half of the 20th century, “The buses were old, their numbers a code/ to a clear destination out in the suburbs,/ under the mountains, close to the sea/ where the city was beginning to spawn new estates/ and nobody heard of the patriots whose names/ were given to the avenues, cul-de-sacs, smooth roads/ where all the stony roads had disappeared.”
Deft with thoughtful humility, Smyth’s Olympians reminds us, as Kavanagh did, how the right lyrics can find the “lofty” gods in the local, “In the book I cannot rewrite/ there are the fathers, mothers, aunts and uncles/ who had no honeymoon or holiday in the sun/ My Olympians are many but I single out just one:/ My Pallas Athena,/ she with whom I have come this far, / the place where we take the turn for Ithaca.”
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Cathy Galvin’s rich, complex Ethnology: A Love Song for Connemara (Bloodaxe, £12.99) is a history of Galvin’s mother’s native Mason Island and a tremendous elegy for her son whose heart is buried there, “down in the bowels of Hades/ am given your heart in a wooden box./ Leave holding you against me like a baby – /wrapped in a bag in the boot of my car … take you on a ferry … the shadow of the Bens … you on the boards of a currach.” (Afterwards).
It is also a burning lyrical investigation into the power of language and those who use that power. Ethnology refers to the “elites” – visitors such as folklorists or the ethnographer Charles R Browne, who as well as attempting to steal skulls from Inisboffin, measured the heads of islanders. “Whatever agendas their lives fulfilled for others, my family remained, long into my childhood, on the margins of Europe, and poor, unless they took their chances and emigrated.”
Galvin acknowledges the paradox that Ethnology owes as much to the elites’ recordings as it does to the Irish language and her upbringing within an Irish family in England. Her elegant villanelle Blunt Needles in the voice of the English textile designer Enid Cooper perfectly expresses this push and pull, “You speak of fishbone stitches, honeycomb and cable,/ how women’s fingers pulled dark nights over their needles./ Inward, rowing in, I come as a thief.”
Galvin is verbally adept, a master of many forms, but perhaps it is the further paradox of being so close to a language she didn’t understand as a child that creates this hungry, groundbreaking book, brimming with grief and desire, “Go to Gorham’s shop/ and say kay hee will too,/ ask her for awrawn./ you said. //Fifty years on, the shop has gone and though I can spell/ cén chaoi a bhfuil tú agus arán,/ I can taste none of it. (Tá Ocras Orm: I Am Hungry.)
Catherine Ann Cullen’s Storm Damage (Dedalus, €11.50) is as precise and delicate as the egg in Pencilling the Dates, “When I touched its rubber skin/ I had to turn my head/ at the memory of those two small moons/ that fell from their orbit.”
Cullen knows the power of understatement to evoke pain, “my small catastrophes, my inhospitable moon”. Typically a poem about the simulation for Cullen’s radiotherapy opens casually, keeping us at a distance with crisp descriptions, “the rough sheet of paper/ she offered as a modesty blanket.” But the close-up is devastating, “Like bullseyes, I think,/ as I feel them scratch onto my skin,/ something to find in a rifle sight;/ pinholes through which to view/ the eclipse.”
Storm Damage overflows with birds, birdsong and song but, as Cullen knows, songs can be deadly too. The Stitchin’ written for Cullen’s “factory girl” grandmother follows a dark tune, “Whatever song was in your head,/ your foot kept the rhythm of the treadle,/ your head bent to the breakneck metronome// of door-knockers no-one answered.” Her grandmother holds the final radiating lines, “when we hesitated over homework, you shook your head.// I only met the scholars coming home./ I only got to first book, you said”.
There is humour too, a ghost crab stands “like a matador, holding its business claw aloft” (Ghost Crabs at Strathmere). In Helmet Crabs whose “carapace” no one has ever held “close to their ear” the crab is a fresh and funny image for humanity’s ongoing struggle to connect, “But I’ve my art: the theatre of my shell,/ swashbuckle struggle as I crack and swell/to break my armour … “I may not sing to you but, soon or late,/ you’ll clock your image in my zigzag gait.”
Matthew Rice’s Plastic (Fitzcarraldo £12.99) is a masterful recreation of the surreal, terrifying world of night workers. Set during a 12-hour shift in a Belfast moulding factory, each title is a time stamp, a sharp reminder of mortality, “Bagging and tagging// plastic table latches/ for aeroplane seats// my hands are each its twin/ and my copy of Gawain// is contraband beneath the frosted-out skylight.” (20.03)
Gawain travels with Rice throughout this night which can be as beautiful as it is terrible, “the peacock-tail/ of sparks Billy’s grinder conjures// off that curious metal/ is an interstellar dazzler”. Dreams and visions segue effortlessly into harsh reality, “Once, in this building, a kid clocked off night shift/ for good at the end of a rope,/ another’s heart gave out at 3am// performing a task as menial as mine.” (20:0 0).
The poems work as stabbing stand-alones but form powerful interconnections too; the 3am suicide is prefigured in Rice’s opening dread, ‘I wake at 3am, the hour no one wants.” Rice’s heightened senses as he drives to work are the last glimpses of the condemned man as working stiff, “The car park’s uninsured Novas/ slumber like peccadilloes and amid/ night’s tranquil abuse confectioneries of light/ mean the moon to us” ([Night shift]).
Rice’s “knightliness” lies in his refusal to look away, the resulting visions dazzle, “wee Gail’s seventieth birthday last week … she has a special/ seat to sit on all shift … her hands … old at the task … making light work of sifting defective ring washers … her bench could be a grand piano,/ her patch of floor a stage,/ and in another life, it is.” (05:29)
Plastic’s existential cinematic conjuring of a very particular time and place is universal in the way that Philip Levine’s poems stamped his working-class Chicago on the literary map, “the relationship between touchscreen and finger/ is unbearable like the Twelfth roadblocks/ sprung with fire.” (00:02)
