Leontia Flynn’s Selected Poems (Carcanet, £14.99) serve not only as a succinct reminder of her wry, finely tuned, often electric work to date but also as a capsule summary of a century marked by “new facades on old baths and gasworks” in which “we rifle bleakly through the microdata”.
These poems begin with youthful zeal but even from the off there is an unillusioned, deflating quality to Flynn’s eye, and language, more likely to allude to the “basic-wage, take-what-you-get epiphany” than to guilelessly blunder into one. Her early work is restless, itchy, it gives the “cheap, unmistakeable thrill” of a minor victory amid the “fairly unremarkable”. She’s laconic early and still, pointed and hard-edged and unignorable.
There can’t but be connective tissue in the gathering of work from a writer who often writes out of life – her mother becomes a refrain or sorts, an atmosphere and a touchstone – as do mothers in general, not least when she is one. From turning down the odd “crazed trilingual pass” while footloose and travelling, Flynn is later left to pore over the “ashes of my own affairs” or “barrelling out like some semi-deranged/trainee-barista: friendly but perplexed” to comfort her crying daughter.
These poems speak of the fitful and anxious and easily bored but somehow end up being beautifully ordered, stylishly made, spikily musical. She has enormous skill at picking up the absurdly quotable slogan, or phrase; the “eat clean but train dirty” motivational truism collides with the interior landscape, its “calm neglect” or suffering in “High Baroque”. She writes brilliantly of the “human need for flight” but can also thrive in a kind of Larkinesque paralysis, in “freeze-frames of myriad intensities”.
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Tender, rebarbative, wittily frayed, she is “raw-gilled/and live” and hers is poetry “out of step with our capacities” and all the better for it.
“So much easier looking back”, Martina Dalton notes in her debut, Midnight at the Saltmarsh (Gallery Press, €12.95pb, €19.50hb), but the backwards glance isn’t quite as simple as that might make it sound. This is a book in which loneliness and the fine margins that separate human connection can, at times, become impassable gulfs – it’s a book of boundaries, some more porous than others, whether in the landscape or the rupture of present and past.
Memory can play tricks, on the eye and the mind, while time here is mutable, plastic, unreliable, whether “the street light/makes the shadow of the woman/look like a little girl” or “the drum roll of the cattle grid,/turned the clock back to zero./I set the rearview mirror//and watched your life grow smaller”.
Dalton builds a litany of sorts, itemising the objects and places of a life lived and lives gone, whether through the removal of time or the grander, more permanent, removals, and through this apparently straightforward method of a kind of natural symbology: “Everything here is a reflection/of something else – /waiting for sun to break through”.
There are other splits here, too, between the imagined and the real – both as seemingly valid, or at least embodied, as the other, just as every connection feels like a form of mortal risk, the close attention paid becomes a form of salvation, or preservative, to counter the feeling of being always on the brink of extinction: “she would never again//get to see it, her house/in the valley —//would have to rely/on memory then,/and the notes she had kept”.
These are poems as evidence and witness, “I show you these things/because I cannot show you the others”, and the obsessive, circling returns come to form a stay against erasure, a means of trying to hang on to things one must leave but can’t leave lightly.
There’s plenty of time travel, and a poignantly fruitless urge towards permanence, in Blake Morrison’s latest collection, Afterburn (Chatto & Windus, £12.99), too. In these poems love “was like sunlight on a lawn,/beyond my remit, impossible to sustain” and a sense of things that glint and are gone runs throughout.
Morrison’s is an enviable eye for the telling detail, the vivid visual description – a childhood memory of clouds that “came over like a pram cover” or a portrait of daddy-long-legs’s movement, “awkward as foals” give a certain concrete fixity to poems that are, often, attempts at fixing the immutable, or already disappeared. In one telling moment the addressee is caught “rehearsing the past” and that’s almost a perfect summary of some of the more personal poems here: in poignant tones they look to walk backwards, to revisit “whoever I was then”.
A sequence of sonnets for his late sister are an emotional high watermark, capturing with portraitist’s skill this apparently “minor character” and making her at once ennobled but never sanded down, or simplified, whether in a photo from his 21st in which the pair could be mistaken for lovers, “your eyes so bright their light can never die” or in later, more troubled, moments, a motherhood “exquisite and traumatic as dawn” or the inertia and retreat that mirrored but preceded a lockdown she wouldn’t live to see.
The desire to seek out, and speak to, the unanswering confidante is especially well caught in the sequence’s final, plangent, address: “Who else but you was there/when high tide levelled the castle we’d dug?” Legacies and what will survive is a thread throughout, and the book closes on another version of inheritance, with the poet talking to his children, as if from the future: “Sorry to leave without a kiss/but at least I have left you this”.
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Joe Carrick-Varty’s second collection, Before Violence (Carcanet, £12.99), opens with a suite of unpunctuated poems, all measured out by a midline caesura, giving an onrushing, breathless quality that matches their portrait of panic and a state of endless suspension, “do we look happy waiting for our dad/to die”.
His syntax and phrasing create a tonal splintering, a sensory collage of overlaid images running into each other, bumping into themselves to create a staccato, wrong-footing effect, “my father held me high above his father’s grave/no witness to corroborate events”.
There’s a note of self-consciousness introduced too, “is it bad that all my poems begin/with the letter i”, which is picked up more fully in the book’s second section, a set of prose poems diving more fully into meta-commentary on what it is to write about family secrets and suffering. “I never intended for any of this to happen”, he writes in this second section, commenting on his debut collection, which received a series of prize nominations and considerable attention but which also came out of laying bare various privacies, “I spent my twenties writing poems about my secrets. Eventually I published a book of these poems”.
As he notes elsewhere, “I don’t want to be the hero of any of this” and the ethical wrangling, the confessional paradox of writing out of traumatic events being in itself another means of reliving, even deepening, them, is interestingly laid bare here, as is the disembodying feeling of “All my secrets floating around outside”.
The book’s final section is an often moving, somewhat impressionistic elegy for a late friend, and fellow poet, further examining the mistaken view of, in youth, imagining “bodies safe for decades”. Carrick-Varty writes about dining alone having “ordered/three of your favourite stews”, and throughout is haunted by, but in communion with, the living and the dead.
Declan Ryan is an Irish poet based in London. His debut collection is Crisis Actor (Faber). He is the new poetry editor at Jonathan Cape, so this is his last column. His successor is fellow poet Catriona Clutterbuck, who has recently retired as a lecturer at UCD.
