PoetryChris Agee has published a number of poems in a variety of places, but he will probably be best known as the compiler of Scar on the Stone, a fine anthology of Bosnian poetry, and of a book of essays on Hubert Butler. The blurb refers to First Light as a "long-awaited second collection" and Don Paterson speaks well of it.
There are many reasons the book might be long-awaited and why it should be spoken well of. Agee's lyric gift is considerable, evoking a plump, succulent combination of Keats and Wallace Stevens, and he has lived in and visited important places. Born in the USA but domiciled in Ireland since 1979, he has spent time in the former Yugoslavia and has supped lightly of Russia and Mexico. He is as far from a parochial poet as you can get.
Keats offers him the delights of nature. In the very first poem, 'Seacave', he tells how, "You could hear the furious sizzle of midsummer crickets/Droning their hoarse heat-song and timed threnody/To a noon crescendoing". It is one of a series of tours de force. Stevens opens doors on possible meditations on nature. A green enamel coffee-pot, in the last part of the collection appears, like Stevens's jar in Tennessee: "Its gracile spout squeezed/the invisible waters of the I/into the pure air of the evening. Its beauty lay/ precisely in the self's non-writing/on the light". Agee is best on nature and its meditation, but I would not say his self is non-writing. At every turn, we find phrases such as, "It came to mind me . . . " "Reminding me of . . . " "I thought this then . . ." "All at once I was back . . . " all the way through to, "I felt plunged into/The inward isobar of a sudden profundity". A poem talks about Arbour Hill, "Empty as the Mexican siesta hour at the ruins of Chicomostoc/Under the big sky of the High Plateau" . You'd have to have been there, I expect. And is the moon in the sky in 'Offing' really "a red disc sinking/Like the buoy of crepuscule"? I thought the point about buoys was that they didn't sink. And isn't "crepuscule" a little fey? The gift is exciting, and the sober aesthetic meditations mostly rewarding, but the slightly preening element of the more precious pieces, littered with proper names, runs counter to the humane poems on violence and history, on which the claims of this book might equally be based. As a matter of historical accuracy, it wasn't Radnóti's diaries but his last poems that were discovered on his corpse after the war. It's a little thing but, having introduced his name, the distinction matters.
George Szirtes is a poet and translator. His most recent book is An English Apocalypse, published by Bloodaxe in 2001
First Light By Chris Agee Dedalus, 95pp, €10