POETRY:GERARD HANBERRY'S At Grattan Road(Salmon Poetry, 120pp. €12) is a third collection of over 70 poems within which he creates a recognisable world, populated by cab drivers, soccer fans, bankers and others who make after-dinner speeches, use the internet, send text messages and negotiate a world both forbidding and forgiving, writes PAUL PERRY
The strangeness of everyday life is captured well in Francis Bacon at The Tateand Visiting France,where tourists are more like aliens "longing for their beautiful / but turbulent homeland many light years away".
When Hanberry pushes his own lyric reportage into the realm of alienation he is most successful. In Outside of Town, the unnerving speaker tells us about the "newspaper cuttings / and the knives" he keeps as well as the "girl with black hair". The poem ends with the chilling admission that "Sometimes I go out after dark".
Credois a wonderfully realised love poem in a third section dominated by the presence of Eros: "I believe in nothing now except / the truth of your hand on my bare shoulder". But it is the final, fifth, grief-laden section that leaves the most lasting impression. In Alone, the poet perfects a deep sense of loss: "It comes at night when she is alone, / through the bald winter fields" and, finally, in the last poem, Seeker's Lullabywhere Hanberry's more formal control gives way to a keening and affecting dirge:
no sign
nothing
sleep now
the clay softening
only sleep
nothing else
nothing
nothing at all.
At Grattan Roadis bursting at the seams with fine poems.
Nearing the end of the poem John Berryman on Patmos, Berryman's mother chastises him, "You can't resurrect the dead through your pen". But this is exactly what Ray Givans does in his first full collection, Tolstoy in Love(Dedalus Press, 82pp. €12). He gives voice to a host of literary greats including Dostoevsky, Wallace Stevens, Dorothy Wordsworth, Simone Weil, Leon Trotsky and of course Tolstoy. Some of the poems that invoke past masters are, inevitably, better than others. Plath's "posthumous letter" to Richard Murphy in Connemara is some way from any of her own engrossing letters. And yet there are lines and phrases that are memorable. Weil has an "arm branded with hot factory ingots", while Sonya Tolstoy ends a monologue with "Love is a garden of palliative and bitter herbs".
"Necessity drives us onwards / to another world" one poem tells us, but memory brings us back to the worlds we've inhabited ourselves and so in the second half of the book Givans draws an Emotional Map of Greater Belfast for the reader. It is a map full of intimate details of his "Tyrone roots", down to "Eskra's sour/ sullen lip" and Castlecaulfield which is "pockmarked with memories". There are the "gooseneck hooks in Grimes's" and the wonderful colloquial turns of phrase: "Too thrawn to attend doctors, you'd rather thole the pain". Tolstoy in Loveis a rich and mature debut.
Making Music(Three Spires Press, 64pp. €10), Patrick Cotter's second full-length collection, is full of inventive mischievousness and idiosyncratic wit. In the Kiddies of Lirwe're told the kiddies' "necks poured forth pus congealed". The Wedding Night of Aoife and Lirbecomes a mock-heroic told by Aoife where Lir "snuffled at my girly, unkissed feet". Any romance is thrown out the window when she reveals that she was "impaled like an apple being cored". The humour is dark and an iconoclastic heart beats throughout Cotter's work. The Unembroidered Clothssends up Yeats's embroidered cloths of heaven by situating us in an "Underworld" where we "waken to find ourselves/ treading on our nightmares", while Not Being Kavanagh is a hilarious paean to disenchantment.
Making Musicis also saturated with the presence of "angels". But unlike the glut of angels in American poetry, Cotter's angels are of a different species altogether. In fact, one particular "Angel" has more in common with Hughes's "Crow" than any other celestial being: "Angel failed to pack his feathers on his trip to hell". In these poems, and specifically in Journal of a Failed Angel WhispererCotter creates a subversive, impish creature: "Angel beckoned/ and I radiated upwards out of the oven of my body". A book more of nightmares than dreams, Cotter writes nonetheless that "The undreamt life is not worth living". An anarchic voice in Irish poetry, Cotter's new collection is playful, irreverent, and welcome.
Paul Perry's most recent book is The Orchid Keeper, published by Dedalus Press