The Last Regatta. By Maurice Harmon. Salmon. 72pp, £6.99
These are excellent poems. The writer has an innate grasp of poetic form. The management of cadence and line is accomplished. He speaks quietly, but the intontation can be passionate. Although not always easy, the poems are enjoyable. Whether writing about family photographs or the vanished Dublin of the 1950s, the writer communicates a human vision of things, and is completely in control of his material. One cannot ask for more.
The title-poem is an autumnal meditation on falling maple leaves. The leaves are independent of the human vision that perceives them. Elsewhere, in a complex meditation on the American Kiawah tribe, Maurice Harmon writes, with a compassion that is at once self-focused and yet directed outward to the world around him:
I live, but not forever.
Mysterious moon, you alone remain.
Here it is nature that survives, man who dies. Some of the poems have an oriental urbanity, betraying perhaps Eastern influences. In `Afternoon Tea', the poet savours the tradition of his wife serving tea in the garden. `The Boarder' is a technically brilliant account of Irish boarding-school life.
The writer's credo is modest:
And ever since I've sought
Satisfaction in work being done, done right, And not in praise or honour to be won.
He need not be so modest. A life, and a lifetime's learning inform these poems. They change our perceptions of the way things are. And they enlarge our sense of the possibilities of poetry itself. A first-rate collection.
Oliver Marshall works at the Oscar Wilde Autumn School in Bray, where he is editor of the literary magazine Wildeside