Travels With Gandolpho by Eva Bourke (Dedalus Press, £10.95 hdbk/ £6.95 pbk).
The Cold That Burns by Siobhan Campbell (The Blackstaff Press, Belfast, £6.99 in UK)
Decoding Samara by Patrick Deeley (Dedalus Press, £10.95 hdbk/£6.95 pbk)
Curse of the Birds by Noel Monahan (Salmon Publishing Ltd, £6.99)
Since these four poets have their own very distinct ways of seeing, they each invest their poems with a language, and sense of rhythm and form which are sharply original. Their recent work shares a contemporaneity that distinguishes it from the kind of poetry being published as recently as the mid-1980s. The focus is on the poet's use of language itself, whereas the poetry of the immediately preceding generation tended to subordinate the language to the imagery - "Deep" images, "magical realism", cinematic text, etc.
Eva Bourke's fourth collection, Travels With Gandolpho, is remarkable for the range of her subjects, from an erotic haircut to unicorns. She deploys a rather quirky vocabulary and an elastic syntax on templates of traditional metre and form with intricately laced effects. Gandolpho, a somewhat unreliable companion it would seem, is:
always in a cello mood;
he climbs onto its rosewood back
and toboggans down the long curving
hill of e-flat major.
Sometimes it takes him a day, half the night, twenty rhapsodies and every single black and white key to free all prisoners from the Bastille.
The elaborate textures of these poems amply repay attentive reading, though they occasionally lapse into impacted phrasing or disjointed associations. Her gifts are best occupied with the final sequence of the book, "Berlin Notebook", where she manages a tour de force by presenting recent experience as a veil through which we perceive episodes in the city's ruptured history.
Many of Siobhan Campbell's poems contain questions suspended in a poem, awaiting an answer. "Lyric" begins:
What could a lyric do -
get up and dance
to a tune of its own making?
The questioning occurs frequently in the poems of the first section, which probe the experiences of religion with the language of the agnostic, often discovering angry regret rather than rejection. The second section gathers more intimate poems about family and familial affection, pregnancy and childbirth, with a few about poetry and poets, ending with a rather creaky sestina. They are direct and engaging, the fruits of much reflection and careful composition. Several are the more moving for their restraint of emotion. This is a strong, exceptionally mature second collection.
Trees form the general subject of Patrick Deeley's fourth book, Decoding Samara. (Samara are winged seeds, as from the maple.) The poet has provided plenty of variety in the treatment of a quite varied aboretum. Pine, oak and ash have their moments as expected, but here also are the yew at Baile's grave, the hollow elm at Clonmacnoise (6th century), the nine hazel trees of knowledge - and a willow on the flooding Dodder:
. . . For merriment she will spin
the wheels of a discarded pram.
And for a change she will woo the willow.
These are leisurely, thoughtful poems from one whose craft draws little attention to itself and, thus, serves the poet and his subjects very well.
Here in its entirety is Noel Monahan's version of Yeats's "Leda and the Swan":
Helen of Troy
A laughing yolk,
crying white,
Tapped on the shell
And a bird came out
To sing.
Curse of the Birds includes a few of these iconoclastic gestures, but many more are salutes and tributes to (presumably) kindred spirits like Austin Clarke and Tom McIntyre. Noel Monahan has an incorrigibly original, vivid modus operandi, partaking of the surrealist tradition while tipping a jaunty hat to its Da-da roots. He uses the refrain and the litany to clever effect, breaks ranks with the sestina and, in general, gets away with versifying mayhem. But his poems have such vivacity that they carry us uncomplaining into the serio-comic world of e.e. Cummings's Prettyhowtown:
A wellington guffaws
Under a bed in the hedge
At an axle making love
To a wheel.
Monahan's world is no bad place to visit, though one mightn't want to live there.
James J. McAuley's new collection of Poems, Meditations, with Distractions, will be published by University of Arkansas Press in March.
