Poetry: Paul Perrylooks at five collections, including Fred Johnston's best work to date
Fred Johnston's new book, The Oracle Room (Cinnamon Press, 96 pp, £7.99) is his best book of poetry to date. It contains nearly 80 poems of irascible and outraged lyricism. His tone and methods are assured; his message irreverent and iconoclastic. He writes about the "desolation" of hospital, the crimes of the status quo, bombs in London, the death of George Harrison, and how in a letter from his daughter she is not interested in "music, poetry" or "him" . There's a "fettering ache" to these poems, an existential eeriness, where towns have "trap doors" and "familiar roads are dangerous". Johnston is a restless spirit, "still hungry for words". He's not just waiting for the muse though, but agitating for her presence. "Something in people like us is always unfaithful to the world/ I will keep on the move," he writes in A Letter Before Setting Out. The Oracle Room is a rewarding and brave book.
John McNamee has been a stalwart troubadour of Irish poetry for over three decades. His collected poems, A Station Called Heaven, Poems 1967-2006 (Weaver Publications, 160pp, €13.95), contains lively diatribes, lullabies, blues, songs, aphorisms and odes. Titles such as Dublin, you're a bitch, A Dead Goldfish Speaks and The Drunken Buddha give an indication to the beat-like intensity and comic delight in the everyday that these poems display. Here is On Being A Poet: "Most people think I should/ Be tame while they are savage/ But my love of wild animals/ Makes me growl.' This is a refreshing and hilarious book.
Unlike our other authors, Nell Regan is just starting out. Preparing for Spring (Arlen House, 63pp, €12) is a debut collection of great sophistication and tact. It has a resilient tone to its quiet poems of survival. Words are a solution and a salve. "I will go back and fill each house/ with words . . ./ I will emerge from the pages/ of each book lived, to imagine a new reality," she writes in Each House. There's an elegiac tone to many of the poems, with a father figure addressed and remembered tenderly in several pieces. At times the poems read somewhat too literally for this reviewer's taste, and do not vary their tone and perspective as much as they could, but that is to quibble with a very fine debut.
From the elegiac to the erotic: Knute Skinner's Fifty Years: Poems 1957-2007 (Salmon Poetry 275pp, €15) is a wonderfully life-affirming and beautifully produced book of poems by an American poet who has lived intermittently in Ireland since 1964. Containing selections from a dozen book of poems, the wry lyrics make, most memorably, a dramatis persona of Skinner's wife, Enda Faye, in a series of priapic and lusty scenarios. His use of dialogue is poised and punchy and the poems are witty and accessible. There' something of Frank O'Hara's sense of "occasion" in these poems - love reigns supreme. In A Day Out, he writes: "I'm in bed now - engulfed and drained -/ with the taste of her body in my mouth, and she's running her fingers over/ what's left of my hair./ In a minute or two I'll get up/ and make tea,/ and I'll offer a toast to us/ and the next ten years."
The introduction by Brian Arkins, which tells us that the political division of the island of Ireland means that "there now exists a category of 'Northern poet'", is a dry and uninspiring preface to a nimble and agile poet.
Michael Augustin shares something of the whimsical with Skinner; at the same time his work has more of the clarity of the aphorism. In fact, Mickle Makes Muckle (The Dedalus Press, 140pp, €12) is a collection of poems, mini-plays and short prose. It also has a selection of idiosyncratic and attractive drawings by the author. Sometimes however, the writing fragments are mundane - "For a bespectacled person/ the entire world/ lies behind glass" - but mostly the pieces are light, amusing, terse and often challenge an axiomatic wisdom: "Poems/ are not written,/ poems/ happen". This selection is translated by the poet's wife, Indian-born Sujata Bhatt and the transparency of the language makes for a lucid translation.
Paul Perry's latest poetry collection is The Orchid Keeper (The Dedalus Press)