RITA ANN HIGGINS writes poetry about standing at the bus stop, laughing into the bitter wind, with crisp bags blowing about your knees. Filling the commonplace with vigorous hilarity, the poems run at a clip a sort of fairytale mixture of madness and glee, horror and pathos, with a Dylan Thomas twist to the language.
She was all over the place sadness up and down coal buckets in and out of old overcoats tears in her lap.
("The Thistles")
In spite of the presence of the Greeks Plato, Socrates, Zeus, Agamemnon Higgins's world is the gritty local one of a 1996 Irish suburb, peopled with familiar characters priest and nun, swimming pool attendant, Babbs Laffey blabbing gossip to the whole street, and Betty, who gives up smoking when the brother gets lung cancer. As an emigrant, I find in her work a wealth of forgotten phrases ("acting the maggot", "the craic was almighty"). At home or abroad, however, Higher Purchase would make any Irish person with half a heart laugh till they cried.
After the racy colloquialism of Higgins, Eva Bourke's poems in and deep. They are very feminine, ripe, delighting in colour and touch, and exhibiting an almost wanton pleasure in the choosing of words. Where Higgins finds the world in a single set of streets Bourke roams around southern Europe, tending to slip into past centuries, embracing the big themes human life on a grand scale, death and immortality "the soul millers are grinding so ii Is ("To the Distributor of Souls"). She seems at a remove from the young women (who) go the fiats with measured maternal step ("Spring in Henry Street"), whereas Higgins was right there, walking beside them.
It's difficult to locate Bourke in her poems. The "I" is reticent and hides behind "you", "we", and behind the stories of the poems for they are stories, richly painted conversations, full of myth and mystery, and all told with a lovely sureness and a likeably odd slant on reality.
At the pier a flotilla of boats loaded up a cargo of sunlight ripe as melons, and the sun was tied to the fishing nets as a float. ("Reading Hikmet in Connemara.")
It is a cool sort of poetry, a little remote, closer to the Metaphysical than the confessionalists impression of a set of stepping stones through Irish history that were placed too far apart. Her habit of starting a sentence at one end of the poem and finishing it at the other led to hurried reading and prevented any savouring of the images, many of which were still obscure after two or three readings. At the end of Fusewire, I was left with a sense of strings of unrelated fragments.
Siobhan Campbell's first collection, The Permanent Wave, draws you in without hesitation. Her poems are clean and unadorned. There is darkness there, but the first section amply demonstrates her extraordinary gift of creating a character with the merest handful of words.
Once I used to dread the dark the hardness of this century, but an enviably seamless blend of real and surreal, refreshing as the open landscapes she conjures so easily.
In Fusewire, Ruth Padel is present at once, describing her immediate world and feelings. Where Bourke's poems were whole months, Padel's are moments. Too often, however, they stop short after just a couple of breaths, failing to establish themselves. Many of the poems are stories of love, but whether it's love on the streets of Sarajevo or in those universally unrequited dreams, as reader I somehow feel shut out from the experience.
The feeling intensifies with the historical poems largely set in or near Derry in the 17th century, they were inaccessible to me without the explanatory notes at the back of the book, and, gave the how it could catch me watching my own smallness ("The Miner")
Through the five sections of the book, she progresses quite rapidly from delicacy and gentleness to a frank, almost harsh tone conscious bittering". The poems dealt with human relations, the misunderstandings, attempts at contact, small failures, and the misjudgments of family.
From section II onwards, she suddenly stands in spiky relation to her own world, and although she maintains a lovely control, the poems spiral into a black realm the councillor who "turned Flynn's daughter", the pornographic magazines of a father. They are hard edged with some violence beneath the surface, some force that periodically erupts, as when the woman cuts off her own hand in "Plat du Jour". Some poems in sections III and IV ("After", "Open Air", and "Calmed") are not self contained like the earlier and final ones they take new turns without being reined in and don't feel as though their owner knows or cares about them enough. In section V, however, she is back, and usually a single sentence from her is more than enough to satisfy.