POETRY: External Affairs: New Poems, By Dermot Bolger, New Island Books, 77pp, €13
DERMOT BOLGER has for many years been a creative force on Dublin’s north side. As novelist, playwright, and poet, he has engaged with what he knows: Ballymun, Finglas, Clondalkin, and Neilstown. There are two main parts to External Affairs: ‘Night and Day’ and ‘The Frost is All Over’. The former deals with urban scenes: housing estates, city traffic, commuting, shopping, graffiti, ‘burnt-out cars, glass shards, twisted chrome’, gangs on street corners, addicts, personal isolation, memories of love, women and men who endure.
The poems were first published as large posters or wall murals placed in various parts of the city. They were, he says, his way “of leaving the sort of sign I had longed for as a youth, an affirmation of the validity of seeing things in a different way”. In effect the poems are a series of snapshots. They enter individual minds as the poet imagines what individuals think or feel as they move through the city.
To meet that transience the language has to be expressive and direct; must say what it wants to say, without ambiguity. The poems engage with the urban scene, in specific detail, but they also engage with internal life. Some speak poignantly of love.
I am the six days of purgatory when I torture myself
With longing for a glimpse of his eight-year old face.
The absence of love is a recurrent theme. Bolger’s sensibility is exposed to hurt lives, thwarted dreams, and dogged persistence.
He is also drawn to traditional music. The poems in ‘The Frost is All Over’ deal with traditional musicians, their music and performances, including the piper and collector Séamus Ennis. They explore, Bolger explains, “the ever deepening relationship between musicians and the tunes they play throughout their lives”. Since they are not required to grab the attention of the passer-by, these poems register experience and settings in a more formal manner.
This is the price of making music,
Of living the life for which he was born,
He is on his way that night to perform
For little pay to a meagre audience
In the back room of a Dublin pub,
With a television blaring in the lounge.
The opening poem of the book, Ballymun Incantation, performed by actors and local people as the centrepiece of a public wake, is a lament for the demolition of the first tower in Ballymun.
Jim Chapson was born in Hawaii in 1944 and teaches satire and other forms at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has published some chapbooks but this, his first full collection, is an accomplished work. He is a versatile poet who is able to express a variety of feelings, to use irony, paradox and humour, to deal with contemporary settings and draw upon classical sources. He writes an attractively formal kind of poetry, as may be seen in the simplicity of Birch:
A cloak of leaves around its shoulders
sets off the gleaming whiteness of its trunk.
A delight to the eyes
its gracefulness,
There is an ease of approach and movement, the rhythm and language unforced and detached.
A poet who is so at ease and so relaxed in manner can be playful and humorous when he wishes.
I took my throbbing
headache home;
if this was love
I’d had enough.
He writes sympathetically about the experiences of gay men and transient relationships. A melancholy tone attends many situations. Even the green shoot among the chrysanthemums is likely to disappear “just when you imagined// it might become your darling”. The sun hides behind the one small cloud “in the whole blue sky”. “Consider,” he declares, “that no matter how bad things are/ they will surely get worse”. This may not have the force of the great declaration in King Lear that so long as man can say this is the worst, the worst is yet to come, but is the same idea. Chapson writes of loss but balances disappointment with more positive feelings. Love can be fulfilling as well as transient. When Apollo kissed Branchos he was set up for life as a diviner, but the real result was transformational.
when the god breathed into him, sunlight
pierced the lime-green leaves, birds
called in the branches. With the touch
of the god’s lips, a warmth entered him, a sympathy
The extended dialogue poem Idyll shows Chapson’s ability to write philosophically as well as humorously.
Maurice Harmon is a poet and critic. His most recent collection is The Mischievous Boy and other poems