The White Beach. New & Selected Poems 1960 1998. By Leland Bardwell. Salmon Poetry. 115pp, £6.99 pbck
Here Nor There. By Bernard O'Donoghue. Chatto Poetry. 52pp, £8.99 pbck
Selected Poems, By C.P. Cavafy. English Versions by Desmond O'Grady. Dedalus Press. 52pp, £5.99 pbck
Not very poet deserves a "selected" or "collected" edition of his or her poems, yet such collections abound. Leland Bardwell, however, decidedly does deserve a "selected", and, what's more, a revisiting of her prose and the plays. This is her fourth book of poetry and is a well-chosen introduction to her work.
I've occasionally found Bardwell's unhesitatingly personal and self-experiential style a little difficult to swallow . Reading this book, which has four sections ("Sixties," "Seventies", "Eighties" and "Nineties"), I would temper my view and am glad to do so; Bardwell's "I" is also a narrator of immense compassion and breadth of concern, reaching out over four decades of a creative life which produced, besides the poetry, four novels, three plays and a collection of stories. Much of Bardwell's territory ranges about Dublin, where, indeed, I first made her acquaintance in the 1970s.
Her language is warm, passionate, to the point. Always there is a sense of poetry being put to use, being made to work, to extend the reader's comprehension of experience: in her "Eighties" section, there is a tender lyrical poem, "The Scattering of the Ashes": "The grass that's flattened by the orchestra of wind/lies polished for the tenderness of hand,/the stroking of this well-trod shoulder . . . " The lyricism is quiet and wonderful and, these days, unusual. Elsewhere, her language is strong, sharp, and she is unafraid of the political. This is a poet's document, courageous, frank, hard-edged and often lyrically poetic. We should come to know Bardwell again.
Reviewing Bernard O'Donoghue, a Munster poet based in Oxford, John Montague in Magill remarked that O'Donoghue's rural poetry was "chronicling a dying world. And that, even in its heyday, it was often a lonely one." More acutely, the poems here represent a sort of indirection, an unsureness about where one stands; O'Donoghue tries to define what the jacket-blurb describes as a "middle ground". His poems are solid, even blocky constructs, a little prosey at times. But there is nothing overly sentimental about O'Donoghue's reflections on "home"; a felt affection for place and people pushes through in poems such as "Redwings," "Killarney," and the penultimate poem, "Westering Home," which lends the book its title: "The old thin ache you thought that you'd forgotten /More smoke, admittedly, than flame;/Less tears than rain. And the whole business/Neither here nor there, and therefore home." O'Donoghue's vision of his home country is imbued with a very clear-eyed acknowledgement of the myths which too often surround any perception of it.
The poem, "Kilmacow," which utilises a lovely, easy vernacular linguistic and rhythm, reminiscent, in its directness, of Hardy, has a subtly peculiar reference: "Of its own meaning and leaked rust/Into the nettles like the good knight's armour." This recalled, for me, pagan-Christian references in an old English ballad, "Down In Yon Forest", to the bleeding, wounded knight, lying in a bower or hut, whose blood soaks the ground. O'Donoghue's preceding line mentions "an iron cross". Nice to think folk song is wending its way back into poetry. Of course, I could be wrong.
Desmond O'grady's translations of the poems of C.P. Cavafy are gently impressive. The jacket-blurb tells us that "This is the first publication in Ireland of Cavafy poems in English by the first Irish poet to translate him"; one seems to bump against a solitary Cavafy version/translation from time to time, like a piece of unnoticed and fragile furniture in a darkened room, leaving one to wonder how it got there (O'Grady published renderings of Cavafy poems in ones and twos before).
O'Grady, who taught for a couple of years at Alexandria, Cavafy's home turf, provides a concise and touching introduction to his life (he died in 1933) and influence on writers and artists of his day and in an afterword, argues a possible Cubist perspective for his work, aligning his way of seeing with that of painters like Braque, Picasso et al. Cavafy illuminated his ancient native city, even its squalor; O'Grady's quiet, soulful renditions are very pleasing: "Halfpast twelve. Time has passed so quickly/ since nine when I lit the lamp and sat down./I've been sitting here without reading or speaking./Alone in this house there's nobody to talk to." ("Since Nine O'Clock".)
Less attractive is the Dedalus cover, bland overall and carelessly, emptily white. Dedalus can produce, and has produced, better-looking covers than this.
Fred Johnston is a writer and critic. His stories, Keeping The Night Watch, were published last year.