PoetryTony Curtis's craft is uniquely artful yet appears artless; shamelessly emotional but seldom sentimental. This fourth collection affirms his assured personal style.
He continues to graze his poems in ample meadows, ranging far and wide for his subjects: dreamy interior monologues, domestic and cultural how-d'ye-dos, tender love-poems and ironic poems about love, and encounters with the ghosts of art and literature.
A too-casual reader might miss the undercurrents of unease, disappointment, and occasional anger. The open forms and mostly unadorned speech patterns may be cheered for their directness and intimacy (this is what Arts Officers call "accessible", as if poetry were a Phoenix Park for the mind); or tut-tutted for being too casual.
The growing numbers of his readers - and listeners - will find plenty of surprising insights and wry, surreal humour here.
The central feature of the collection is a sequence "after paintings of Lucien Freud". Voices speak from and to the paintings; the artist is interviewed, jokes fly about, the sensual details approach the overpowering fleshiness of the originals. In 'Nude With Legs',
A nude woman
sits in an attic door
legs dangling above
a confession box,
basking in sinshine \
In One Clear Call, Eugene O'Connell from North West Cork mines a vein, much like Robbie Burns's, for verse of a high order, with astute character sketches and anecdotes and memoirs which accumulate into a strangely moving description of a place and its people.
This first collection resonates with local imagery: the isolated rural house, the small farm, the local pub, the church. Names of places and people work in the poems like stones in a wall. His understated, sideways approach raises the material of local gossip to the level of myth:
Denny Andy himself would boast
Of the farm that went down his throat,
And how the dog he went to search for
In the pubs the morning after a session
Was a ruse to cadge a cure for his failing.
Their short forms and laconic rhythms give the poems a suitably abrupt, off-hand aspect. Many concern neighbours, relatives, farmhands, a postman - and a marvellous "Mower" - whose physical or psychological adversities result in tragedy, triumph, slapstick reversals, or just ironic come-uppance, all related to us as rich versified gossip. He weaves often commonplace objects into a few complex sentences so that they become badges or totems. A sharp example is 'Morley', nine lines about a blind man and his wife and how the tea-things become sacramental.
A few foreshortened narratives would benefit from more development of character and place. And there are enough lapses in proofreading to distract an attentive reader; but all told, as a first collection these poems are rich in lore and wit, and we can easily forgive their author for their few flaws, and their readers for wanting more and better, sooner rather than later.
James J. McAuley is a poet and critic
What Darkness Covers
By Tony Curtis
Arc Publications, 87pp. £8.95
One Clear Call
By Eugene O'Connell
Bradshaw Books, Cork, 53pp. €12