Tom Paulin's poetry is determinedly one of sound before lyricism, of intellect before evocation. `Style', an early poem in this collection, puns on his recurrent assertion that words are a truculently awkward means of communication, and effectively explains Paulin's own "style", in which language has to be clambered over again and again, legged up by dialect etymologies and lost associations. Once the "stile" is traversed, The Wind Dog rewards the reader with a Paulin more open and self-reflective than before. The Wind Dog has all the academic and political nuances usual in Paulin's poetry, but when, in `Odd Surname', Paulin lists a history of misspellings of his own name (Powlin, Pauling, Pauline, Pollen) there is a new and welcome lightness of touch which comes from putting himself through the kind of scrutiny his poetry has traditionally given to less personal subjects. In a later poem, mention of Tom Paine, a hero of Paulin's often nostalgic republicanism, makes the self-irony complete by playfully echoing the poet's name with intentional bombast.
The Wind Dog's title poem (the phrase describes a fragment of a rainbow) epitomises this new-found, relaxed construction in Paulin's poetry. Memories of childhood events mingle with recollections of first language experiences. The result is a cacophony of Paulinesque sounds ("Rikki-tikki-tavi", "grey-green, greasy Limpopo river") which revert almost inevitably to rhymes of his early life in Belfast ("thhee black lumps/outa her wee shap") and "the sigh of Hindi" from his days in Yorkshire. The "wind dogs" of the poem are these autobiographically linguistic explanations, which then resonate through the knowingly Joycean mention of "baby tuckoo", and become connected to a list of barely hidden references to other poets (Heaney, Longley, MacNeice, Frost, Owen, the tricksiness of Muldoon, the repetitive mantras of Van Morrison). The Wind Dog is a self-conscious act of canine scavenging which starts with sound "all crisp and pepper definite" and ends with sound as "both Being and Becoming". In its collective purposeful snatches The Wind Dog charts a candid, aural biography for Paulin's conviction that "the ear/ is the only true reader/ the only true writer".
Paulin does not entirely remake himself in The Wind Dog. The England of this collection is predictably one in which Anglicanism is "brisk, bossy, heartless,/ and utterly without hope" (`Bournemouth') and where the forgotten republicanism of Marvell and Milton is still bemoaned. `Oxford' is a buddleia-edged imperial centre. Of the poems on the recent politics of the North, `The Quinn Brothers' is the least successful in the collection, partly because the traumatic nature of its subject far exceeds the poem's capacities - it ends with an awkward recanting of Paulin's favourite metaphor, the liberty tree. Much more successful is `Drumcree Three', in which a ladder used to prune a vine on the day of the march becomes, by the next day, a plethora of possibilities: it may have dropped from the sky, or risen from the earth, it may be the Jacob's ladder on an Orange arch, or the arch itself, or "a type of cubist/ hard metal liberty tree". Whether the ladder is "object or symbol?" is left as a question. What it does symbolise is the openness, the critical multiplicity and, ultimately, the assurance which recur throughout The Wind Dog, making it an adventurous and important departure in the work of a major contemporary Irish poet.
Colin Graham is Lecturer in Irish Writing at the Queen's University of Belfast and the author of Ideologies of Epic