Poetry: Micheal O'Siadhail's Love Life performs the sweet trick of reading like a Selected. That's because it tells the story of "Three dozen years. Morning, noon, night./ Love life. Our being bathèd in light", as the fine dedicatory couplet has it.
The book's four sections examine the phases of a life-love from first encounter to the Kitchen Portrait earned by long co- habitation: "You work a swift careful knife./ Kind, forethoughtful,/ At ease and yet/ No one oversteps/ The mark." No epithalamium then, but a marriage-hymn of long retrospect, this is a collection which is unabashedly joyful, univocal and sincere.
O'Siadhail is comfortably sure-footed within the arc of his own poetics. Although it's music that predominates, his imagery is often aptly fresh: "I watch the tumbled dim of evening light" (Ten to Seven), "A pebble [ . . .] Shimmering in the sea's dark shaft" (Making Up). His rhythms are beautifully exact:
[. . .] I too begin to flirt
Taken by fold of skirt
Which like a Japanese fan
Flicker accordion pleats,
Sways of silk's redundancy [ . . .]
(Concertina)
It's hard to avoid reading a book like this - whose very title enmeshes this Love with a Life - as, if not autobiographical, at least narrative.
Nevertheless - apart from some elegiac later poems (perhaps more expected in an older poet) and the genuinely moving Parkinson's - this is a remarkably homogenous collection, whose close returns us to the Crimson Thread of its opening. If some poems might have been pruned to allow the bones of this tighter structure to show through, it is nevertheless a generous, accomplished book.
Fiona Sampson's The Distance Between Us is published by Seren. She is the editor of Poetry Review
Love Life By Micheal O'Siadhail Bloodaxe Books, 118pp. £8.95