PoetryThat two Irish poets, one from Co Cork and one from Belfast, have made their writing homes in the UK might seem slim grounds for comparing them. Indeed, there's a piquancy to reading Peter McDonald and Maurice Riordan together, since they are strongly associated with apparently divergent tendencies in British poetry.
Last year, Riordan took over as poetry editor of Poetry London, one of the most colourful and international of UK Little Magazines; while McDonald's critical practice, including his directorship of Tower Poetry, has long been associated with intellectual excellence.
Piquant indeed, then, to discover in The Holy Land and The House of Clay similarities not only of theme - haunted by a dead father, both books return to a "holy land" of childhood enchantment, which they memorialise with tender exactitude - but of register and imagery too. Here, for example, is McDonald In heaven:
[ . . . ] shapes step slowly
out, one by one,
from the horizon,
then they soften
into drumlins, row
upon neat row
of saplings, head-
high, barely moving,
while in Riordan's The Ten Commandments, alongside "the straight into Youghal",
[ . . . ] the ocean reared above us: a wall of
water
more cold fire than water, more the silver
flickering
on Smarts' whitewashed wall than the
wall itself -
in which we could see the Pharoah's
soldiers
still struggling with their chariots and
spears.
Such shape-shifting characterises both collections; but Riordan's diction is the shiftier. Just as, here, it is both an outdoor movie and the strand-side Atlantic in which this family sees the sea closing after it has let the Chosen People through: so, throughout this book, two presents are juxtaposed so closely that we pass from one to the other before we realise we have done so. In the poem actually called The Red Sea, for example, visiting the family home "for the last time", "I see what was always there but had forgotten: / red cement, with a green diamond at the centre - / where we've been placed with dolls and animals". From the grammatical cloudiness of memory we are thrown, by the swivel of that dash, into a vivid childhood moment in which the poet's mother is painting the floor.
Elsewhere, the father is a ghost who foretells the birth of his twin grandchildren and what that will cost the poet; or witnesses the loss of farmland to "landfill, rubble, roundabouts and raw estates".
The book's core, though - and comprising nearly half of its 49 pages of poetry - is a series of 18 Idylls, in which the father to whom it is dedicated is undisputed king. Prose-poems, each records a moment of reflection, amidst work, by "the men": Moss, Bo'sun, Dan-Jo and Davey Divine joining the family men-folk.
These captured "spots of time" resemble Patrick Kavanagh's prose reminiscences of "the constant service of the antique world". The Idylls are lucid, exact, fully-inhabited - and display Riordan's perfect ear. That same ear catches echoes of Muldoon, in "[he begins with a line by Sandy Lyle]" and "[he begins with a line by CJ]"; and generates, in the book's final poem, an elegant ecological villanelle. It also attends to a greater complexity, of both form and tone-world, in the extended lyrics that succeed the Idylls.
Here Understorey - as its title suggests, both the book's key and its foundation - gives us effortless narrative observation ("The rain pauses. We emerge into Higgs's Field. / Two snipe take off, zigzagging towards the Glens") underpinned by a more necessary register - "the child whose mouth shapes and reshapes / its empty scream" - and wider compass: "we belong in an uncountable world". This is a fine and serious book, which deserves a wide, non-specialist audience.
PETER MCDONALD'S The House of Clay is at ease with complexity from the outset. The first poem, San Domenico, is an aubade to a place and (siesta) time in which the visiting poet, when he disappears into his room, both is and is not: "the few hours till I appear / again".
McDonald is at the poetic disadvantage of having grown up not on a farm, but "in 44a Woodview Drive". Yet this verse understands the uses of enchantment and distance: "As I move faster, everything speeds up: / I make the rain stop by raising my hand, / and sunlight loses itself on the Castelreagh hills" (The hand). It understands, too, the virtues of a countable, urban world in which, as in The overcoat, the "rain-raked platform / is just outside the lighted train"; and cold, and the smell of cigarettes in "a grey overcoat", characterise a home city so strongly they can make the remembered dead walk again. McDonald, like Riordan, seems to step across time into his late father's shoes when he too "come home late", carrying the very toys his father used to bring him.
But this is poetry that understands the challenges it addresses. The overcoat may be a "ghost" poem; it is also haunted by the Troubles, since "quietly", in the sixth and seventh verses, it tells how the father's bakery was held up by the "two / men with guns, their faces masked" who might have made a ghost of him one Friday afternoon. Elsewhere, Vigilantes are the angels of death who keep father and bereaved son apart; and mark the limits of an individual's control over his own life. The "house of clay" of the book's title is both the tomb and our animal home there. In As seen, what is elsewhere informed by the classical beauty of Pindar becomes visceral: "in desperation / we force ourselves / to our bare flesh / again". Visceral, too, is A schoolboy's "romper-room, / the torture-floor" where a child-self kills a fly.
McDonald is a writer of great range as well as subtlety. If these two distinguished collections both celebrate how, as his The other world has it, "In all-over light, for ever, the grass / makes stars and rivers and waves of the sea" - that is surely good news for contemporary poetry and its capacities.
Fiona Sampson's Common Prayer is forthcoming from Carcanet in June. She is the editor of Poetry Review
The Holy Land By Maurice Riordan Faber, 55pp. £8.99 The House of Clay By Peter McDonald Carcanet, 71pp. £8.95
