The Voice of the Hare by Patrick J. Daly Dedalus £71pp, £5.95; True North by Fred Johnston Salmon 85pp, £5.99
These two poets are not new to the Irish poetry scene. They have both published widely here and abroad. Their poetry is easy on the ear, the brain and the heart, and very accessible. It is a poetry untroubled by the problems of linguistic communication, by the nature of language itself. The world is given and accepted, the word referential.
By vocation Patrick J. Daly is an Augustinian priest, and the presence of that religious calling is heard everywhere in the poems of The Voice of the Hare. Confronting death and suffering, he asks repeatedly for God to show himself in some way, through compassion or understanding. But this is not the anguish of the believer longing for the Deus absconditus. Daly reminds himself that Jesus is the God of suffering no less than of love; and it is Daly's good fortune to possess the gift or grace of faith that saves him from morbidity and despair.
Like a boat, serenely on a sea after storm,
When the sun newly lights the waters,
You lie in your hospital bed,
Grateful to the nurses,
Reaching to grasp our hands,
Slipping gently into God
("Minnie")
Daly's faith, however is no facile thing. It is sorely tested again and again as, for example, in the poem "Complaint" in which he poignantly writes of a dying woman "Who suddenly had all her trust removed And turned to the wall and died":
Where were you, Sir, when she called out to you?
And where was the love that height nor depth
Nor any mortal thing can overcome?
Does it please you, Sir, that your people's voice
Is the voice of the hare torn between the hounds?
The Voice of the Hare is a deeply moving collection of poems by a sensitive, kind and intelligent human being. It would be remiss of me not to add that besides all the soul-searching in the book, there is also present a deep sense of joy in the good things of this world.
Fred Johnston's True North is, by and large, a book of affirmative lyrics, many of which are love poems that employ the traditional tropes of the genre:
Tie up your hair, loved girl, come with me
I have a memory as bright and leaping
As the salmon's back I have watched you sleeping
("Tie up your hair")
As a displaced Northerner living now for many years in Galway, Johnston, as might be expected, has things to say about Irish identity; but, like that other humane, unbigoted Northerner, Robert Greacen, he has no ideological agenda. Like Greacen, too, he speaks quietly and always in human terms:
I think of you through Omagh driving
the moon bewildered and all light gone out
up North where the maps of the heart change daily
that unsure territory of small towns and checkpoints
cold in that coat you said looked like a curtain
navigating the darkness, tuning the radio hedges
like ghosts flung out and hauled back
transmissions mauled by weather, distance, static ("Night Driving")
True North reads pleasantly and effortlessly in rhythm and lapidary image, and through it all there is the voice of someone who has experienced disinheritance and learnt from it to be tolerant and understanding.
. . . Time paces itself, a slow mist danders off.
The headstone names are local, a carved roll-call
Of certainties and what's what. I do not possess that,
A rooting gift, but clamber up to touch something
Like it through the rigging of my doubt, feeling with every pitch
And squall the need to let go, fall free into what will
Absorb me, drown me. My True North is always shifting,
A few degrees from far off marks a considerable distance up close.
("True North")
Michael Smith is a poet, translator and publisher