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Irish Times
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
New poetry: Frank McGuinness, Erica McAlpine, James Harpur and Dane Holt
'Did he know he trespassed where none should pry?' Frank McGuinness writes in Flight, 1909. In context, he's discussing 'the first flight over Lisfannon', taken by his father's father, but the poem also gestures to some of his latest collection's concerns, and obsessions. Many of the poems in The River Crana (Gallery Press, €12.95/€19.50) move towards and away from revelation and confession – they paint scenes that offer self-exposure and dwell among the risks involved in finally taking the plunge. Touch, 1976 is a sequence of poems pivoting around a brief encounter with 'the kind of guy you should not trust in bars' and its aftermath, from several perspectives (including the bed itself, in the slightly odder poem of the set). McGuinness's eye for portraiture, carnality and psychology all come to the fore in the telling, and his shifts of perspective allow for a bruised kind of empathy, 'never again looking/the length of his life and out of my own'. Elsewhere we hear about 'saviours who have lost the plot' and others 'full of remorse/and craving compassion'. It's a various book, elegiac, playful and intertextual; McGuinness is fond of and adept at the dramatic monologue form, bringing in a whole chorus of unexpected voices, ably thrown, from the ancient world, Shakespeare and Maeve Binchy at Croagh Patrick. READ MORE His eye for the telling image, too, shines out, from Armenian orchards that 'smell of pomegranates/the colour of veal' to lambs 'licking us sticky clean as honeycomb'. One of the sharpest poems, Lack of Sleep, also shows off his skill in form, and reaches for a kind of universalist timelessness – a note he also strikes in a touching version of Cavafy , Bandage, which is similarly rich in a sense of being vulnerably observant in the midst of all the action: 'I liked looking,/looking at the blood/that belonged to him'. Traditional form is the keystone for Erica McAlpine, and in Small Pointed Things (Carcanet, £11.99) she brings her scrupulous musicality to bear on the natural world, retellings of Ovid and 'the point of no return'. She's particularly good at turning scenes from nature and the quotidian into something at times almost parable-like, ruminative while never abandoning the physical or concrete realm. In Bats and Swallows, the book's opening poem, the speaker addresses someone whose nature it is 'always to side one way/or the other' while she prefers an approach where 'either, or both, hold sway'. This having it both ways instinct serves her well here, allowing her to at once debunk the idea of ideas , 'They can be elliptical/in the worst way,/or too convoluted even to say' while taking them for a walk, in carefully chiselled stanzas; to see poetry as 'a dazzle/of pure thought/about itself' while simultaneously clinging to its gravity, and craftiness. [ Paul Durcan: 'Poetry was a gift that he loved to give others' Opens in new window ] There's something of Marianne Moore to her animal poems, another poet who, like McAlpine, 'cares for delicacy of stroke', especially in her muscular, rebarbative scorpion who is 'a prizefighting champion/posing and preposterous/and plated like a tiny rhinoceros'. Throughout, in her many studies of the natural world, she aims for something more than simple taxonomy, or voyeurism: 'But life gives//itself over/purely to whatever/is near it', she writes in Kingfishers, and that sort of companionable generosity spotlights the book as a whole, whether finding fellow feeling for The Second Warthogs 'not-quite-worthy/of being seen' or the labour of the spider and its web, 'this feeling/like combing through a baby's hair'. These are poems which, however well built and apparently ordered, know that 'some things can't be straightened out' and, for all their enviable sprezzatura, legislate for the dark undertone beneath the music and 'felt the sting/of knowing we draw/from our own grave/to water what we have'. James Harpur, whose new collection is The Magic Theatre. Photograph: Alan Betson James Harpur's new collection The Magic Theatre (Two Rivers Press, £12) is steeped – at times stewed – in nostalgia for his days as an undergraduate at Cambridge University, a 'power station that burns on brains'. There's something charmingly guileless, a quality that lends it a slightly Rupert Brooke-ish idealism and helps to disarm the cynical reader who fears the experience of reading it will be akin to gatecrashing someone else's college reunion. The Brooke scent is strongest in moments of reverie, such as Summer Term – 'Begins mid spring: days of moon-white suns/The punts still smoky in their pens/And trees along the Backs pubescent green.//At first, insouciance of students, phoney war'. It isn't all blissful punting and sepia-tinged lost content, however, and the most moving – and compelling – strain of the collection is found in the relationship revealed between father and son, played out subtly and in small gestures. The divide brought about between the son's growing erudition and learning threatens to cause a schism, 'These are perhaps the final moments/Our worlds will still connect/Before I get more bookish by the month/And make him feel inadequate' but later revelations, of tenderness and more complicated elements, add depth – 'he'll let on/From the cosmos of his wheelchair/That he could only pay my fees/By gambling. Roulette in Kensington'. Friendships and relationships are formed and lost, and the world of acting entered into – the whole thing at times a meditation on performance, on and offstage, and the 'tinnitus of humiliation' which sometimes accompanies it. Self-sabotage and a perennial tendency towards running counter to his own interest's seems to stymie the narrator at several crucial moments, and aside from the odd Pooterish moment it's hard not to be won over by a poet capable of resurrecting his school days in such vivid colour, 'A gold balloon arcing from the river/Through a mist of atomised champagne'. Dane Holt's debut Father's Father's Father (Carcanet, £11.99) is full of tall tales, an often surrealist narrative instinct and a tendency to turn on a sixpence, or pull various rugs out, just as the reader starts to get comfortable. This can – at times – risk settling into a groove of sorts itself, one starts to wait for the twist or the volte-face, but throughout there's a clarity and precision to the language, and a fine knack for image and phrasemaking, which largely wins out. It's not an accident that the first line of the first poem, John Cena, about the professional wrestler, is 'Everything you do you do precisely'. Ironically, that narrator's exhortations might, in the end, be usefully applied to some of the poems here – 'f**k up once in a while, why don't you,/in a way we don't anticipate'. The best work here is that which is willing to walk the tightrope over sentiment, such as an unexpectedly moving poem riffing on the narrator's grandmother by utilising Tammy Wynette: 'how saying one thing so/exactly to someone intent on hearing//the opposite is art' or another family-related one, Humphrey Bogart, about a grandfather and his son, 'They both loved/the men Humphrey Bogart played'. There's something analogous about this idea of performing, or wearing masks, and Holt makes hay with the subject in a series of poems which use wrestling – that ultimate mix of pantomime and physicality – as their means of talking about being 'unmoored/from dramatic structure', a plight many of the masks and characters come to share. Avoidance, and variations on the theme, are at the heart of Father's Father's Father, and while the urge towards following WS Merwin's advice 'I could do anything' occasionally results in some slightly arbitrary-seeming, simile-heavy wackiness, often it leads to something original, well-seen and entertaining.
Irish Times
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Infinity Pool by Vona Groarke: Subtle observations take readers on journey of the senses in accomplished collection
Infinity Pool Author : Vona Groarke ISBN-13 : 978-1917371094 Publisher : Gallery Press Guideline Price : €11.95 If poets are to be either 'visual' or 'haptic', as Randall Jarrell once suggested in a review of Marianne Moore, then Vona Groarke (like Moore) is visual. Her latest book, Infinity Pool , exemplifies this. The starting point of these poems is inevitably how a subject strikes the eye: the dense clouds above Knock as seen from an aeroplane window; a future passed through, 'like a car through fog'; or the poem itself – the 'infinity pool' of the title – a blue rectangle held against blue, so the viewer can't quite 'tell the edge'. This is a depiction of the watched world and the effect for the reader is an immediacy of vision: a scarecrow 'derided' by the wind; a butterfly that 'chases itself down, very lightly, between stalks/ of cow parsley up to my neck'; 'Antique dusk/ with its yellowing pages'. I imagine the cow parsley as Sligo – the poet's county – on a May afternoon; while the antique dusk is surely England , the yellowish glow of Cambridge where Groarke is poet-in-residence. The writing inhabits both places with focused and tender attention. READ MORE There is a third place also, the place of poems, a complicated realm into which the poet climbs 'through tears in the brocade'. This strange state of existence – described in Hindsight as a 'pipe of light I pull myself through/ like a rag through the barrel of a shotgun' – is tested and questioned throughout. The result, as always with Groarke, is exciting intellectual exploration. [ The Illegals by Shaun Walker: The Russian agent who couldn't get Irish people to shut up, and other spy stories Opens in new window ] [ The fall of an ancient tree is a sad occasion. It marks the death of a living monument Opens in new window ] Hers is a 'thinking eye', to borrow Klee's phrase: the immediacy of the visual is always joined and powered by the working-out of an idea. The Future of the Poem, for instance, is a verse-essay in miniature, each brief section a prophesy, or a dare: 'Watch it become something smaller./ Watch it rot.' Although the book closes with a magnificent sequence written after reading Chinese love poems, Groarke, again like Moore, favours anti-Romantic subject matter: a maths copybook; a ball of lint; a coin game where 'the batten sweeps forward to nudge them all in'. In this poem (Tipping Point), a skilful play with negatives leads us towards its heartbreaking conclusion – just one triumphant example of the subtle manipulations of light and surface that illuminate the whole collection.
