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. . . ..................I've blown this, but to hell with poetry.Life's more important. I could go on and on adding forever to this mumbo jumbo sandwich.But I better wrap up, finish my ranting and rambling ravings. I'm quoting from the second last page of Greg Delanty's latest collection and see a paradox, yet no contradiction, in what I'm about to notice next. 'Rambling ravings'? - The Hellbox is the most tightly constructed book of poems I have come across in the last few months. I emphasise this for two reasons. The first is the usual one, a 'book' of poetry as opposed to a 'selection' particularly shapes the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts: asks to be read from cover to cover rather than dipped into. The second reason is that, in the present case, there is a shift in style (without injuring distinctiveness and continuity of voice) between the relatively formal opening poems and the long risky title poem at the close of the volume. In order to watch this journey and appreciate how the final piece came to be earned, it doubly matters to read this collection as an integral whole. The opening pages contain well-made pieces such as 'The Composing Room' and 'The Cure' (with its nine quatrains of alternately rhyming lines), along with mock-sonnets like 'White Spirits', 'Modern Times', the lovely lyrical 'Mirror'. The middle section, however, registers a shift in method through the more open form, the 'getting lost', of the excellent 'The Lost Way'. The evocation in the epigraph to 'Ligatures' of Walt Whitman - himself, in his teens, a compositor and journeyman printer - further foreshadows the more open form of the title poem. The opening-up, in the ten-page 'Hellbox', is partially a response to the wide and varied continent where Delanty now chiefly resides. The stylistic shift is a self-aware one: even me own poems are getting blasted bigger. I'm cross-fertilizing my regular, leprechaun-small strain with the crazy American variant as if the Irish to-mat-o- was crossed with the whale of the Yankee to-mate-o". As a (I think unintended) bonus, the appeal in the last stanzas of 'The Hellbox' for actuality, for things as they are "Where is that down- to-earth-angel" chimes with Whitman's call to respect the way things really are in his 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass: "Men and women and the earth and all upon it are simply to be taken as they are ... with perfect candor." In keeping with the book's evolution in technique, it is notable that the opening pieces are largely localised around Cork and the world of the Eagle Co. Printers - the poet's boyhood/adolescence, his father and his father's cronies. The note here is frequently elegiac-celebratory - for people, for the "spoiled good old days" ('Passing the Evergreen Bar'), for the lost craft. Cork and Ireland are there in the final pages also, but now as part of the meditations of the adult poet reflecting on a less localized world embracing the peepshows of 42nd Street, the Antarctic, Timbucktoo, Chernobyl: a rag- and-cranebag that's also a cornucopia whistling from "so-called home" to "the handle of Miami". Holding all together is the metaphor of the hellbox and allied printing imagery: ...in the year of Himself or Herself, the Great Compositor, nineteen hundred and pied ninety-five anno damini, thrown like all the other broken |
and worn days into the hellbox of this century. Marvels happen as the poetry goes to play with the tools that, between Caxton and the day before yesterday, used to set poems. And the poems remember their words, the Logos of John 1.i is not overlooked: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was made cold type and the Word was coldness, darkness, shiny greyness and light- And the Word dwelt amongst us. ('The Composing Room') Fidelity to "shiny greyness" in the glove with the "light" of language underpins this book and gives it its playground and integrity: tolle lege - read and enjoy.
Gregory O'Donoghue As a (I think unintended) bonus, the appeal in the last stanzas of 'The Hellbox' for actuality, for things as they are "Where is that down- to-earth-angel" chimes with Whitman's call to respect the way things really are in his 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass: "Men and women and the earth and all upon it are simply to be taken as they are ... with perfect candor." In keeping with the book's evolution in technique, it is notable that the opening pieces are largely localised around Cork and the world of the Eagle Co. Printers - the poet's boyhood/adolescence, his father and his father's cronies. The note here is frequently elegiac-celebratory - for people, for the "spoiled good old days" ('Passing the Evergreen Bar'), for the lost craft. Cork and Ireland are there in the final pages also, but now as part of the meditations of the adult poet reflecting on a less localized world embracing the peepshows of 42nd Street, the Antarctic, Timbucktoo, Chernobyl: a rag- and-cranebag that's also a cornucopia whistling from "so-called home" to "the handle of Miami". Holding all together is the metaphor of the hellbox and allied printing imagery: ...in the year of Himself or Herself, the Great Compositor, nineteen hundred and pied ninety-five anno damini, thrown like all the other broken and worn days into the hellbox of this century. Marvels happen as the poetry goes to play with the tools that, between Caxton and the day before yesterday, used to set poems. And the poems remember their words, the Logos of John 1.i is not overlooked: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was made cold type and the Word was coldness, darkness, shiny greyness and light- And the Word dwelt amongst us. ('The Composing Room') Fidelity to "shiny greyness" in the glove with the "light" of language underpins this book and gives it its playground and integrity: tolle lege - read and enjoy.
Gregory O'Donoghue |
