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Looking in at Eden. Aidan Murphy. New Island.
£6.99 pb Pat Boran (Sunday Tribune, April 2001)
Where other poets of his generation might turn to Greek and other classics to find vocabulary and incident for their concerns, Aidan Murphy has always had one eye on the cinema screen. His parallel explorations of the underbellies of real Irish and fictional, largely American lives chart growing similarities between the two and recognise, in each, the presence of mythic dimension. As in this new book, poems might be set in Dublin's flatlands, and film noir tough guys might replace Heracles and Co., but the effect is the same: this is a haunted world. A lesser writer might easily take refuge among these echoes, wishing like the men at the bar in 'A Western Dirge': 'To live here in this godforsaken twilight / And be going nowhere.' However, though called by oblivion, Murphy's social and storytelling conscience refuse to let him off so easily, and his empathy for lives eclipsed gives the work real depth. In this handsome new collection, New Island shows it is justly proud of one of the least affected, most affecting voices around. To date, The Hellbox is Corkonian Greg Delanty's most impressive and unified book. In it, his favourite subjects of twin identity, of the entry into a life in words, indeed of the physical aspect of word-making itself were almost magically recreated. But where it and earlier books seemed much concerned with the daulities of growing up in Ireland and working and writing in the US, the new book nicely complicates that issue. Time spent in India gives yet another new perspective on early years and relationships, on the crafts, rituals and even on the prayers of his childhood. Always determined to include early vocabulary and expressions in his navigation of adult experiences, Delanty's poems might be typified by an awkward charm, a reach to bridge the gaps between registers of language and feeling. Often this leads to a need for notes on the Cork slang, and to a kind of circling, even within short poems, as he ranges back and forth clearing sightlines. The effect is often of a chatty, even slightly distracted voice, and it is this very quality that makes his best work so compelling. One almost hears the poems being made, the effort, play and by times anguish of the process becoming part of the finished thing. Simpler lyrics do get an airing ('The Travelling Monk', 'The Nuptial Fish'), and their images reappear to cement the book into a whole, but it is the more unsettled poems which repay rereading. The inspired ventriloquism of Brendan Kennelly's Cromwell, Book of Judas and, to a lesser extent, Poetry My Arse, has coexisted with a penchant for the fleeting, the passing, the transitory. In Glimpses, the speed of modern life, added to the brevity of life itself, seems to add up to a need for brief poems, though, in fairness, with some 600 of them, it can be hard to see the best for what they are. Of little more than haiku or tanka size, the short poems gathered here are again, as one has come to expect of Kennelly, full of overheard and imagined speech, the crumbs from the table of rational discourse. Marginalia, in a sense, the jokes, asides and inflections of hearts under pressure, they argue with each other, speak in riddles and whispers, but often feel more reductive than fragmentary: the complete 'Playing Around,' for instance, reads, 'lived / veil'd / devil'. In a book about things seen on the run, blindness is unsurprisingly a recurring theme. But there is a strong sense that the voices which make up this dark, unsettling book, have been reduced to speaking in asides by something, for all its variety, only ever glimpsed. Macdara Woods is another poet for whom
the notion of 'voice' seems almost inadequate. Confident that
a certain dislocation can lead to the heart of things, Woods
shies away from the neat closure, preferring instead that overlapping
and echoing of senses that is almost his hallmark. Embracing
the longer poem like few around him, he has produced a huge body
of work (this is an update of his Selected Poems of five years
back) in which the voice is the primary guide. Time passing, death and elegy are ever-present concerns, and, as if against the tide, many poems record the time and place of their making, often in the title itself. Where Ginsberg called himself a stenographer
of the mind, Woods might be said to be a stenographer of memory,
and the powerful feelings of these poems, coupled with the persuasiveness
of voice, is what gives them their magic and authority.
© copyright Pat Boran |