Best Poetry Books 2002 selected by Pat Boran

Poetry Books of 2002

Sunday Tribune

In an essay-length introduction to her 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem (Chatto & Windus, PB, £12.99 UK), Ruth Padel touches on the, well, touchy subject of the size of the audience for poetry today. 'If you treat something as a "minority interest", and hardly mention it,' she reasons, 'the interest is likely to become more minority still.' Once something is marginalised, it becomes more marginalised.' The miracle is that poetry continues to have any readership at all.

But part of the reason it is still read is that, whatever non-readers might think, or remember from their schooldays, contemporary poetry is at least as wide-ranging and diverse as the various styles of music they might find by turning the dial on their radios -- and, arguably, much more so. And 2002, while perhaps not the best of recent years, offered its own numerous attractions.

Pearse Hutchinson's handsome Collected Poems (Gallery Press, PB ¤17.50/HB ¤30) brought together some 40 years of lively, politically and socially engaged and engaging work by a poet who makes both English and Irish his own while acting as two-way ambassador to poets from Catalunya and other quarters. 'To kill a language is to kill a people,' begins one of his best known poems ('The Frost is All Over'), and new work collected here sees his gift of language again used to explore the fears and injustices of his time as well to celebrate the enduring power of love, a word which an earlier poem warned should be added to postcards only if made 'illegible'.

With the last poem in Hutchinson's collection dedicated to her, Indian poet Sujata Bhatt widens and nicely complicates the picture of contemporary poetry with her fifth individual collection (A Colour for Solitude, Carcanet, UK £7.99) a quiet-spoken, sustained meditation on the life and work of 19th century artist Paula Modersohn-Becker who lived near Bhatt's present home of Bremen, Germany.

Though a very different kind of book, Welshman Robert Minhinnick's After the Hurricane (Carcanet, UK £6.95) also journeys outside of the self and the purely autobiographical with poems that explore 'The Bombing of Baghdad as seen from an Electrical Goods Shop', as the title of one poem has it, to 'A Welshman's Flora' where hemlock can say, 'This time the mad cows / Are nothing to do with me', using poetry to keep one eye on history and another on the world we live in now.

Across the Atlantic, novelist Jim Dodge (Rain on the River, Canongate, UK £7.99) writes spare but quirky poems with more than a hint of Zen to them, so the recommendation from Gary Snyder on the cover comes as little surprise. In its entirety 'Death and Dying' reads: 'Don't matter diddly / When, where, / Or how / You die. / Important thing is, / Don't take it personal.' More simple and mindful than simple-minded, Dodge already looks like the real thing in this, his first collection.

Closer to home, Dennis O'Driscoll (on this list last year for his prose work Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams) published Exemplary Damages (Anvil, PB, UK £7.95), his sixth collection of trademark morbidly humorous poems where blood, pumping hearts, germs and nurses compete for space with his contributor's copy of 'The New Younger Irish Poets / already liver-spotted with age.' Ironic, dead-pan, keen-eyed and interested in appropriating both ready-made and emerging verbal forms for poetry (lists, fragments, formal repetitions and, increasingly here, relaxed discourses that acknowledge the presence of the reader), despite all the health and age scares, O'Driscoll is on top form here.

Vona Groarke's third collection, Flight (Gallery Press, PB ¤10 / HB ¤17.50) confirmed the impression that she is one of the brightest younger Irish stars around. Formally assured, and both inventive and ambitious in her approach to subject matter, Flight contains felt poems of domestic and familial life, while also exploring, in particular through the longer poems, the so-called bigger picture of Irish history. Even the long poem on death, 'Or to Come', whose opening so strongly echoes that of Derek Mahon's 'A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford', manages to break free from this shadow and, like so many of the poems here, seduces with rich music and sharply observed detail.

Other notable collections that appeared during the year include Mary O'Malley's new and selected volume, The Boning Hall (Carcanet, PB, UK £6.95), Matthew Sweeney's Selected Poems (Cape Poetry, PB, UK £10) and Sinéad Morrissey's Between Here and There (Carcanet, PB, UK £6.95), as well as Ciaran Carson's riveting version of Dante's Inferno (Granta, PB, UK £14.99). Among first collections, Liz McSkeane's Snow at the Opera House (New Island, PB ¤9.99) deserves a mention, not least for the sonnet Samsara, which will undoubtedly appear in an anthology near you some time soon.

And because Christmas is, perhaps most of all, a time of anthologies, it would be remiss not to mention both Neil Astley's wonderfully varied Staying Alive (Bloodaxe, PB, UK £10.95), at almost 500 pages surely the poetry bargain of the year; and, not least because poetry is one of the last refuges of the sometime strange, Niall MacMonagle's Off the Wall (Marino, ¤ 12.95). The latter, among other gems, boasts Lawrence Ferlinghetti's fittingly seasonal 'Sometime During Eternity' in which 'some guys show up / and one of them / who shows up real late / is a kind of carpenter...' who goes from being 'real cool', according to 'the usual reliable sources', to being 'real dead'. Maybe it's just the season that's in it, but haven't similar 'reliable sources' for years now claimed the same thing about poetry?