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The lightness of his syntactic touch is masterly His poems are flexible enough to lift off the page Boran's poetry is amongst the most tantalising poetry being written in Ireland [O]ne of our most exciting and rewarding contemporary Irish poets [He] seems, to my ear, to have crossed Such work restores one’s faith
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The
Unwound Clock [A] FIRST COLLECTION of striking, almost arrogant self-assurance...
Boran maps out a poetic landscape with youthful energy and deceptive
wit. The book introduces a poet of great promise. IT'S NOT HARD
to see why Pat Boran received the Patrick Kavanagh award... for
his collection. At the heart of the book stand six poems from
what seems to be a sequence-in-progress, 'from The Cartographer's
Assistant's Notebook' the timbre and texture of which are more
sombre and disturbing altogether than anything else in The
Unwound Clock. A medley of self-obsessed voices is set in
motion, and a tense inner drama, or series of dramas unfolds
in a mood reminiscent of the atmosphere of an ensemble by Munch
or Strindberg. It is an uncanny, utterly absorbing work... History
and Promise: THE VELOCITY OF
the journey between ground-facts (Laois, landscape, signpost)
and large abstractions (history, time) betrays the presence of
the true poet... [He] seems, to my ear, to have crossed William
Trevor with Seferis, producing fragments of short stories that
-- anchored in ordinary landscapes and humanscapes -- have been
shot through with a hunted, almost visionary light. BORAN CAPTURES
the seductive claustrophobia of life in small Irish towns quite
brilliantly, and with a minimum of verbal fuss. PAT BORAN'S SLIM
sequence History and Promise is subtitled 'Poems from
Laois'. In the parlance of Patrick Kavanagh, these poems are
parochial without being provincial. They maybe 'footnotes to
a local history', but they are crafted and collated with such
care that the place itself, 'A flash of light on a signpost',
glimmers through these pages. In a journey that is more self-seeking
than self-discovery, the poetry bridges the gap between history
and promise; and the promise is fulfilled. Familiar
Things [A] MARVELLOUS, INTELLIGENT collection...
[It] should be grabbed by anyone interested in what a comparatively
young poet (thirty this month) can do using the rules of poetry...
Such work restores one's faith. The
Shape of Water ON THE EVIDENCE
of this third collection Pat Boran is a poet who is consumed
with a passionate curiosity about people and about things. He
is blessed with the gift of transorming his experience into poetry
resonant with vivid images and arresting observations. Boran
investigages a world where the ordinary is invested with the
ritualistic and liturgical and where water flows enigmatically
as in the title poem... [The Shape of Water] is another
milestone alone the way in the development of Pat Boran as one
of our most exciting and rewarding contemporary Irish poets. THESE POEMS EXPLORE a cosmos subtly different from the one revealed
in his previous work. The author cites a line from Wallace Stevens:
'Ignorance is one of the sources of poetry'. So, too, is awareness
and a keen sensibility. Boran demonstrates that he possesses
these two qualities. BORAN'S POETRY HAS
a mature acceptance of the mystery of large abstractions, History,
Art, Politics. There is something comforting in the grey sanity
of these poems. They have the confidence and the courage to be
themselves and restore one's faith in the integrity of the poetic
act. Boran's poetry is amongst the most tantalising poetry being
written in Ireland. It is a book of such true talent, variety
and strength that it deserves to be read beside water. Strange
Bedfellows THE BEST THING
I can say about Pat Boran's masterful collection of short stories
is that I hope they will be bought and read by legions. In a
quirky style that never descends to the smart alecky, he deals
lightly but most effectively with themes that are not alone relevant
to modern times but to all times. I could go on, but in no way
would I be able to embellish these short and wise pieces. Buy,
borrow or steal them, that's what I say. [BORAN'S] FIRST COLLECTION of stories [is} characterised by a strikingly
lucid style of prose coupled with what Dermot Bolger describes
as a 'macabre and Hitchcockian' sense of the twists in people's
lives. This element in his writing is the more effective because
of the feeling of innocence which runs through it -- innocence
turns to insights in often shocking ways. A distinguished debut
from a writer who promises much. BORAN MANAGES TO
convey, with haunting precision, lives lived on the outskirts
of a rural community; lives which exist in the subterranean of
society, where the primeval law of survival of the fittest endures
in the darkest ways possible... [The title story] is the most
exciting modern short story of rural Ireland that I've read...
Strange Bedfellows is Salmon's first book of fiction and
it's a strong and exciting one to start their list with. BORAN'S TONE IS pointedly
downbeat and restrained, and the best of these stories ('Strange
Bedfellows', 'Pearl', 'A Question of Innocence' and 'The Street
Went Blind') testify to his skill as an explorer of strained
psychological states... 'And The Street Went Blind' seems particularly
successful not only because of its subject matter, where a young
man returns to the now derelict optician's premises once run
by his father, but because of the exact and paradoxically passionate
use of language through which his recollections take place...
L'Homme et ses Masques is a vast, sprawling meditation on the nature of existence itself, a multi-faceted interrogation of the forces that shape our minds, our reactions, our creations. -FIRST EDITION
New and Selected Poems In Pat Boran's poetry, stylish and learned as it is, the humanity has always been to the forefront. As Dennis O'Driscoll says in his characteristically just introduction, the publication of this ample selection of Boran's poems is greatly to be applauded. Boran is a salutary figure in many areas - not least the generosity he expends on the promotion and understanding of other writers' work, from Ireland and beyond. Much admired and appreciated as he is, seeing the work extensively like this is a revelation, from the complex meditations on place and home and leaving in the 1990 poems, to the unsentimental facing of his father's death, and the sureness of eye in the elegies and observations in the new poems. Boran has throughout been a kind of lateral visionary; his poems are never only about what they seem to be about. Like Auden's, they are stranger than they look. The lightness of his syntactic touch is masterly: a Travel Agency is "a place you go when you want to go some place". The elegy for Michael Hartnett evokes its subject with perfect delicacy: "The skull of a martin's nest/ grins in the eaves." The disconcerting His First Confession is a wonderfully sympathetic view of the dilemma of the young priest hearing a first confession, from a girl who says "I hate you, Father": an impressively unclichéd - and necessary - intervention into a current Irish debate. "Boran's language is pared down and precise. He is a poet who is capable of adopting a vast array of poetic and linguistic registers and one who clearly takes no small pleasure in playing with the possibilities of language and form... This is a collection which reveals a poet who is truly engaged with life in all its forms, a writer who responds to the minute and the miraculous with impressive clarity, precision and compassion"
All
the Way from China
A
Short History of Dublin THERE ARE AS MANY books on Dublin as there are Dublins. Like many folk who live in Dublin, Pat Boran is not actually from the Pale itself, being a Portlaoise man, but nobody has a monopoly on our capital city. Boran has written a useful and compact history which is likely to be picked up by a visitor wanting to get a good cross- section of the political, geographical, and social stratas of the city. There are 19 short, well-flagged chapters, ranging from "The Prehistory of Dublin 5000 BC-AD 795', through Cromwellian, Georgian, and Fenian times to "The Shopping Centre in the 1980s and 1990s". Dublin has, of course, changed hugely in recent years, and Boran ends by saying: "With the current pace of development, the next 50 or 100 years may well bring changes in Dublin as dramatic as those experienced in the previous 1000 - The Irish Times
The
Portable Creative Writing Workshop BORAN OFFERS WRITERS the chance to practice writing as if they were in a workshop without actually having to get up and go to one. The basic tools are all here, including introductions to the two major forms of creative writing, poetry and fiction. There are plenty of exercises, which are the strongest feature of the book. Blocked and semiblocked writers can never have too many exercises to keep the ideas flowing. The author is an Irish poet, and references to the literature and literary condition of the Old Sod actually add some flavour to his treatment of writing as an important national pastime, not taken lightly. Also of value is the Endgame section, which consists of advice for beginning writers from such poets and novelists (mainly Irish) as Maeve Binchy, John Dunne, and Seamus Heaney. Advice from writers on the other side of the big pond is rarely heaped upon U.S. writers, and they offer unique perspectives from an area of the world where writing is an admirable art." - Booklist, USA POET AND SHORT STORY writer Pat Boran has here compiled a collection of ways in which the aspiring writer might learn his or her craft. With a series of tricks and games, accompanied by advice from noted writers, he first addresses the raw material of the writer before moving on to specific disciplines. The second section deals with the various forms of poetry, discussing structure and demystifying metre; in a section entitled "Adjectival Infestation" I particularly liked one piece of advice from Mark Twain - "When you catch an adjective, kill it". The chapters dealing with the writing of fiction touch on setting, character and dialogue, and the author closes with a selection of advice from noted poets and prose writers. Maeve Binchy, perhaps, has the most practical advice: ".....tell yourself in a very stern voice you MUST write ten pages a week.....Then in 30 weeks you will have a....finished book and that will put you streets ahead of ninety nine percent of the world." -Irish Emigrant
-- Heather Dune Macadam, New York ,
30. April 2000 As
the Hand, the Glove
Years later -- for it is years There is, of course, a time in any writer's life, as in all lives, when one, in a sense, becomes the shadow of one's parents. Other poems refer to Boran's father and/or mother: the father, significantly, a pragmatic sellers of doors and windows, whose metaphoric significance no poem could ignore, and his mother a well-spring of dream, potions, a bright season of possibility and ice cream: ...though no one I've asked among my friends The boy becomes the man becomes the poet. Yet somehow the literal image of the poem seems not to be attractive. In a strange lyrical poem, 'Literature', the poet spies himself naked in a mirror in the early hours of the morning. The image does not fit the reality -- so much so that even metaphors get mixed up. ...like a man who would keep his truth
concealed, Now 'Rosebud', as we know, was the dying magnate's last word in Orson Welles' epic film Citizen Kane; it referred, it has been suggested, to the female sex-organ. The image is not in line with the notion of Jekyll or Gray, who were both 'other sides' or representations of a human self. Boran seems to be suggesting that the many-imaged poet cannot easily stand the single honest image of the true self; the metaphor most appropriate might be that of the poet as Caliban staring at his reflection. The poet knows reflexively that poetry is not as important or as lofty as it is often projected to be. This is an intense and complex view, perhaps a tad harsh, of the manifest primal 'sea-creature' lurking in the Blakeian innocence of the poet and the Darwinian upright ape which gives it practical form. What does a poet look like? Well, there one there, in the mirror. I see. This is an indication that, paradoxically, Boran takes writing poetry seriously. He is not so easily fooled about 'images' of what the poet should 'look like'. Through a series of poems about paintings, a sad well-wrought poem on a friend with AIDS, through a beautiful love-poem ('Hand Signals') to the start of things -- the poet as infant again -- a wonderful circular motion is achieved; as if poetry, like life, had its orbits. I've thought before now that Boran was a fine, lyrical love-poet and still do; his range widens here, he takes in a whole life, and in the whole knit edifice drops barely a stitch. This is a thoughtful, craft-conscious collection of poems, some of which have earned their credentials in previous arenas of publication. -- Books Ireland *** PAT BORAN IS one of a growing number of poets who write about Dublin. His is not the city of Noel Purcell, with coffee at 11 and a stroll in Stephen's Green, but an ugly dehumanising place where, in 'Machines', a man, infuriated by its alarms, beats the hell out of a car with the handle of a brush. The city reappears in 'Grief' with images of broken glass, emptiness, worthlessness, a rat in a bag "the only sign of life". The "nightmare" is all about him, but the poet will not flinch from recording its details. As he writes in 'Flesh', "I say it again: the spirit loves / the flesh as the hand, the glove". The poem celebrates the senses and rejects religions that would blame the flesh or punish those who enjoy it. It is to Boran's credit in this honest and forceful collection that he will accept the whole man and life as he finds it, not Dublin at 11, but at its bleakest, a metaphorical city. 'Afterlife', a lament for Lar Cassidy, brings a range of emotions together -- grief at his death, rage at lovers banging away in a car with the headlights filling up his room, and a muted acceptance of flesh and spirit. transcending the noise, glare and grief, the poem lifts to an image of his friend "carried aloft / or on to where our wavering hope" in an afterlife -- The Irish Times ***
THE TITLE OF Pat Boran's collection comes from the poem 'Flesh' which affirms the primacy of the living substance. In itself this is a welcome celebration and indicative of the persuasive mood of the poetry. Even poems that grieve over the death of a father, a lover or a friend, do so in the context of the vitality of life and love. 'Flesh' concludes in a language whose simplicity and directness makes the claim all the stronger: I say it again; the spirit loves And if you doubt me, ask my dying father to be done at last with love and pain, The elegy 'For S with AIDS' places the theme of loss and mortality within the cyclical process of life and decay, growth and fall, and does so in a manner that might seem callous or opportunistic until one understands the way in which grief is transmuted. Elegies not only cry out their pain, they bring in the note of consolation -- the portrait of the dead father in 'Lost and Found' for example, is deeply moving. The poem in memory of Lar Cassidy called 'Afterlife' has an unusual directness and emotional force. To confront feeling in this way requires technical control, but Boran has his personal voice and idiom. The language, his language, works. The context is copulating flesh: a couple in the back yard, in a red Escort, with the headlights flooding the room where the speaker gets "those few and terrible words" of his friend's death. Even here, in the philosophical spirit that guides the collection, he knows the living must accept these words "as a new place to begin". His first reaction is to fling something at the lovers in the car, to shout at them to "kill the lights", because ...There are souls In a smooth transition from a portrait of the self on "other nights", he moves from irritation to a more measured reflection on mortality and the community of death we all become part of "when the lights go out". Maybe it is rights, he thinks, addressing the dead man... you should be rising up in an afterlife, That the lights of the car become the twin helix may seem too daring, but the tone carries the idea of elegy's traditional transmutation of the dead to a better place. Boran also has an amused and ironic intelligence that sees the possibilities for comedy in Cosimo Rosselli's 'Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints', Edward Hopper's filling station or being ill in New York. His poems are flexible enough to lift off the page. -- Poetry Ireland Review, Winter 2002
*** PAT BORAN's FOURTH poetry collection, As The Hand The Glove, shares Daly's preoccupation with exploring moments in which the poet gets a sudden glimpse into the other-world. For Boran, arriving at what he calls 'the mid-year of a life', those moments are inspired by memories, I daydreams and nightmares, and the inevitable experiences of loss. Boran's memories are deeply rooted in his Laois childhood, and the collection opens with a series of Dylan Thomas-like idylls, though with a stream of humour and visual richness that Thomas never quite achieves. In 'Hall of Mirrors', the poet recalls
standing in for It's like the room in Van Eyck's Arnolfini
Wedding as a rake though I am, sport a Bruce Lee
medallion. In 'Milkmen', the 14-year-old narrator greets the milkman's son on his doorstep; it is the adult who understands the symbolism of the boy taking on his father's mantel: I begin to know of doors, of silences, to accept The qualities of love and inheritance infuse this collection, in which the emotional turning point is the death of the poet's father. We build to this moment gradually, with poems like 'Flesh' reminding us constantly of the inevitability of loss. I say it again: the spirit loves And if you doubt me, ask my dying father to be done at last with love and pain, When the moment comes, the bereft are left to continue a life diminished by death. In 'Am', the poet meditates on the moment of his father's death: And if I press this button here, There are other elegies in As The Hand The Glove (to a friend who died from AIDS and for the Irish Arts Council's iterature officer, Lar Cassidy, loved by a generation of Irish writers), and so an elegiac tone pervades the remainder of the collection, which seems haunted by strange, beautiful imagery. The poet is the eternal observer, staring out of windows and doors of Dublin Georgian houses, imagining the riches of other people's lives while his own goes on in slow motion around him. But what beauty he sees and imagines. In 'The Washing of Feet' he describes, during a bout of late night restlessness, those brave tulips and roses to the dark, cottony Pat Boran is a writer of great tenderness and lyricism. Whatever he produces during the 'second-half' of his life will be worth the wait. -- Agenda, Irish Issue, Vol 40, Nos.1-3
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