Poems from The Moth, Poetry Ireland Review, The SHOp, The Stinging Fly, etc. Many of the pieces allude to music. Caitriona O'Reilly on the back cover mentions "subtley and sophistication ... wide-ranging shifts of tone from the hilarious to the poignant", which I think is true. In particular many poems hit the ground moving, the reader uncertain initially what the mood is. Here's how the book starts -
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Sinking the Piano I would like to stay and share a joke about how far we have come from the plush of the sitting room, make fun of people we have known - the examiner from the Associated Board who even as you go down I see shouting tally-ho from your bow or slag you off about your distaste for bluebottles |
It took me a while to realise that the title was relevant to the poem - a piano has been dumped in the sea, leaving the persona in a funereal/wake mood, though even then the (music?) examiner shouting tally-ho seems overly fanciful. And the bluebottles? I feel I'm missing the point. Later in the poem mo chuisles is used - Irish Gaelic for "sweetheart" (the book has notes but I had to look that phrase up).
Another quick starting poem is "Man at the Back"
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He was the groupie I never had in the glory years before the notes started to leak from their mermaid purses forming a small but unerasable stain, dark as a memory lapse, on the collar of my shirt |
I know what a mermaid purse is, but that doesn't help me understand this stanza, and why is the stain on the collar? How did the purse (whatever it is) leak there? Other brisk starts include -
- "Worship" - "At the wooden jetty the baroque friend/ from your youth is the last to disembark./ Children tag along, their three-legged dog/ leading the way across the strip of sand,/ the marram grass, to the railway carriage you call home" (nothing cryptic there, though there's a lot going on)
- "City/ In his rucksack/ the mystics have abandoned/ their drinking song",/li>
- "Water Ghosts/I./ Creaming his barnacled feet,/ the home-help sees her hands/ as a wreck sinking to the briny// graveyard"
"Review of a Performance Never Given" is excellent."Glenn Gould's Chair" has, as its first-person persona, the chair - an idea that's well used. I like "Houseguest", Root Zone", and the following section of "Before the invasion"
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The Orchard Stumps in the knee-high grass wanting to shout out to the world the millstone rising up in the night's throat no escape from the hoofbeats rows of trees with their arms tuned-in to a far-off grief nettles rampant over the clearing where mother once sat with her easel |
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