"New and Selected Poems" by Denis O'Driscoll (Anvil)

Poems from Atlanta Review, Harvard Review, London Magazine, LRB, Oxford Poetry, PN Review, Poetry (Chicago), Poetry Review, The Southern Review, TLS, The Yale Review, etc. Seamus Heaney chose "Exemplary Damages" as a Book of the Year in 2003.

Overall, the poems that I understand seem too light to me. The features/subject-matter that critics like in his work might not be common in literary published poetry (the sort critics read), but they're in workshop poetry - and prose. "A Life Study ("Here is a woman on a bus/ half-way through a book/ entitled simply Life ... She seems to be enjoying it"), "Success Story" (a miniature version of "The Bottom Line" that I didn't get either), "Them and You" ("They get drunk./ You get pleasantly inebriated.// Their wives have straw hair./ Yours is blonde" etc), "Home", "Full Flight" ("Having retrieved their sliding cases from the carousel,/ they leave the steel-clad baggage hall, declaring nothing,/ follow trolleys to where tanned holiday rep,/ regional HQ driver or exiled daughter waits") and "No, Thanks" ("No, I haven't the slightest curiosity about seeing/ how your attic conversion finally turned out") don't impress me. "Churchyard View: The New Estate" seems far too long. "The Clericals" and "England" are the best - most sustained - of the longer pieces. I don't trust his indents or short lines.

Here are some quotable fragments -

• "Fulfilling the forecast on the breakfast radio,/ pods of hail were shelled on window ledges" (start of "Serving Time")
• "wrapped in a sheer white negligee/ you are a fog-bound landscape ... I can detect a sun-like breast/ already radiating through the chiffon dawn" ("Day and Night")
• "Summer is in heat again: gooseberry scotums swell,/ hard blackberry knuckles will soon ooze with blood" ("Home Affairs")
• "Like some class of transsexual,/ inhabiting the wrong body, you are/ trapped in an ungratifying job ... or is it an out-of-body experience,/ so this isn't really you" ("The Bottom Line [41]")
• "Water was first mirror,/ drinking images of beauty,/ showing their wrinkled future/ in the mildest breeze" ("Water")
• "Before this page fades from memory,/ spare a thought for Alois Alzheimer" ("In Memory of Alois Alzheimer (1864-1915)")
• "I look down on the snail as on a container ship/ seen from a plane, its slow pace an illusion/ caused by distance" ("Snail's Pace")
• "a love poet must somehow make love,/ if only to language, fondling its contours" ("To a Love Poet")
• "I stare at the graves/ like a sailor gazing out at sea" ("Churchyard View: The New Estate")
• "Playing tonight at the X-Ray-Ted Club,/ The Chemotherapies, drugged to the gills,/ the lead singer's pate modishly bald.// And who will your partner be?/ Alzheimer, the absent-minded type" ("Saturday Night Fever")
• "Life gives/ us something/ to live for ... Cannot imagine/ living without it" ("Life")
• "ice inching along roads,/ the slippery slope towards winter" ("Natural Causes")
• "Christmas is always on the cards ... / for siblings singing from different carol sheets, / raking over old coals at the hearth" ("Non-Stop Christmas")

Other reviews

• George Szirtes (It is O'Driscoll land. It is a place that at first sight appears to be bordering on Larkin country, though it is not entirely contiguous with it, for while the Irish poet is avowedly an admirer of Philip Larkin, he is a more tender, more playful and distinctly less xenophobic writer. ... The poet, in other words, is not there to tell people how they should feel but to try to understand, to share and to give shape to their feeling. That's a tall order, of course. Part of it, in O'Driscoll's case, is done in technical terms, so that when employing similes, for example, the comparison of the ordinary is frequently not to the extraordinary but to the even more ordinary ... O'Driscoll is a builder of lists. Where other poets use stanza, rhyme or conventional form to structure their imaginations, O'Driscoll's favourite trope is repetition)
• Bernard O’Donoghue (O’Driscoll shares with Beckett the capacity to present the deathly through humour. These poems are life-enhancing not only because they are true but also because they are funny. This quality is most evident in the sequence which is reproduced in full here, The Bottom Line (1994): 50 11-line poems, all woven out of the language of business and bureaucracy. And, even if it is not his most substantial subject, the sequence is his most original and sharpest achievement ... His capacity to revivify cliché recalls MacNeice and Beckett; often his observant “Martianism” remains faithful to the school of Craig Raine. He can sound like a more charitable Betjeman ... or, more often, like the “supposedly fouled-up Philip Larkin”.)