"Live Streaming" by Conor O'Callaghan (Gallery Books, 2017)

His work puzzles me, and does so in various ways.

• "Grace", the first poem, begins with "They're coming to collect/ the table I'm writing on./ They texted a while ago/ to say they were leaving/ a suburb four miles south./ Midweek, early evening:/ traffic should be light.". It's how I'd like to start a story. I can see potential in it. Shame about the line-breaks.
• "Trailer Park Études" has ruthless rhymes
• He can loosely rhyme too ("A Glass of Water")
• He can write passage which make half sense to me - e.g. "Where kimonos go to die/ all doors are gooseberry and loaded with springs./ Stationery is the new snow,/ gathering in drifts no nib's squid sullies./ One tiptoe into/ the parchment backdrop mountain range/ can symbolize a hundred miles./ Heavens above!"
• He can write long poems. "His last legs" is 20 pages about a father. I liked the anecdotes and observations. Already episodic, I don't see how the piece is improved by italics, line-breaks, and format switching. Fragments from a notebook would have suited me fine.
• He writes short poems too. The 4-line ‘Black Rose’ I didn't get at all. Fortunately Joe Carrick-Varty quotes it and provides an explanation in The Manchester Review. Unfortunately I don't understand the explanation.
• He can do prose poems, he can do short lines. "Bank" starts with "Seeds of/ the dandelion/ picked from/ millions/ like it". If the short lines are supposed somehow to symbolise the seeds, why have more than one word per line? If not, what are the line-breaks for? And why "Seeds of the dandelion" rather than "Dandelion seeds"?

Other reviews

• Joe Carrick-Varty (Moving away from the self-reflexively metaphorical poems in Fiction (2005) such as ‘Coventry’ and ‘Gloves’, this book is more observational, more detached, sharing a tone of awareness with The Sun King (2013), his previous collection. … Live Streaming is a deeply moving and rewarding book. One can find layers (if one is willing to dig!), clever line structure and technique, stark images, thoughtful observations. But most of all is the sense of nostalgia, the sense of longing and loss; the comfort in the panic.
• Caitríona O’Reilly (these shorter lyrics serve as bookends for the main event, which is an extraordinary 20-page tour-de-force of excoriating familial and self-examination, part prose poem, part dramatic interpolation, part transcription, entitled His Last Legs.)
• Paul Murphy (The next poem “Where Kimonos Go to Die” seems to be the conditioned nightmare of a practicing Surrealist. Beyond the surface appeal of the language there seems little to comprehend but perhaps that is the point? A stream of consciousness exercise completed to fill a page on an eventless day, but the page is better filled than left blank. The same could be said of the central section "His Last Legs". The poet seems better when he is attempting poetry rather than an experimental prose poem which gathers up autobiographical material and some scraps of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In these poems there are some difficulties but also good insights, useful usages of language and occasional pearls.)

"Fiction" by Conor O'Callaghan (The Gallery Press, 2005)

Let's take the first 4 poems.

• "Coventry" has 2 paragraphs, their conceptual parallelism emphasised by verbal parallelism.
• "Nineteen Eighty-five" takes us back to summers

  of believing the nuclear winter can be sat out with back issues of Reader's Digest and curried beans, of afternoons rewinding through When the Wind Blows on a video recorder the size of a dialysis machine

  and a dog that

  ... isn't seen again despite its owner's weeks of hope and the ads in shops about it answering to 'Gorbachev'

  It works in the same way that prose works. Compare its subject matter and use of form with David Hart's Then in the twentieth century
• "Lovelife - The First Flush" is 6 more lines of nostalgia, rather more tightly packed this time.
• "Gloves" (one page-long stanza, short-lined) uses the insides of gloves in various ways as simile/metaphor.

There's sufficient variety and interest to make me want to read on. There's a poem in landscape mode, list poems ('Fall', 'Other titles in this series'), more nostalgia poems, and in 'This is Her First Publication' a pretty straightforward account of a success. The taste for idioms reminds me of Armitage. He seems to deal with various subjects appropriately and well as far as language is concerned, and yet the need to have all stanzas of a poem the same shape endures.