"She has, as chimney sweepers, come to dust.
And bitten it. She has given up the ghost
and lies in cold obstruction"
So begins Death of an Actress, the first poem in Colette Bryce's The M Pages (Picador, £10.99). Cataloguing euphemisms for death and dying, and finding them wanting, it sets the tone for a brilliant, moving book, whose efforts of affection are most affecting in the long title sequence remembering her sister.
What that title sequence delivers is a stunned and stunning series of realisations, delivered with typical attentiveness in spite, as one poem puts it, of a voice in her head saying Dontsayanyofthis.
"I wish", she writes in section 1,
"there'd been a warning, a scare, a chance
to show more love,
to change the course of events."
At the end of section 6, M is
awkwardly lowered
on ropes down into a six foot crater
filled by a neat municipal digger.
We stall in silence
gradually disperse
like images on the surface of a stream
into which a stone is cast.
“Dying is an art you were not very good at”, another poem observes, as the poem talks itself down from rhetorical responses. Similarly in A Digital Photograph of Your Grave, a poem whose title speaks to our new rituals, siblings:
"talk about monuments
on the family blog; we say, absurdly,
that you would have liked
a bird in flight, or a Celtic knot."
Reminiscent of one of this century’s great elegies, Denise Riley’s A Part Song, The M Pages is similarly probing, hurt, skeptical and smarting. Bryce is a poet of great assurance, and this sequence alone makes the book a necessary addition to the library of readers interested in contemporary Irish writing.
If the elegiac note dominates, Bryce's book is as witty and as surprised as ever by the stray trails of language in poems like Needles to Say, or An Amendment, which imagines the 2015 referendum affecting a
"family tree [which] shivers in response
to a breath
the slightest disruption
in the air".
And, in a book packed with good poems, A Last Post is surely one for the pandemic, the solitary poet an "inspector of tidelines" who declares, not unhappily:
"at home
with my own company
I'd be; barely curious enough
to track those trails
of human spoor to the point
at which they always disappear."
Paddy Bushe's new English-language book Peripheral Vision (Dedalus, €12.50) is unified by its ekphrastic responses to music, paintings and sculptures. Bushe does not name, in the poems, the artworks which were their starting point, a good decision which allows a more ruminative and abstract contemplation of art's effects. The poet is dramatised interestingly too: separate from the artworks he considers and meditates on, he is sometimes critical, and often moved, as he writes himself into art's aftermath: "This one hears the echo of what is to come," as he puts it in Moonlit Waltz.
Formally, Bushes favours short stanzas, villanelles and rhymed variations on that 19-line form. These are flexible enough for a book where artworks mingle with scenes and portraits from west Kerry and the poet's travels, all of them drawing the reader towards a way of seeing beyond, or in to the poet's vision, which sometimes resolves so that, as Forging Icarus puts it,
"height
And sea and sun were all the one
Wonderful tempering".
In this companionable book, even despairing responses to global politics summon up song as a sign of hope: During Donald Trump's Inauguration remembers Paul Robeson's
"profound voice rolling
Across the barriers built by poisoned money,
Urgent with the wish to make America good", its closing phrase carefully rebuking the poem's sloganeering subject. And Bushe's vigorous, flyting way with satire is evident again in Faustina Shivers whose subject will not enjoy being described as
"a shiver in endless search
of a backbone to land on".
In Róisín Kelly's Mercy (Bloodaxe, £9.95) the poem Easter is close to an ars poetica. That poem links vocabulary with desire:
"Once," she writes,
"I gave my words for garden
and water and moonlit and love
to a man who kissed me. After he rolled
a stone over my heart and shut me off
from the world I had no words left".
But desire returns, and it brings language back for the poet too:
"Now a rose is once again
not only rose but soft and red and thorn and bee and honey".
Mercy cleaves to this traditional idea of poetic language and ritual. The book begins with a re-birth ("the Aegean comes to my hips, rises within me"), and the language of baptism and marriage recurs, as do star myths and astrology. Kelly's best poems use that ritual power a little knowingly: Rose is both wild and comic, noting that
"the man
I should have given the rose to was passed out
behind [the closed bedroom door]", while still able to declare, of the rose petals, "All night I felt
their soft bloody mouths pressed to my breasts,
their last act of love in the world."
Kelly brings her Gravesian language ambitiously to bear on more obviously historical and significant events. Her focus on gender and injustice complicates the profusion of images of the natural world. Sometimes her subjects’ own gravity is overwhelming, and the lyrical speaker is almost muted by unlikely conjunctions, as when a poem on Cambodia’s “killing fields”, the state-sponsored shrine at Choeung Ek, is titled Tuam.
Will Harris's Rendang (Granta, £10.99) is another remarkable British debut. Mostly set in London, its thinky poems tell stories, address race and colonial inheritances, and deftly integrate references to Merleau-Ponty, Derek Walcott and Sonic the Hedgehog. Harris's best poems are winding narratives which set up speakers who, like his readers, are bowled over and thrown off-track by unexpected encounters and conjunctions.
Hard to quote, their suddenness is also evident in a short poem like Mother Country:
As we begin
our descent into the black
smog of an emerging
power, I make out the tin
shacks, the stalls selling juices,
the red-tiled colonial
barracks, the new mall.
It is raining profusely.
After years of her urging
me to go, me holding back
I have no more excuses.
