To say that John F Deane is an outlier in modern poetry is to understate the case. This generous selection of his work, Selected and New Poems (Carcanet, £16.99) does several things, but perhaps chief among them is to highlight his obsessions, his touchstones and totems, by gathering work from across his many books that demonstrates a striking coherence.
There’s his attempt to “Mine the religion of poetry” as a rejoinder against “our bully-boy modernity”, to “say, in music, what cannot be said”. His “loved dead” are often invoked, or summoned; there is a throughline of lyric symbolism in which foxes become stand-ins for the Christ figure to whom many of Deane’s pleas are addressed.
This is writing in the line of, and in communion with, figures such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, who is directly invoked at times and alluded to at others. Objects and creatures become portentously loaded: a red gate at home, say, or the various birds of the parish, and while Deane’s newer poems seem to be channelling the later Eliot in their philosophising out loud and their more prose-driven rhythms, consistency rather than change is the keynote here.
This can lapse into “a dry stillness” on occasion; one is reminded of Allen Tate’s criticism of Robert Lowell’s early religious poetry, that its lack of “concrete experience” could make it feel “angelic”. Deane’s faithfulness is felt most in irrefutably concrete moments, a “long-limbed bobby hairpin hanging loose” on his mother, or a memory of his grandmother: “In pages of the Irish Press/she wrapped away green Bramley apples for the winter”. It’s striking that the earliest work gathered here has an undertow of violence, cruelty even, which has been all but excised over his writing life. Instead of those clashing cymbals, much of the work selected here is more in tune with “the whistle-song of the entropy bird”.
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Victoria Kennefick’s second collection, egg/shell (Carcanet, £11.99), is split into two parts and features a wide array of forms, styles and angles of approach while pivoting around two central wounds. Both are seismic, wrong-footing and difficult to navigate; a series of miscarriages and a partner’s transition, occasioning a voice at once shocked and desperately mourning.
A question in the opening poem, Ram, is felt throughout – “who am I supposed to be in all this”. Kennefick’s answer is often one of almost overwhelming reasonableness, an attempt to meet difficult things with levity, patience and understanding, but the most successful work here is occasioned by rarer moments when this carapace cracks.
Kennefick leans on a few central tropes – swans become a sort of spirit guide or alternative persona for the narrator, while the eggs of the title become an – at times somewhat on the nose – surrogate for other types of frailty, or creation, sometimes seeing her give into a punning instinct which acts as a pressure release but can feel a tad throwaway: “can’t you see I’m already walking on eggshells?”.
It’s hard to avoid the sense that, at times, the book is as much a frieze of grief as anything else, a means of a poet coming to terms with things in real time. This can create a sense of implicating intimacy in the reader, but on occasion spills over into something slightly more uncomfortable, especially in moments of apparent self-loathing, or outright shame: “I will be crawling along those silken, parquet floors/like an animal on all fours, a runting thing, sliding,/under the artworks I do not deserve to observe”.
That said, Child of Lir is one example of several here where Kennefick’s capacity to navigate the near-impossible, while maintaining her writerly composure, allows the poem’s rigging to reorientate her in this new world.
Mícheál McCann’s debut collection, Devotion (Gallery Press, €12.95), is a stately book – courtly, even. At its centre is a sequence, Keen for A -, which takes as its basis the 18th-century poem Lament for Art O’Leary to construct an elegy for a dead lover that is at once stiff-backed but also deeply feelingful.
[ Lament for Art O'Leary: 250 years of Ireland’s touchstone love poemOpens in new window ]
McCann’s language shows a rigorous control here, a somewhat timeless diction adding depth to the bereaved’s lament: “I knew then that I had discovered the name /of my destination, and would follow you there /along puddled roads and grassy paths /into the meadows in the south of the city”. It’s a wonderful act of reckoning up, of coming to terms with grief while exploiting the lyric poem’s potential for time travel, and resurrection, the possibility of blending tenses and summoning the dead allowing for a lurch of the heart and the false hope of return: “you will beat me home,/feet up, sun lightening your eyes.”
There are fine things elsewhere, too, a Bishop-esque study of romantic grooming, in this case a haircut rather than a shampooing, while Bishop is also alluded to directly in another act of historical ventriloquism, a version of a ninth-century Irish poem, Líadan Attests Her Love, in which One Art’s heart-rending imperative is co-opted: “Write it! – He was my heart, a soft wind/through the hedge outside”. “I write the things I am trying to forgive”, McCann notes in Adoration (Rhesus Disease) and the collection as a whole has the authority of sadness, in Larkin’s phrase, but is usefully leavened by a dogged persistence and a somewhat belligerent wit.
It’s also imbued with a thwarted belief in words themselves, as shoddy but irresistible tools: “Were it that they/could save us, and were no momentary crossing to safety”.
Another debut, Gub (Corsair, £10.99) by Scott McKendry, is a different beast entirely, full of “Eejit” vernacular, swearing, lexical swanking, a cast of oddballs, alter-egos and even a spot of minor demonology. McKendry’s gathering principle might be summed up by a line from Five Little Terrorist Boys: “a motto (something hotly obscure) and a three-to-four letter acronym”.
Gub is a book that makes hay with in-jokes, arcana and a tethering together of seemingly unlikely bedfellows, cohering by nothing so much as linguistic brio and temperamental ebullience. An easy comparison might be made to Paul Muldoon, or to Ciaran Carson – who is the subject of a tribute poem, if not quite an elegy, Gubble, a poem that demonstrates his recognisable fondness for the music, and tang, of vowels and plosives: “At the kerbside, ogle/the grey smithereens and gore, gobshite, not the lore of yore./Do an Ulster virgo version of a bomb scar. Call it Gubernica”.
McKendry is a joyful liar, a storyteller and many of the poems occur “on the Paradise side of Commonplace” – reality is just as plastic as his syntax and lexicons, while some poems have the condensed pressure of short stories, particularly the grippingly claustrophobic, and barbed Snap. “Friday nights/is raptor stew” he writes in Keepers of the Pedigree and he has constructed here a world not so much recognisable in its terrain, or cast, as its pleasure principle, both in terms of the velocity of the poems’ movement and their encyclopaedic desire to get as much of the world in as possible, from the breakfast table to the briefly hallucinated.
In A Song for Gaud McKendry writes “life’s not synonymous with pain” and it’s this sense, of a kind of all-encompassing appetite, that marks him out as fine company, and a suitably irreverent antidote to some of contemporary poetry’s more well-mannered pieties.
Declan Ryan is a poet (Crisis Actor [Faber, 2023]) and critic
