Ciaran Berry’s new collection States (Gallery, €12.95pb, €19.50hb) operates “in the long shadow of the sarcophagus”, full of rollicking, end-of-days energy, “The funfair is over; now it’s the disaster movie”.
He tends towards a long line and heavy verbiage; these are poems full to the brim in all manner of ways. The writing is allusive and strip-lit – Berry mines his life, his shelves, his back pages and film collection, making cross-connections with pop culture and memory, “Once more I play charades/ with Mnemosyne”.
He writes of living in the United States, the changes and erasures wrought by its endlessly changing skyline, its rupturing politics and slide towards chaos. He quotes Bernard Malamud, “In New York who/needs an atom bomb?/If you walked away from a place they tore it down”, but the threat of atomisation is never far from his own mind, either.
The apocalyptic atmosphere seems one that’s been willed on, or at least one in which the narrator of I Am Legend can feel retrospectively complicit – “yet isn’t this/what we really wanted all along, what with our weapons stockpiles/and our zombie flicks? We, who thought we were more than a blip//in the fourteen billion years of this universe?”
Berry revels in the B-movie trappings of urban detritus, a life as “low-budget affair/where the uncanny has us under siege” but isn’t entirely given over to accepting the unravelling spectacle, taking time out at still, small moments to state – as if from another book – “Turns out we loved our small lives after all”.
He can edge towards prosiness at times, due to pile-ups of thoughts and modern signifiers tumbling over each other, and occasionally strains to make his disparate strands cohere, “when/he says vagus I hear Vegas,/which sets me going like a slot machine”, but his verve usually compensates for the odd misfire in this firework display of a book.
Cherry Smyth’s finely-wrought new collection One Mountain: Sold (Arlen House, €15) begins with a long, multifaceted and multi-voiced poem focused on the gold-mining in 12 town lands in the Sperrin Mountains in Co Tyrone.
[ Go Walk: The Sperrin Mountains, Co Tyrone/Co DerryOpens in new window ]
Smyth draws the reader in with snapshots, imagistic views of the place before its coming despoliation, a scene of calm and the seemingly immortal: “an axial/holds up/the maximum/moon” before it becomes “plentied by tectonic crush”.
She is good at absence across the book – not only in this long sequence, but in poems of lost love, and meditative withdrawal, but here she uses not only the white space of the page but a Zen-ish long view, “Remove the mass of rock, of soil, of plants,/of minerals: the mountain is not there”.
It would be to oversimplify her art, and artfulness, to shelve this simply under “eco-poetry”. While her dissection of the systems, politics and corrupting influences that have led to the plundering of this landscape has a preservative focus, it’s as much to do with the wider coercions of modernity, the lack of control and agency of the citizen, and the long shadow of Northern Ireland’s Troubles. It makes for a stirring, blazing introductory third of the book.
It would be unfair, also, to let the title sequence become the whole story – there are lots of other finely rendered poems of love, lust and memory in the rest of the collection, studded with sharply aphoristic or otherwise eye-catching phrases, and finely chosen visual descriptors, often taking place in the pull of “love’s/magnetism”.
Hubris is another gathering storm, and Smyth is good on the dramatic ironies and hard-won lessons that usually arrive in its wake. The biggest decisions to be taken often pivot on notions around “opting out” or diving in, all while reconsidering any easy assumptions: “only city kids cry/as the tide invades/the castle”.
There’s a narrative drive and purpose to Afric McGlinchey’s new collection, à la belle étoile (Salmon Poetry, €12). It is focused on the life and travels of Jeanne Baré, a French herbalist from the mid-1700s with no formal education who ended up circumnavigating the globe. If her “discovery” by a learned stranger feels a touch Hollywood, “I know a thousand times more than ever he learned from professors/in such moments,/ a life changes direction” then, admittedly, the whole story is one that exists in a near-fantastic realm.
The pair join a ship, with Jeanne having to disguise her sex, and there are the odd moments of enrapt comfort to be found, at least at the outset, “lonely in recent widowhood,/he beds me tenderly, and my body sings like a bell” before things get into somewhat choppier, and riskier, waters.
There are a few narrative jump-cuts but McGlinchey on the whole helps us to navigate this unlikely and ambitious voyage, often leaning away from naturalistic dialogue in order to get across her point or place her finger on the scale of gravity: “With rarities such as these,/ you and I both will take our place in history”; “the ship’s leaving/ severs me/from France/and, into the bargain, /from my erstwhile self”.
Jeanne’s pretending to be a eunuch can only protect her for so long and a violent, distressing assault under the “the pig-weight of them” while bathing is one of many dark turns, alongside the illness and death of her companion, which acts to shut down her freedoms, and future. It’s a compelling story and if the psychology feels more modern than its setting, McGlinchey’s eye for the telling visual detail helps to keep the reader in the moment, if not necessarily always of it.
[ Afric McGlinchey: Bringing my mother back to lifeOpens in new window ]
Ralf Webb’s second collection, Highway Cottage (Penguin, £10.99), is one that, as per River Rat, takes place in a “lush, bright action of terror and baptisement”. This is a collection centred around returning to the countryside after years away, to the encounters and reabsorption into familiar topography and the blending of rage and reassurance that entails.
Webb is a scrupulous and gifted writer, with a knack for phrase-coining and an undercutting “elegant atonality”. He refuses to prettify – either with his music, tone or address – and as a result he can at times cut brutally through the pieties or performances that can easily occur in the writing of place, particularly “home”.
There’s a certain degree of anhedonia, at least at the outset, a melancholy sense of having been stripped away, an observer of those with “immaculate metabolisms” rather than their fellow. The speaker of these poems seems diminished, abashed and caught out, important ties to the world snapped or threadbare, lost in a generation – and historical moment – whose apogee amounts to little more than “café desolation”.
There’s something of Karen Solie’s unstinting dissection to his take on nature, and those who police it, his “humdrum bucolic” mechanised, scrutinised and run to ground. At times the torpor, the disillusionment, can force the reader – too – to feel that “Progress is a heavy wheel. One that never moves” but amid all his kill shots and drone-eye-views, Webb can also reach for a rare spot of calm, or beauty, and proves just as able when doing so.
On Visiting My Father’s Grave is a particular high point, moving in its integrity, like its subject “cruel with redemptive kindness”. Sometimes Webb gives in to his inertia – one almost wishes for him to go a little easier on himself, or his narrators – but his work is a compelling, stylishly rendered portrait of our “stun-kill” era.
