“I must start at the start, at the white page in my mind,” Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin wrote in Borders, from The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (2001), and throughout her New Selected Poems (Gallery, €14.50pb, €22.50hb) we encounter evidence of starting over. This is a book full of departures, bids for freedom and border-crossings; there is something fabular and narrative to her craft, often a sense we are “at the beginning of a story,/steam rising off the river”.
Ní Chuilleanáin’s is a language built on accuracy, her poems live in “Hundred-pocketed Time” but manage, nonetheless, to take the longer view, to move among eternal things and commune with those who have passed beyond the present tense. “I laid myself down and slept on the map of Europe,” she writes in Curtain from The Sun-fish (2009), and there is a Europhilia on show here, detours to the resonant Lazarus in Autun, and an immersion in the cosmopolitan, the across-the-water, to counterbalance a devoted but nuanced rendering of the local and immediate.
Re-encountering her body of work in this way is a reminder of the little miracles, the crooked light and glee in striking out for new freedoms which have often marked her territory – the relish of a phrase such as “Nobody who knows me knows where I am now” in Home Town key to her ability to move, fluidly, between the familiar and the lost, to commune with the dead while being resoundingly vital.
The new work here is similarly undeceived, changeable and curious, “So little of ourselves really belongs to us,/to our life,” she notes in David Marcus: On A Bridge, and the push and pull of coming and going remains a constant. Up There has the earth say to the root “stay,/still, you’re going nowhere”, a rare grounded note in a book otherwise marked by perpetual motion.
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New poetry: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin; Enda Wyley; Gregory Leadbetter; and Rosamund Taylor
Enda Wyley’s graceful new book Sudden Light (Dedalus Press, €12.50) begins with a foreshadowing of an elegiac note to come, in a poem referencing the late Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, “They live in semi-darkness and suddenly there’s light.” The phrase might stand as something of a watermark for the collection itself, one studded with illumination and unexpected raptures, in which – for the most part at least – “exhaustion was defeated by joy”.
Wyley looks to conjure up the dead here, through the lyric address and its capacity for summoning back those who can’t ordinarily be spoken to: “But nothing is lost that cannot be retrieved./So much comes back and claims the page.//No one is ever gone whose name is said,/whose life, like yours, is recalled,” she writes in The Archivist. Her own younger self is spoken to and sought out, too, “And a great longing came to be with them all,/to walk barefoot down the rough, sun-yellowed/lane and to ask, do you mind if we join you?”
That polite attempt at connection is echoed elsewhere, in a keener yearning to revisit and step back into the past, to reinhabit loved, familiar scenes, “to stand above the river at the edge/of Lord Edward Street and see you again as you were then”. She does something subtle, but affecting, with her tenses in poems dedicated to her late mother, which bring an immediacy and ongoingness to the act of remembering and directly addressing her, in short, highly visual scenes which share some of the qualities of a photograph: “You are forever kneeling/at our gate, your arms/stretched out to me,/racing home from school.”
These are poems rich in magical thinking, often set in “this other/world where I am with her again”. “None of this will come to you again” she notes, candidly, but for the duration of the poems it somehow does.
Gregory Leadbetter’s The Infernal Garden (Nine Arches, £11.50) is another collection interested in giving voice to the mute, and to blurring the porous boundaries between the quick and the dead. His is a visceral, arcane sort of communion – “They crave an alphabet. That is/the meat for which they hunger. I pass/from mouth to mouth, and give them it,” he writes in opener Listen, where “The dead are in my ear again”.
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He’s a pointedly musical poet, and many of the stanzas and sonic patterns here give additional charge to the folkloric, darkly riddling quality of his tussle with language as an animate, almost hostile, force. At times this can cause a little tangling of his delivery, as concepts and parts of speech wrestle against the speaker itself, “make sounds to make/manifest the is from is not –/and so make his familiar undouble/alive: the other mind inside/what is said”.
But for the most part Leadbetter manages a difficult balancing act of weaving through an esoteric, philosophical slant on forging a diction and giving voice to a symbol-laden natural world with a direct purposefulness of speech. Death and birth become astral twins, of a sort, just another door to be passed through, as shown in Wake, a compact highlight of the book, in which “Her eyes/opened as if being born. The feather/I found has flown, and I am drunk/with tears”.
Much of the driving force here is “the going through”, and the spell-like concentration of Leadbetter’s writing is always pushing towards answering the question implicit in The Speaking Art: “There are still those who wonder/if a thing can be spoken to life.” His is language with the power and syntactic engineering to force such a conjuring trick, and to leave the reader with answers to fundamental questions they might otherwise never have posed.
Rosamund Taylor’s Filly (Banshee Press, €18) is a kind of bildungsroman for voices. It centres on Orla – a schoolgirl when we meet her – and her abusive relationship with her teacher, the booze-basted, imposing (in most senses) Irene Wall: “Everything about Mrs W was wide –/her shoulders, her breasts, her chin.” Taylor shows us both perspectives, although at times Mrs W feels a little too neatly ordered in her self-justifications – “I can’t resist a cigarette in bed,/a drink before noon. When I know/something’s bad for me, I want it more” – but this is, perhaps, a nod towards her general air of disinterest and the addict’s malaise.
Orla has a rough run of it, subject to homophobic abuse at school, the betrayal of her former best friend and then the heady predations of Irene – emphasised adeptly by an undercurrent of hunting, and animal imagery, that comes alongside early frantic encounters: “I was a mouse in her claws –/we soared”; “I suppose I should rip your blouse off,/I’m the predator”.
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Mrs Wall is unpleasant to her young lover, putting her down, finding herself bored by but unable to resist her adolescent company, her eagerness and the attention it bestows. Orla meanwhile is – necessarily, and naturally – powerless, “I wondered how she didn’t know/that she could gouge my eyes out/and I wouldn’t tell her to stop.”
Eventually Orla finds solace through new friends at university and an online friendship which can feel like a vehicle for exposition, ultimately leading her towards new, less self-damaging, love and the understanding that her one-time not-quite-partner was “a lazy old drunk”. There’s a streak of reasonableness throughout but there are also moments of lyric tightening – especially around desire – which counterbalance it enough to ensure this difficult, traumatic retelling doesn’t become a sanitised morality play.
