A NEW series of poetry collections - In Sight of Home by Nessa O’Mahony, Pluto’s Noon Sky by Gary King, and Playing Poohsticks on Ha’Penny Bridge by Edward Lee - illustrate that there is no right way and no wrong way to write poetry.
Good poems are as unique as your first love’s fingerprint or your child’s DNA. Yes, there are rules and a tradition; but these too can be a liberation rather than a tyrant who stands over us every time we sit down to write.
Yesterday, someone e-mailed me a haiku she had written about the ongoing floods. In doing so she was using a form perfected by the 16th century Japanese poet, Basho, to write about rain that was still falling as she wrote.
In Sight of Home by Nessa O’Mahony (Salmon Poetry ) is a moving verse-novel about the Butler family who emigrated to Australia in 1854. The opening lines of ‘Orphan’ made me reflect that in 2009 - this year of endless complaint - we have perhaps grown just a little whiney.
The narrator is writing from Loughrea Workhouse in September 1847: “I wasn’t born here,/but don’t remember any other home./Ma brought us in one winter/when our stomachs got too loud,/she died soon after.”
The book takes the form of letters from her protagonists - some in verse, some in prose. The diary entries by Fiona Sheehan, a Dublin writer using the archives to track down her ancestors, make the world of the 1850s and the world of 2003 collide very beautifully here.
Pluto’s Noon Sky (Doire Press ) is Gary King’s debut collection. ‘After Disco Lights’ - a poem about an evening not living up to its apparent promise - is both hilarious and very well written: “I was the meek not inheriting the earth/and the almost young host was the most/sincere person I had ever met.”
Another excellent poem is ‘Eighteen Hours of Rain’. The aforementioned rain falls “on the sleeves of miserable light jackets/who are planning an early evening/in Knocknacarra - or maybe on someone planning/a worldwide insurrection from the side of his nose.” We can only speculate as to the identity of Gary’s would be insurrectionist.
He is a poet who uses humour with serious intent, but in poems such as the Larkinesque ‘Wedding Shots’ he proves that he is a lyric poet of considerable ability as well.
Playing Poohsticks on Ha’Penny Bridge by Edward Lee (Spider Press ) is a book with a genuinely subversive feel. The nether regions of the poetry world are awash with youngish male poets who imagine themselves to be the next Baudelaire, Bukowski, or Poe but whose ramblings are in truth much less exciting than the average meeting of the Galway City Council. Edward Lee is different.
I greatly enjoyed the menacing ‘After All These Years’: “My hatred for you/has turned the blood/in my veins/to sugar,/bulging my skin/like a cancer.//Now,/do you still think/it was wise to call?”. In poems such as ‘Not Everything Is Love’, ‘Cross Dresser’ and, especially, ‘Hand Cream’ Lee also shows himself to be an erotic poet of great originality.
