The Salt Harvest, Eoghan Walls, Seren, 64pp, £8.99 (paperback) Wondering About Many Women, Derwent May, Greenwich Exchange,
46pp, £7.99 (paperback)
Powder on the Wind, Norman Buller, Waterloo Press, 83pp, £10 (paperback)
The poems in Eoghan Walls’s debut collection, The Salt Harvest, are wide- ranging, muscular and full of a linguistic and intellectual restlessness. A number of poems are set in Ireland, but Walls also writes about an unpredictable lake in Africa, floods in Prague and the fate of Pluto, demoted from its status as a planet. Some of Walls’s best poems are set in or around airports. In ‘Terminal One’ he succeeds in capturing the sense of placelessness of airport terminals, stating how ‘Here, all conscious life/ is in transit, neither here nor there, as we learn our exile/queuing behind our trolleys in single of double file’. In ‘Confession to the Southwest’ the stewardess indicating the nearest exits in the emergency drill is described as ‘spread-eagled as the repentant thief upon the crucifix’. It is a startling image which is carried through to the end of the poem, the whole act of flight becoming a kind of religious ecstasy.
This metaphoric ability to match unlike things in new and startling ways underpins many of the poems in the collection. In ‘Star Matter’ a jogger is paired with the reflection of Orion, or at least a reflection of how the constellation ‘hung this way eight hundred years ago, when the photons/ rattled aeons from the core through the debris of stars/still spinning in the wake of a nova in the Crab Nebula’. Later the poem suggests the jogger himself is perhaps no more than ‘star matter,/a brief collision of waves and particles.’ This is poetry alive to the nuances of science which tells us that nothing is fixed, that the old certainties of Romantic Nature aregone forever. This theme is amplified in ‘Star of the Sea’, a dark vision of planetary pollution which ironically undercuts poems of praise for nature’s unlimited bounty.
There is a visceral intensity to many of these poems. ‘Frog’ is reminiscent of Les Murray’s Translations from the Natural World, full of linguistic inventiveness in an attempt to get under the skin of another animal. The poem is as energetically physical as many of Murray’s, detailing ‘Horror as a skyfall feathersweep./Roar of lights on tarmac. Wellyboots,/sloshing palmfuls of spawn destined to sour.’
The collection ends with a series of poems about children, but Walls avoids any sentimentality. Rather these are poems imbued with threat. The book’s final poem, ‘Bird Strike’, returns us to air travel, and is an account of taking a young child on a plane for the first time. Wrestling with his own fears of a crash, the poet says of the child, ‘I want you to defy me, bold and upright,/staring out from the torrent of feathers in the wake of pillow fight, brazen in your future.’ It is this sense of life’s value in the face of threat that characterises Walls’s remarkable first collection.
Derwent May’s Wondering About Many Women is a quite different book. The tone is quiet and often retrospective, the work of a poet in middle years. May tends towards form in these poems and often deploys it to good effect. ‘Vanishings’ is one of the stand-out pieces of the collection, beautifully modulated, the rhyme carrying much of the emotional impact of the poem. It is a poem about the passing of the generations, and it is its clear simplicity which makes if so effective. The poem opens
Our parents stand and stretch their arms
Over our first horizon.
We sing and grow and find ourselves
Breathing with them in unison.
The second stanza is about having one’s own children, and at the end of the poem they ‘vanish into life’.
‘The Walk’ is another poem about different generations. In this haunting poem May describes a walk in the country with three children. It is a poem about seeing the world through the eyes of the children, but it never descends into mawkishness. In part, the power of the poem is in the long lilting lines and the extended sentences, both of which create feelings of ease and wonder. There is also a subtle use of rhyme, often internal and never regular, but echoing in the mind as one reads. I read this poem a number of times, haunted by its cadences.
‘Temple of Dreams’ is a profound meditation on the choices one makes in life and how these end up determining one’s identity. May uses the image of the self as a building to good effect.
The temple was oneself.
It had its lights,
Its elegant embrasures and a floor.
Some of the rooms were dark on certain nights.
Here was a violet stain, a swollen door.
The poem ends with a sense of how the speaker is now trapped in this self- made temple, how ‘Will still could pull it down, but is afraid.’
These are poems of a questioning intelligence. May is not afraid to look at the big questions – time, death, relationships – in ways which may perhaps seem slightly old fashioned to some readers. However, the book as a whole builds up to a moving meditation on transience.
Norman Buller is another older poet. The biography on the book jacket describes how his early work appeared alongside that of Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes in the fifties. He then seems to have fallen silent until 2005, when he published a pamphlet collection. Since then there have been three full volumes. The best poems in Powder on the Wind are direct and powerful. ‘A Husband Visits the Cancer Ward’ is only fourteen lines in length, but the understated power of the details has a big impact.
Each time they inject
it is his needle
entering the moist portals
of her disease.
The use of unforced, natural sounding language has real force, as it does in
‘Otherness’, a poem which deals subtly with closeness and separation and where a newborn is described as being ‘spasmed at last from the womb’. At other times, however, the language in some poems can tend towards the more self-consciously poetic, as in ‘Dream of Fair Women’, which opens with the lines ‘Man has dreamed his legend/of fair women/centuries long.’
There are a number of translations in the collection. The most successful of these is ‘At the Auschwitz Factory’, after Primo Levi. The poem is beautifully judged, the descriptions in stanza one summoning up an image of hell on earth.
Smoke drags itself from chimneys,
vicious whistles cut the morning to shreds
and the crowd of dead faces
inherits the suffering day.
Here Buller has succeeded in making a powerful and convincing poem from the original.
The collection also contains a series of poems about dead poets. Langland, Louis MacNeice, Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Marina Tsvetayeva, Blok, Mandelstam and Pasternak all make an appearance. Often the poems about male poets attempt a psychoanalytical reading of the poet’s life, and often it seems that some vengeful or absent mother haunts the poet. This is from ‘Isaac Rosenberg’:
His Jewish momma wore the breeches,
his benefactors held the purse;
women were the power, the serpent in
the kiss, ruin within their hair,
dangerous tides in which to quench
his thighs’ fire.
There are also two sequences of poems about religious belief in the collection. These short poems use elements of various religious mythologies to build up a sense of different paths reaching towards an ineffable goal. However, I found it hard to engage with these poems, or to understand quite where they were leading me. Too often they seem to fall back on rather familiar religious ideas. For example,
I sing the created male and female,
unison of lover and beloved.
Plant your tree and nurture it
in the orchard of Truth.
This is a collection that contains a number of powerfully realised poems, but there seem to be different voices competing for attention. At eighty- three pages this is by far the longest of the three collections, and a third of the book could probably have been edited out, leaving a collection with a more consistent tone.