Niall Campbell’s previous two collections had marked him out as a devoted singer, but in The Island in the Sound (Bloodaxe) he’s added further layers, and colours, to his range.
It feels a more expansive, ambitious, collection, with epistolary poems, myth-fashioning and an increased interest in history and folklore counterweights to the delicately lyrical work, but Campbell has all the while retained his meticulous eye for detail, for the observant, redolent image: a queen bee “quivers like a just struck match” and in The Egg Gatherers of St Kilda “wild balance was the work”.
There’s a rootedness in the sights and places of early life which is feelingful, and which evolves naturally out of “something new-old”, as in Beginnings, ending on a list of alternative names for a familiar view: “Place of Cool Sun; Rain’s Last Outpost; First Home”.
Seamus Heaney has always felt like a touchstone for Campbell, but at times here it feels that he has more fully absorbed that master, thinking through, and with the same drive towards tethering twinned, suggestive, impulses to forge organic, domestic epiphanies; an urge to connect ritual and routine: “parents kneeling in their church,/I, too, was kneeling by the grate”.
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The highpoints are a series of Love Letters From the Tenth Year of Marriage, all of which are stitched with evocative visions, at once tender and undeceived; a dispatch from France operating in an atmosphere of James Salter’s immortal sunlight, while a quote from Virgil on his bees allows a darker, political reckoning of the couple’s position in history, “not long after the death of Caesar,/some time before the fall of Rome”. Elsewhere, the memory of an apprenticeship allows for a study of close attention to “the grading tray”, “I did it five years,/and then did it for the rest of my life”.
Elisa Gonzalez’s debut, Grand Tour (Penguin), is another book which is shot through with summer light, opening on “White wine greening in a glass” under an “impatient” Cypriot sun, in the exemplary Notes Toward an Elegy. There is an elegiac strain throughout the collection as a whole – poems for, and to, Gonzalez’s brother who was shot dead at 22 – and there’s a fire, and hunger, both for resurrection and restitution, which sets her work apart. “To hold your body again. And to resurrect you? Who knows/what I am capable of”.
At times, Gonzalez foregrounds the art in her artfulness, “Reader, I want you to know you are reading a poem.//What is the point of talking otherwise”, in a way which feels more WS Graham than arch post-modernism, while throughout also allowing herself to reach for the sublime, and the epigrammatic. She does this in evoking a “volley of worship” from a blend of the Muezzin and church bells, or by turning her attention to “animals as hungry for dailiness as passion”.
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It’s a book of passion and yearning – “I have a young man’s mind, deranged with desire”, she writes in a poem after Augustine, and she’s particularly good on carnality and want, able to recreate on the page some of the “pent-up electric joy” of sex, and pleasure, in part as a reverse side of the omnipresence of grief and loss.
“How many revivals should one life contain?” she asks, in An Arrangement of the End and there is, across this arresting, sometimes masterly, debut no shortage or rebirths, or restorations, both as subject but also of the language itself, which feels freshly laundered by her voice. “That there’s no elegy for the ongoing” is cause for wonder and lament, but there’s hope here too, and perhaps, above all, life.
There’s a distrust of “interesting times” in John McAuliffe’s latest collection, National Theatre (Gallery), a sense that “a quiet life goes out, which he suddenly wants”. This is a book which feels poised on its various precipices, looking backwards and forwards, waiting with an admixture of alarm and dawning recognition that “the world is more and more like an altered/photo of itself”.
It’s also a book aware of its knack for constructing clinching symbols, from an ordinary life being – in some ways – eulogised, “It does, in spite of everything, this left shoe, do more than speak for just itself”, while “A life swims/into the fortress of a formal device”. Not unlinked is an elegy for Martin Amis, which is not only a fitting match for the novelist’s capacious, ever-attentive, loquaciousness but a nod towards the ways in which, in the right circumstances, “pleasure [was] something you could double/into paying work”.
The impressive Fog Lane has a fabular quality which links several of the book’s seemingly competing instincts – at once hymning the everyday while creating patterns, and a resonant, metaphorical, set piece which cuts through the bafflement and disinheritances of the poems’ speakers. The world, to some degree, feels like the ball in Fog Lane, “Not yet given up as lost/or out of reach”, while the I of the poems so often, as per The Scientific Method, is “a participant observer, not unobsessive”.
Interestingly, the ghost of Robert Lowell crops up more than once, and the sense of using the daily bread of experience to talk, at times elliptically, about wider, political upheaval, to witness “one of the great trees of state going under,/the capital of a long childhood gone west” seems apt, as does a quote from Lowell’s elegy for TS Eliot, “lost in the dark night of the brilliant talkers”.
The atmosphere of John Fitzgerald’s Long Distance (Gallery) is set up at the off, its opening poem Familiar speaking of “Staring intently”, with “eyes wide to everything”. Fitzgerald is a watchful, modest writer – open to admitting mistakes, to revisions, and the need for second, reshaping, looks.
If there is a reluctance towards flashiness, an accounting for the “if” in each proposition, Fitzgerald still permits “a small allowable/indulgence” every now and then, rising to the performance of his poems with an occasional turn towards full, knowingly uptuned, rhyme, but largely his is an artful understatement: “But I have work to do/to keep all this as it is:/remote, dishabited, ordinary”.
It’s a book populated by ghosts, by the need and at times discomfort of elegy. There’s a freeing-up that goes with the disappearance of old certainties, as well as the loss: “Now that you are dead I can write this”, Clanrath begins, in which an old secret can be unburdened, and there are poems in memoriam of Seamus Heaney, as well as closer, blood, relations.
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The abiding sense is of time slipping – or racing – away, “wanting to leave you a voicemail/that explains where all the years have gone”, while in Steeplechase we see “Time galloping beside me”. Time is a constant refrain, both the word and the force – and there’s a sense of an accepting kind of powerlessness in the face of it, which complicates and consoles: “Only those with few imperatives remain”, “I must believe/this is the Universe/letting me know/that my call has been received/and logged and will/be dealt with in due course”.
These are poems which avoid easy answers, at times avoid conclusions entirely, which suggest “there’s no meaning to our presence here on Earth,/except what we can engineer from happenstance” yet ennoble that witnessed mixture of luck, and coincidence, nonetheless.
Declan Ryan’s Crisis Actor was published by Faber & Faber in 2023
