Blossoms tumble through Thomas McCarthy’s ninth collection, Plenitude (Carcanet £11.99). The book is abundant in the language of flowers and heritage gardens, and political crises and elegy aplenty thrum on their borders. McCarthy’s characteristic generosity is woven throughout these poems, as in Apodictic, where he counsels a weary Camellia who exclaims: “I won’t undergo any therapy though I need it / After what I’ve been through.”
McCarthy, ministering to the shrub, conjures Elizabeth Bishop’s beautiful uncertainty for a moment: “If only – / If only I were as thoughtful as that retired army officer / Bringing Camellias indoors”. The voice of these poems has warmth, but can be exacting too.
Plenitude explores at once the great abundance in Ireland and its opposite: a deep, gaping lack. The housing crisis peeps through certain poems (“our young who cannot afford a home: there is no nest” Lustrous Gold), where McCarthy laments “how will the young / Become if they cannot begin?”. The book moves in tone from the statesmanlike, as above, to the enormously, sometimes painfully intimate; a highlight being In Memory of Eavan Boland, where McCarthy directly addresses the great Irish poet, and the reader feels as if their ear is pressed to the wall of the poem.
McCarthy is a poet entirely at home in the compressed lyric poem as much as the long-lined narrative poem, and the collection assays into a variety of voices: “It is important to have a wide view of history when you have / Nothing else.” (In Memory of Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin). McCarthy is ultimately a poet of the collective pronoun – “The vast summer we share” (Early Evening at Ballyferriter) – galvanising a reader to think “our” rather than “my”, to consider our duty to one another and to the land, before it is too late.
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Tidal (Doire, €16), Karen J McDonnell’s second collection of poems, explores how even the smallest actions (the slow erosion of a tide, a flippant decision to say yes, deciding to put an old relative’s name into a search engine) can cause enormous ramifications. The opening poem, Here, praises the decisions of various women – Queen Anne, Lady de Vere, McDonnell’s mother: “because / that stubborn Methodist / girl bypassed parental / consent, and eloped / with my Catholic grandfather.” The manifesto-like opening leads the reader to conclude McDonnell is acknowledging her being “here” is thanks to an array of random-choice decisions and flights of fancy of these women: “because / my mother said / ‘Yes.’”
This book regards the decisions and distant footnotes of the past firmly from the present, as in Scroll: “Midnight scrolling, / propped up on pillows, / in the glow of the twenty-first century” the speaker “out on a limb” peeling through civil records, decides to enter a great-great-grandmother’s name. An epiphanic tercet echoes the improbable little bursts of connection we find via the internet nowadays: “There she is. / Her daughter, her bud, not yet four. / Herself, barely a bloom.”
This is not a book full of backward gazing to the past; a surreal/experimental edge perforates these poems. The sea, for example, speaks in the title poem: “Come to me later, with your seaweed hair / and tidal salt-blood.” The sea gives us the key to the lock of this book: if the land is a patriarchal territory, the wide, uncharted sea is a feminine continent, where creativity, danger and community ebb among the waves.
The book concludes with remarkable erasure poems drawn from a consultant gynaecologist letter: “The result of / a / womb: / a precancer / change.” A refreshing, energetic book.
With the welcome advent of new poetry publisher Macha Press arrives Sam Furlong’s first collection, Crowd Work (Macha £15.99), a book that is as much about standup as it is vegetarianism, Jackass, rape-revenge films, Psalm 41 and trans experience: and all this with an enviable lightness of touch. The book opens with a beautiful, untitled preface poem: “I am going to show you / what it looks like / when I am being / the boy”, which establishes a speaker attentive to the forging of their own persona.
The title poem establishes the book’s slightly off-kilter, surreal humour as a speaker shrinks against the walls of a comedy club: “When the headliner says, giz a cheer if you’re trans, / my voice breaks lonely against the cellar walls.” This book excels when it uses humour as a lens by which to view things. For instance, in a poem about paintings Furlong states “God, I hate paintings”.
It is bracing therefore when the collection turns entirely serious. Customs is a fragmentary poem where the poet writes about being trans by omission: “package declared / cassette tapes // for the sound / of vials colliding” is a bizarre descriptor, unless a reader has the ears to hear the poem’s cryptic descriptions as secret hormone packages. Furlong has instanced a thrilling way to write about queerness here; knowledge and curiosity toward queer communities is rewarded in Crowd Work, and the poems do not endeavour to make themselves intelligible to those uninitiated. One of the book’s major focal points is physical disgust as in Fork, where a back-of-Uber kiss concludes with a tongue depicted as “a pink muscle of wet germs”. Furlong’s poetic eye recalibrates our sense of normal, so a reader realises that everything is strange, if looked at intently enough.
Another book by turns surreal, witty and touching is Selima Hill’s tomely A Man, A Woman & A Hippopotamus (Bloodaxe, £14), which, at 270 pages, has the feel of a Collected, but in Hill’s trademark refusal of convention, it is a book full of kaleidoscopic miniatures. Three poems often share one page where voices of animals, objects and shared lives intertwine: there is enormous fun in Hill’s writing (“I am writing this letter to explain about the sheep. I could sit here happily all day if it wasn’t for the sheep!”) that I found myself unexpectedly pierced when poems were immensely sorrowful, as in Self-portrait with a Bunch of Roses in Front of My Face: “I am holding them in front of my face / not, as you might think, to sniff them better // nor to look more closely at the petals / but because I have succumbed to shame.”
With the first 60 poems of the book being self-portraits with, to name a few, a Sock, in the Shower, with Parsley, with Novak Djokovic, Hill directs much attention to the very effort of creating a persona within the poem. The reading itself of this book is unusual; you don’t read a single poem, chew poetic cud, then move slowly on, but in their brevity these poems possess an oddly snowballing effect, where narratives fuse with one another. “My father went there nearly every day” goes The Famous Museum, “I know he’s dead and everything but still” and on the same page The Funeral: “The funeral director asked me if the purple Porsche blocking the gateway belonged to me. […] After the funeral I saw a young blonde woman drive off in it. I know I shouldn’t hate her.” This book marks Hill as a poet of boundless reinvention.
