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(Review by David Lloyd, The Irish Times, Dublin) Trevor
Joyce For quite
some time in the 1980s, Trevor Joyce was known among the few who still
knew his work as "the best poet in Ireland, not writing."
Then in 1995 appeared his formidable collection Stone Floods,
announcing a welcome new burst of productivity. His new and collected
work, With the First Dream of Fire They Hunt the Cold, contains
both the old and long unavailable volumes and a singularly impressive
collection of works from the last decade. For anyone debilitated by
the typical pap of what passes for contemporary Irish poetry, this collection
will be a delight. To that poetry's lovers, it will seem an outrage.
The old warcry, "It ain't poetry", is sure to disgrace its
utterers once again. Here are no rural anecdotes, no repetitive returns
to the lyric effusion and fabulistic narrative, no consolatory childhood
yarns. Here, at last in Ireland, is a body of work that increasingly
liberates its language from the despotism of reference and the pabulum
of the well-made poem - tyrannies that should surely have been made
redundant by the work of Beckett, Coffey, Devlin or even, for those
who could read him, Yeats. Joyce's earliest collections, brought together
in Pentahedron in 1972, already bespoke a poetics with quite
other resources than those common in Irish poetry of that moment. Betraying
an urban - and urbane - voice for the most part, with darkly returned
echoes of Kinsella, these early works bear traces of readings in constructivism
and expressionism - a curious but interestingly productive confluence.
"Gulls on the River Liffey" and "Diagram + Sun"
are typical of these, or the exquisite "Christchurch. Helix. 9th
Month": Passages of labyrinth repeat;/ the crypt gives vellum
thighs to the dead,/ mark our return in this way;/ again we hollow dust-caves,
ankle-deep. Arch and relentlessly knowing, the poetry verges on
mannerism in the best sense that designates an art tired of the habits
of a style that has become commonplace in its very common sensicality
and that forces the limits of style at the risk of excess and artificiality.
Mannerism as one recognizes it in Baudelaire, Kafka, Mangan, the early
Beckett, all of whom used conventions to burst conventions. Signal throughout
Joyce's work is his refusal to fall back into the tired conventions
of late-romantic lyric, which is not to say that the poems do not at
times sing resonantly, but that those effects are secondary to the main
purpose which is - and this surely is the only legitimacy of poetry
in our moment - to extend the significant use of the language. Stone
Floods represented a remarkable simplification of the language, at least
on the surface of things, for though less apparently baroque in their
effects, the poems are rich and complex, echoing with the variety of
influences that Joyce had absorbed - Lorca, O Rathaille, Meng Jiao and
other Chinese classics - and witnessing a new poetic range. Secreted
in that volume were a couple of poems, "Turlough" and "Chimaera",
both based formally on the Japanese "renga", with its patterns
of ambiguous and recursive movements of sense. These poems foreshadow
a number of poems in the latter sections of this new collection, most
notably "Syzygy", which deploy the procedural possibilities
of computer generated assemblages to produce forms that emulate the
compositional possibilities of the medieval plainsong (the basis of
the familiar "round") or of serial music. These new works
compellingly explore the pleasures of a non-narrative poetry that can
accommodate both the multiple resources of contemporary languages and
the fundamental poetic resources of repetition, echo, internal rhymes,
ambiguity. Though at times uneven in the yield of the experiments, their
pleasures lie precisely in jettisoning the old and exhausted fiction
of the unified poetic voice and in the opening of new possibilities.
Joyce is constantly willing to experiment and to risk failure. The risks
pay off above all in the final work, "Trem Neul", an "autobiographical
essay in prose and verse from which everything personal has been excluded",
a work which juxtaposes in parallel text deceptively simple lines of
everyday speech and dense prose paragraphs. It is a tight weave of many
recurring and blending voices organized contrapuntally, with effects
at once dreamlike and almost scientifically precise. Its marbled textures
resonate continually and long after the first readings of the text are
done: here, without doubt, Joyce reaches a new terrain of language.
And it is surely no accident that this collection is book-ended by the
two prose and verse works that draw most deeply on Irish matter - the
1976 collection with which it opens, The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine,
a "per-version", as Mangan might have said, of the old Irish
Buile Suibhne, and "Trem Neul" itself. Both works release
Irish materials - translations, citations, allusions, interlingual puns
- in ways that allow the language to take off, to "peregrinate",
to release itself from the trammels of obvious referents and neatly
packaged meanings. However much some of the techniques may resemble
things happening in European and American post-modernity, this is a
volume that extends irrevocably the range of what Irish poets can do.
(Perhaps that is what Cork County Council is acknowledging by having
had the foresight and courage to select Joyce as their current Writer
in Residence.) Though rarely work that yields its pleasures easily,
this is a collection that must be read and come to terms with. If your
bookshop is reluctant to carry it, order it at the website of Wild
Honey Press, where you can also hear Joyce and other contemporary
poets reading samples of their poetry. |