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(Review by Peter Sirr, Poetry Ireland Review, Dublin) Pearse
Hutchinson These two books collect substantial bodies of works by two poets who share a country and a language but whose ways of making poems or of coming to poetry, have little in common: a fact which in itself, in a properly diverse poetry culture, should be welcomed. As it is - and this is one of the dullnesses of division - readers of Joyce are probably not often readers of Hutchinson, and vice versa. . . . . In his recent book on Irish poetry, John Goodby has written of the separation between Irish neo-modernist and mainstream poetries which he finds "greater, at an insititutional level, in Ireland than in either Britain or the USA, with their relationship characterized not so much by polemic as by ignorance and outright dismissal." I'm not sure what's meant by "insititutional level"; it seems to me that the ignorance and dismissal comes from poets and critics on both sides of an artificial though apparently compelling divide. Yet the more interesting point Goodby makes is that "at the same time, arguably, the gap between the practices of some 'mainstream' poets and certain neo-modernists is narrower than elsewhere". Kinsella, Carson, McGuckian, Muldoon, Ní Chuilleanáin may well inhabit different regions of the contemporary map but they share a willingness to disrupt, reinvent and shape their worlds according to their own radical poetics. This book, which collects Trevor Joyce's work from 1966 to 2000, should provide an impetus to a further redrawing of that map and a blurring of divisions which serve little purpose other than encourage a culture of coteries. The first thing that strikes about this work is its range, in terms of subject and formal approach. There are tightly constructed short poems, complex sequences, prose poems, poems which present and add to poems by other poets. The first thing presented is his fascinating working of Buile Shuibhne, a spare, anguished version of the medieval Irish source material from O'Keefe's Irish Text Society version, done many years before Heaney's better known but in no way superior Sweeney Astray:
Joyce' s versions combine the fragmentary and the definite: a language that's gritty, unpredictable, from a perspective that's scattered, demented yet in its way fully in control of its own environment; Sweeney is the gealt in flight from the world who sees and experiences with fierce exactness
These poems are a series of densely textured mini chronicles, songs that "some of us made.../about the journey in our minds." and at the same time a poetry of scientific apprehension, as in a poem like 'Construction' which moves from a view of a street to a study of a single cobble. It's an urban poetry that almost seems to write itself from inside the city's stones. It sees the city with extraordinary clarity and condenses it into its essential components so that it doesn't seem to belong to any particular time:
In 'The Turlough', from the later sequence stone floods, the poet is geologist and physicist, looking at the occurrence of winter lakes as well as contemplating the expanding universe. What's interesting about a poem like this is how it combines modes of language to produce a kind of forensic lyricism. Joyce always keeps to the fore the pleasure of the line" and the book is full of lines which announce themselves with a sonic flourish and a nod to a lyric tradition remote from this work's intentions but running like a buried current beneath it: "The jaded sun lies low in his halt galaxy", "Hammers of ice strike through the chiming earth.", "Above the fog a gibbous moon is growing". As the work develops there's an increasing interest in and reliance on systems, schemes, games where a determining formal element is the play between randomness and order. Joyce likes to take material from arcane sources, scholarly texts, snatches of poetry, proverbs, phrases found in newspapers or overheard, and then to arrange them in seemingly random patterns in sequences partially explicated in elaborate notes which are themselves elements of the strategy. To read the notes consecutively is to be offered an encyclopaedist's hoarding of knowledge covering inter alia geology, astronomy, Chinese history, Tocharian culture, Gnostic arcana, Japanese poetry, software, medieval musical forms and Hungarian folk-songs. For all their complexity his orchestrations stay close to a voiced order: even at their most abstract Joyce's poems retain the texture of a speaking voice. "Chimaera" presents "a composite, for three voices, plaiting the disparate ghosts of Richard Lovelace, Aloysius Bertrand and the original authors and later interpolators of the Lie-zi." The note that explains this also reminds us that "there is interference on all channels." Plaiting disparate voices is what many of the poems do, playing off one against another or reacting to the work of other poets. In 'Joinery' a poem by Michael Smith forms part of the fabric; other poems deploy poems by Randolph Healy or Tom Raworth and are conceived "with and for" these poets. "Dark Senses Parallel Street" presents Tom Raworth's poem "Dark Senses" on the left and a parallel poem by Joyce on the right which can be read separately or in conjunction with the Raworth poem, continuing across from each Raworth line and forming a whole line of exactly eight words. The sequence 'Trem Neul' is a sustained echoing of and response to many voices. Its epigraph from Yeats: "All that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt" could serve as manifesto for the whole book. The constant interweaving of voices, their diversity and fragmentariness, the conjunction of randomness and order, are part of an aesthetic which refuses the comforts of the single perspective and the biographical imperatives which drive so much poetry. This book collects work since 1966, but about three quarters of it consists of poems written in the last seven or so years, witness to a quite remarkable flowering of Joyce's talent. The work is consistently interesting, formally engaging, wide ranging and risky: altogether an unmissable collection. |