Jewel
Peadar O’Donoghue
Salmon Press, 2012
I can pinpoint the moment when I knew this book and I
were not aligned unusually precisely; it was when, having written a note about ‘control?’
on page 19, I turned it over to see page 21’s title: ‘This is a Controlled Poem’.
And I thought well, that told me, except it doesn’t really, on reading it, as
it’s not so much a poem displaying control as it is a poem dismissing it as a
helplessly grey and sensible presence, “a Golden Labrador, the Sunday Times, /
a bay-windowed Victorian semi, / a neatly-pressed shirt for the office on
Monday.” If I tried to approach this implicit poetic as I normally read, it
would be like bringing gravy to a sweet course; bear with me as I try to avoid
the category error.
I feel that the magic is in the rawness, a rough
diamond, polished pieces are not my style. I’ve tried a few times and the whole
thing falls apart. I’m not too hung up on form or style or punctuation or even
spelling, within reason of course. Some
writers are alchemists, I’m just a miner, I keep digging mainly coal to keep
the fires burning, but if the odd piece of gold turns up now and again then I’m
happy!
So let’s trust that - is there gold? Yes, I think
there is. Take, for example, the “darkling tarmac” of ‘Cardboard Kings’, the
image of the improvised firing squad in ‘The Birth of a Nation’ where “those
that had no guns / pointed fingers”, or, from the poem I put that original
control note against, the “nothing but starfish, / starfish on the beach.” Each
of those is striking and can develop in the ear, the imagination, the
understanding. The opening poem makes reference to a “blandiose” refurbishment
of a bar, which is an apt and expressive portmanteau.
There’s a sustained shine across poems like ‘The
Summer in Siam’, which dances through the other seasons to shed light on the
titular one as it is recalled by “these closed eyes under / penny weights”.
That structuring suggests it’s had more polish than we’ve been led to believe;
similarly the sustained anaphora in ‘This Christmas We’, which builds a
happiness in the face of circumstances where the speaker must “contract, /
cut-back, / shrink and save”. That’s the last poem of the book, one that ends
in an acknowledgement of relative wealth in the world where “We [...] rejoice
in the hope / and are glad”, which is an admirable sentiment and one you’re
carried along with as a reader, making this a strong conclusion.
Sadly, there are rather more poems where I find myself
uncarried than I would like. I have tried to bring something other than gravy,
but still I find some of the poems in here to be stretched jokes, others that
spend their second half ensuring we understand the point of the first, and
several with noticeable amounts of text that ambles along conversationally. It
might be me, rather than the poet at fault here; my worries about the lines
being conversational tap straight into the opening fret about control. Perhaps
this is Wordsworth’s language of men talking to men brought into 21st-century
web-connected speech and I am simply being a whale-boned mentat for worrying.
A test of this: when you read this last sentence of ‘Star
Lovers’,
We filled the void
with the smallness of ourselves,
our closed petals daisies
were eyelids kissed,
and I said ‘I love you’
more than the average amount of times.
do you find it stumbles after its rather lovely
daisies with that uncountable “amount”, rather than the countable “number”? To me it’s a problem, and a fixable problem,
that undermines the poem in its closing moments; a point where the surrendered
control disconnects poem and reader. If you agree here, it won’t be the only
place you feel this way.
If you disagree, though, you may side with Rachel
Fenton, who asserts in an interview based around the book that “if Wordsworth could have cracked a
few more jokes and let the metre run he’d have been your equal.” O’Donoghue, to
his credit, laughs off that evaluation, but Ian Duhig’s positive (and more
realistic) back-cover assessment may outweigh mine: for him, Jewel is “a
book of joy and power”, full of energy, delight and an eye for the ridiculous.
Much as I recognise those starting points, too often I find the poems let their
energies dissipate under the weight of attention, just as the opening quotation
fears they might from polishing. That might, of course, be just the gravy
talking.
Andrew
Bailey is a writer based in Sussex, with a first collection, Zeal, available
from Enitharmon. He has worked with various arts and educational
organisations.
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