E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

SPOILER WARNING: Almost the last line of the play - in a shocking shit-fan whirlwind - gives it away - "what will we do"? Far from being merely a stereotypically Irish problem play in the shadow of the gunman, or the ploughman and the stars, Jez Butterworth's bizarre post-modern masterplay directed by Bond helmer Sam Mendes , is all about stories, and how they are told - often very badly. This is a play of half-remembered poems, dementia-fuelled fairy stories, and lies and demi-lies, all spoken in the name of attempting to find a strand of sense and narrative in the melee of time and history - we are reminded that even Darius interrupted war to let the harvest come in, so potent was the symbolism of that ritual. There is the harvest story, and the boys' stories, and the story of Jesus on the cross, and the stories of love at the GPO... all the stories in the play end badly, or are told badly. Of course, it is also about feast and famine, sowing what you reap...

A LADY LOOKING FOR NOSFERATU IN CHAPMAN'S POETRY I have been a fan of Patrick Chapman's poetry for the whole of the 21st century at least, and remember first coming across his unusual work in his book The New Pornography (1996) - which was at the time a radical departure for Irish poetry - and 20 years later still seems to be.  Chapman should be celebrated as one of the most idiosyncratic, strange, disturbing, and imaginative Irish writers now at work - and his gothic, atheistic, scientific sensibilities chime equally with Stoker 's and Cronenberg 's. We often forget the Romantics loved science and the bizarre, and mistrusted god, and are more modern than even we sometimes appear to be.  Chapman is that sort of Romantic poet. His new collection is his best by far.  Slow Clocks of Decay (Salmon, 2016) has much that appeals to that part of me which loves Hitchcock films and sexy vampires; that enjoys bleak descriptions of life's futility, and the doomed nosta...

I used to be a close friend of the poet Kevin Higgins ; I am not especially close to him anymore - by that, I mean, we haven't seen each other in three or four years, at least, don't speak on the phone, and rarely email, if ever - but of course have some facebook contact, now and then.  I was very sorry when his mother died, and told him so. I mention this because, though I am fond of Kevin, and he wrote an introduction to a book of mine from his own publisher, Salmon, there isn't any literary back scratching going on these days, if ever there was any, between us. Things just drifted, as they do, as people in middle age become embroiled in their own days and ways. I can write what I am about to say without fear of feeling compromised, or in any way, hindered.  If anything, my own familiarity with the man and all his poems (I have met him on perhaps a dozen occasions, sometimes with his talented partner, on two continents, and in major cities like Paris, New York, London...

Ian Pople reviews Pat Boran The Next Life Dedalus Press, £10.00 There is an interesting tension in this book between its overall opulence ( it’s 100 pages in length and its approaches and techniques just as varied) and the often beguiling simplicity of its best poems.  In part that tension is controlled by Boran’s seeming effortlessness - Boran is a very fine technician - and it is also controlled by Boran’s clear-sighted perspective on the world.  To my mind, the best poems in this book are where Boran responds with dextrous and beguiling simplicity to the things he has seen. As in ‘Skipping’, in which a girl is portrayed skipping outside his house for most of the morning.  In the course of the morning, the girl is ‘now with a friend, now with a whole gang of friends,/now on her own.’ The poem then moves into a single sentence which last the remaining twelve lines of the poem.  In the trajectory of the syntax, Boran mov...

Jessica Mayhew reviews A Promiscuity of Spines   by Patrick Chapman Newly arrived in London, I was struck by the constant chatter that stole through the previous occupant’s grey curtains and into my room. Lovers’ tiffs, actual tiffs, drunken revellers tossed from the night buses, all punctuated by the call-to-prayer. Reading ‘Night on 109 th Street’ by Irish poet Patrick Chapman, I was gripped by his keen observation of the enforced intimacies of city life. “Forbidden to smoke in the apartment,” the speaker of the poem sits on the roof and watches aeroplanes and fire hydrants, and all the debris of the streets. However, the speaker’s attention soon switches, until he is spying on the neighbours. The activities begin seemingly innocent; the reader hears the “sudden creak of cello” or a football game, but curiosity soon uncovers a driver asking a girl “Baby, how much for a suck?” This penetration of privacy continues, and the speaker watches: A man in an adja...

Drinkers may be sad to know this is an appreciation of a new poetry collection from Northern Irish poet Andrew Jamison (Gallery Books, 2012) and not a toast of the pleasures of imbibing cheaply from 5-7 pm, perched on stools, scoffing greasy peanuts.  It's not a review, but a brief mention.  Reviews are fine - I publish them and write them - but sometimes, one comes across a book that one loves, and the best thing to say is, I want to share this with you friends.  Happy Hour is not a great title, to be honest.  It does the wonderful book no favours, because it implies a sort of glibness, that the book goes well beyond.  But again, perhaps it signals at some lightness of touch, that is present; to me, it confirms too easily stereotypes of the Irishman in New York, carousing - and indeed, there are poems about New York, and bars, here ( Auden was here ).  The title is not the point, though.  Jamison is one of the best younger Irish and British poets no...

J ewel 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. It’s not just an implicit poetic; I later found O’Donoghue telling Robert Frost ’ s Banjo that: 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 ...

Heather Brett and Noel Monahan  - poet-editors - have been working on Windows Publications, from Ireland, for 20 years now, and have now published a celebration of this two-decades of effort to support local and wider poetry.  Such work is usually thankless, so I thank them here.  And note the anthology is worth buying, to support their work, and to read some very good recent poems by Irish poets known and new (perhaps) to you.  I am in the book, I should add, which is lovely; many others too, including Paul Perry, Patrick Chapman, Anne-Marie Fyfe, Nessa O'Mahony, Pat Boran , Leland Bardwell and Medbh McGuckian .

Eyewear is very glad to feature Martin Mooney (pictured) this Sunday, on the eve of his reading for the Oxfam Poetry Series in London on July 4.  I first met Mooney in Belfast, in 1987, introduced to him by Medbh McGuckian , and we struck up a friendship.  Corresponding trans-Atlantic by letter in the days before email, we put together an anthology of contemporary poets from the North , which was launched in March 1988, in Montreal during a conference on Irish writing.  Martin came over for the launch for a few weeks, staying with me.  It was an exciting time - Paul Durcan, Terry Eagleton, and Michael Longley were there, as well as Senator David Norris .  We were the cover story of a Montreal daily paper.  I was not yet 22, Martin was around 24 or 25. On one of the last days of his visit we drove across to the border to Burlington and met Paul Muldoon for Chinese food, after a reading he had done. After that, we fell out of touch, and went our sepa...