New poetry: Frank McGuinness, Erica McAlpine, James Harpur and Dane Holt

Irish Times

06-06-2025

'Did he know he trespassed where none should pry?'
Frank McGuinness
writes in Flight, 1909. In context, he's discussing 'the first flight over Lisfannon', taken by his father's father, but the
poem
also gestures to some of his latest collection's concerns, and obsessions.
Many of the poems in
The River Crana
(Gallery Press, €12.95/€19.50) move towards and away from revelation and confession – they paint scenes that offer self-exposure and dwell among the risks involved in finally taking the plunge. Touch, 1976 is a sequence of poems pivoting around a brief encounter with 'the kind of guy you should not trust in bars' and its aftermath, from several perspectives (including the bed itself, in the slightly odder poem of the set).
McGuinness's eye for portraiture, carnality and psychology all come to the fore in the telling, and his shifts of perspective allow for a bruised kind of empathy, 'never again looking/the length of his life and out of my own'. Elsewhere we hear about 'saviours who have lost the plot' and others 'full of remorse/and craving compassion'.
It's a various book, elegiac, playful and intertextual; McGuinness is fond of and adept at the dramatic monologue form, bringing in a whole chorus of unexpected voices, ably thrown, from the ancient world, Shakespeare and
Maeve Binchy
at Croagh Patrick.
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His eye for the telling image, too, shines out, from Armenian orchards that 'smell of pomegranates/the colour of veal' to lambs 'licking us sticky clean as honeycomb'.
One of the sharpest poems, Lack of Sleep, also shows off his skill in form, and reaches for a kind of universalist timelessness – a note he also strikes in a touching version of
Cavafy
, Bandage, which is similarly rich in a sense of being vulnerably observant in the midst of all the action: 'I liked looking,/looking at the blood/that belonged to him'.
Traditional form is the keystone for Erica McAlpine, and in
Small Pointed Things
(Carcanet, £11.99) she brings her scrupulous musicality to bear on the natural world, retellings of Ovid and 'the point of no return'. She's particularly good at turning scenes from nature and the quotidian into something at times almost parable-like, ruminative while never abandoning the physical or concrete realm.
In Bats and Swallows, the book's opening poem, the speaker addresses someone whose nature it is 'always to side one way/or the other' while she prefers an approach where 'either, or both, hold sway'. This having it both ways instinct serves her well here, allowing her to at once debunk the idea of
ideas
, 'They can be elliptical/in the worst way,/or too convoluted even to say' while taking them for a walk, in carefully chiselled stanzas; to see poetry as 'a dazzle/of pure thought/about itself' while simultaneously clinging to its gravity, and craftiness.
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There's something of Marianne Moore to her animal poems, another poet who, like McAlpine, 'cares for delicacy of stroke', especially in her muscular, rebarbative scorpion who is 'a prizefighting champion/posing and preposterous/and plated like a tiny rhinoceros'.
Throughout, in her many studies of the natural world, she aims for something more than simple taxonomy, or voyeurism: 'But life gives//itself over/purely to whatever/is near it', she writes in Kingfishers, and that sort of companionable generosity spotlights the book as a whole, whether finding fellow feeling for The Second Warthogs 'not-quite-worthy/of being seen' or the labour of the spider and its web, 'this feeling/like combing through a baby's hair'.
These are poems which, however well built and apparently ordered, know that 'some things can't be straightened out' and, for all their enviable sprezzatura, legislate for the dark undertone beneath the music and 'felt the sting/of knowing we draw/from our own grave/to water what we have'.
James Harpur, whose new collection is The Magic Theatre. Photograph: Alan Betson
James Harpur's new collection
The Magic Theatre
(Two Rivers Press, £12) is steeped – at times stewed – in nostalgia for his days as an undergraduate at Cambridge University, a 'power station that burns on brains'. There's something charmingly guileless, a quality that lends it a slightly Rupert Brooke-ish idealism and helps to disarm the cynical reader who fears the experience of reading it will be akin to gatecrashing someone else's college reunion.
The Brooke scent is strongest in moments of reverie, such as Summer Term – 'Begins mid spring: days of moon-white suns/The punts still smoky in their pens/And trees along the Backs pubescent green.//At first, insouciance of students, phoney war'.
It isn't all blissful punting and sepia-tinged lost content, however, and the most moving – and compelling – strain of the collection is found in the relationship revealed between father and son, played out subtly and in small gestures. The divide brought about between the son's growing erudition and learning threatens to cause a schism, 'These are perhaps the final moments/Our worlds will still connect/Before I get more bookish by the month/And make him feel inadequate' but later revelations, of tenderness and more complicated elements, add depth – 'he'll let on/From the cosmos of his wheelchair/That he could only pay my fees/By gambling. Roulette in Kensington'.
Friendships and relationships are formed and lost, and the world of acting entered into – the whole thing at times a meditation on performance, on and offstage, and the 'tinnitus of humiliation' which sometimes accompanies it.
Self-sabotage and a perennial tendency towards running counter to his own interest's seems to stymie the narrator at several crucial moments, and aside from the odd Pooterish moment it's hard not to be won over by a poet capable of resurrecting his school days in such vivid colour, 'A gold balloon arcing from the river/Through a mist of atomised champagne'.
Dane Holt's debut
Father's Father's Father
(Carcanet, £11.99) is full of tall tales, an often surrealist narrative instinct and a tendency to turn on a sixpence, or pull various rugs out, just as the reader starts to get comfortable. This can – at times – risk settling into a groove of sorts itself, one starts to wait for the twist or the volte-face, but throughout there's a clarity and precision to the language, and a fine knack for image and phrasemaking, which largely wins out.
It's not an accident that the first line of the first poem, John Cena, about the professional wrestler, is 'Everything you do you do precisely'. Ironically, that narrator's exhortations might, in the end, be usefully applied to some of the poems here – 'f**k up once in a while, why don't you,/in a way we don't anticipate'.
The best work here is that which is willing to walk the tightrope over sentiment, such as an unexpectedly moving poem riffing on the narrator's grandmother by utilising Tammy Wynette: 'how saying one thing so/exactly to someone intent on hearing//the opposite is art' or another family-related one, Humphrey Bogart, about a grandfather and his son, 'They both loved/the men Humphrey Bogart played'.
There's something analogous about this idea of performing, or wearing masks, and Holt makes hay with the subject in a series of poems which use wrestling – that ultimate mix of pantomime and physicality – as their means of talking about being 'unmoored/from dramatic structure', a plight many of the masks and characters come to share.
Avoidance, and variations on the theme, are at the heart of Father's Father's Father, and while the urge towards following WS Merwin's advice 'I could do anything' occasionally results in some slightly arbitrary-seeming, simile-heavy wackiness, often it leads to something original, well-seen and entertaining.