From dark and witty to feather-light perfection: New poetry by Kimberly Campanello, Patrick Cotter, Karen Solie and Bernard O'Donoghue

Irish Times

3 days ago

The dark, witty prose poems that form the body of Kimberly Campanello's
An Interesting Detail
(Bloomsbury, £10.99) are preceded by the more formal I'd Love to Say I'd Been There. It hypnotically builds its musical repeating lines on ' ... the bells / of the churches ... heard / below the waters / of the bay' so convincingly that even the meta-statement 'this opening sequence sounds incredibly akin / to the ringing of cathedral bells' does not jar the imaginative sonic waves carrying us to the ending. There, Campanello reveals that, like the reader, she's just been reading about this too – this is a hymn to the imagination as much as history.
Campanello's neat, surprising endings are a central feature of her highly original prose poems, often upending a seemingly heavyweight beginning. In Major Insights, Campanello begins with a chart showing 'an ancient king found buried with his dog, four horses, cattle and sheep'. The speaker gifted this chart from which 'Major insights will be garnered' but the recipient doesn't want Campanello looking under her sink. 'I said it's not clean down there in anyone's house. I had brought lunch. I said I was hunting paper towel.'
Campanello's exact deflation is particularly potent in poems describing her growing disability. One could almost miss the pain if the endings didn't bite so hard, 'If you wish I can pour you a glass of wine, but it is better if I make larger movements, like opening the corked bottle in one go. That is if I am to appear less vulnerable and more impressive, which I assume you prefer me to be.'
Campanello's preoccupation with the layers of history mirror a powerful awareness of the seachanges in her still-young body, remembering her activist days, 'All those years walking great distances across capital cities during strikes. My body sliding off me like melted butter' (Ghost Walk).
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Patrick Cotter's fourth collection,
Quality Control at the Miracle Factory
(Dedalus, €12.50), features many of his signature anthropomorphic poems – ranging from Reverse Mermaid through the identity-bending For What This Row of Rabbit Heads in My Wardrobe to the wild commentary of A Horse Called Franzine Marc, who enters the National Gallery knowing 'enough about Duchamp and Beuys to be unembarrassed when / she dropped ... an ephemeral treasure, // fluffy and fragrant. An arts journalist' speculates 'if this was meant as guerrilla art/or critical commentary'.
Sometimes the surreal reveals that it is the real world that is more fantastic. The touching prose poem Crow, My Friend lists the crow's 'airdropped' presents of 'crazed creativity' that act as metaphors for Cotter's collage style, 'the feathered fish-hook ... the platinum screw from an aristo's sit-in trainset, the brass clasp from a child's Chinese casket'.
And it's funny, 'The cat could not compete with the gist of these gifts', yet the crow disappears, his last message melted away in the snow.
Elegy is Cotter's heart ground. In The Mare I Meet the Week of Your Death, Cotter's description of the horse expresses all the beautiful horror of fresh grief, 'Her prehensile lips form a glove ... Now she turns an eye the size of an anemone's bright / corona to blaze on me, her low gruff whinnies // like flat stones skipping across the pond of my hearing'.
In Self-portrait at Sixteen, Cotter manages to hold two ghosts in one, Cotter's 16-year-old self in 1979 connecting with the 16-year-old Sarah Paddington at her 1821 grave in St Fin Barre's Cathedral. 'Later, I lit a candle for her Purgatory-dwelling / Protestant heart, at Catholic St Augustine's'.
Karen Solie's deeply philosophical
Wellwater
(Picador, £12.99) begins in the basement where 'one is closer to God ... closer to consequence, to creatures no one loves / but the specialists' (Basement Suite).
This is one of many acute Solie snippets, jostling beside quotations from writers including Rilke, Denise Riley or simply Proverbs, 'to which I guiltily return, / sliding another out of its pack, / he who troubles his household with groundless anger / will inherit the chaos that some of us / truly seem to prefer.'
Restless, angry elegies for our stricken planet skewer the global economic crisis. 'To be no longer working bodes differently / for those of us who will not walk, as in the promotional literature, / upon the equatorial beaches ... Money buys the knowledge it isn't everything' (Autumn Day).
Our global collective helplessness is given form and shape, held tight in lines that fall on the ear almost like a guilty pleasure. Red Spring charts the rape of the land by agrochemicals in Solie's native Saskatchewan alongside Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics, 'The chemical // in the field respects the gene ... the farmer the authority / of Bayer ... who will not hesitate to make of you an example / if you insult its canola patent by growing your own seed. // Such wide confusion fills the countryside...'
Towards the end Wellwater begins to climb – to the stars in Orion – but most beautifully in the final Canopy, its owlets 'peering / through their nursery window' at young Solie and her family, sitting 'on the graded dirt' below two cottonwoods who 'built their circular staircases / 80 feet high, around columns / of absolute nerve'.
Miraculously the cottonwoods still survive 'in excess / of their average lifespan ... In spring / they champagne the air with cotton'. The owlets could be a stand-in for a young Solie as the set-up reminds us of Autumn Day's chilling Rilke quote, 'Whoever has no house now, will never have one'. Yet the peripatetic Solie is mostly like the cottonwoods, building her own erudite and magnificent treehouse with 'absolute nerve' from words alone.
Solie writes of songs so simple you don't recognise at first how good they are – a description that fits the brief brimming poems of Bernard O'Donoghue's
The Anchorage
(Faber, £12.99). O'Donoghue's poems are feather-light, yet they mimic perfectly the indelible sting of our sharpest memories.
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Bernard O'Donoghue: from byres to spires
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The title poem's 'anchorage' is an 'iron staple / In the wall which the dog had been chained to'. The farmers of O'Donoghue's homeplace of Cullen form a 'cortège of horse floats' making their way to 'repair the loss. / But what good was that?'. When the poet closes his eyes, all he sees is 'the invisible / Last leaping of the dog'.
Memory and imagination are a lethal mix here, the reader reimagining the death that haunts the poet. And O'Donoghue drives that point deeper in the pitch-perfect Lif is laene, urging us 'read the small print' and 'for God's sake to love' our lives that may have to be sent back 'if we are not ready for the high investment ... And you must not put / their pictures into albums till you're sure / you can bear the cost of items of such inestimable value.'
Death, always present in O'Donoghue's poetry, stalks now like never before. People are as likely to be making hay in the afterlife (While the Sun Shines) as in his memories of Cullen, which are, of course, another afterlife – his own 'picture album'.
His version of Chaucer's The Privee Theef, simple, direct and terrifying, recalls another terrific Middle English translation The Move from O'Donoghue's previous collection and this gift extends to Old Irish too.
The Hide, an unbeatably fresh version of Túaim Inbir, leaps off the page. 'My dear heart, God in Heaven, / He is the thatcher who made the roof. / A house into which the rain can't pour, / a refuge where no spear-point's feared, / open and bright to a garden...'
The Anchorage confirms Ireland's quietest living poet as one of its finest.