House in Heaven
C.L. Dallat: Morning Star. Belfast: Lagan Press, £4.95.
Given the quality – and also, thankfully, the calibre – of poets issuing from Northern Ireland in the past few decades, it’s proving increasingly difficult for the up-and-comings to stake out a patch of their own in the poetic terrain. In this, his first full-length collection, C. L. Dallat – hailing from the Glens of Antrim, though now based in London – locates his verse within a site of personal loss, grief and bewilderment. At times he uses this as a prism through which to refract the larger conflicts which have bloodied the latter part of this century, and his often bleakly humorous verse offers a welcome new take on the subject.
In recent decades virtually every aspect of life in Northern Ireland has been overshadowed by sectarian clashes, and as a consequence poets from the region are intensely conscious of their position in relation to these events, repeatedly questioning the role of poetry itself. Dallat is no exception. Artists are inevitably open to allegations of voyeurism, of collusion, of exploitation, if their work focuses too readily on the violent transactions of human history, and the sense of self-consciousness attendant upon this is the subject of ‘San Nicolo Dei Mendicoli’, the opening poem of the collection. However, as is the case with much of what follows, the site of suffering is removed from the immediate arena of the Troubles – in this case to Venice. Here the speaker notes that, “when we have talked so much of death”, it is
strange we should flinch,
just that,
to see
one tourist video a water-borne funeral …
The closing lines further foreground this self-regarding anxiety with the neat concluding observation: “Stranger still/ I should write this”.
The following poem reworks the same theme, and this is characteristic of Morning Star as a whole. The collection is, undeniably, impressively coherent: it has three distinct sections, each of which is internally cohesive – often an image, a character, an incident in one poem is picked up and developed in the next – and the three sections taken together create a whole which is almost classical in its balance. There are, however, disadvantages inherent in such a style, the most obvious being that poetry which continually echoes itself all too easily becomes tedious, and the ideas overworked and stale. The potential for irritation is only heightened by the poet’s over-indulgent use of a tripping triple metre. Many of the poems are composed of a loose-limbed series of line-straddling dactyls and anapaests, deftly pinned down by internal rhymes, then pulled up short by well-placed caesuras. Although this can create a definite narrative momentum, at times the ear would appreciate some metrical variety.
Nevertheless, there is much to enjoy, and to return to, in the collection. Part I develops into an exaltation of the joys of family, and contains some subtly-drawn vignettes of day-to-day life, including ones dedicated to his son, daughter and wife. The section concludes with a brief lyric, entitled ‘Days’, which conjures up an almost ridiculously happy picture of the contentment experienced by the poet at this stage in his life, surrounded by those he loves:
Fridge full,
kids home, tree-lights;
Bechet plays, you’re writing
cards: what my house in heaven’s like all
year round.
Part II of Morning Star is less transparently autobiographical than either the first or third parts, although the poet does make the occasional, rather Muldoonesque, oblique appearance. In one poem, for instance, he surfaces as the pedantic and somewhat self-satisfied accountant Dilat Q’hal. The “painstaking ledgers” kept by Q’hal can be viewed as a metaphor for the collection itself, characterised as it is by a fascination with arithmetical balance. Structurally, the volume is built around the number fourteen: the first section contains fourteen poems; the second, which is vaguely cyclic in structure and framed at either end by poems in dialogue with each other, twenty-eight. A fair proportion of the poems throughout are fourteen-liners – either traditional sonnets or else variations on the form – and a number of others are built around seven- and fourteen-line stanzas. The figure also crops up in two of the poems: Part I’s ‘Rue Saint-Antoine’ reveals that the poet has been married for fourteen years, and the narrator of one of the final poems in the collection confesses to keeping “this picture/ of myself at fourteen in the attic/ bedroom”. Evidently, for Dallat, the number fourteen signifies emotional equilibrium and wholeness. Unfortunately, although perhaps inevitably, one wonders whether a number of the more mediocre poems might not have been excised were they not needed to make up numbers.
Significantly, the third part consists of thirteen poems only. The shortfall mirrors the sense of loss informing this section: after the more emotionally-distanced poems of Part II, this final section circles its way back to the poet’s life, and in particular to his childhood which was scarred by the death of his mother and defined by his attempts to come to terms with this. This event is powerfully figured in the poem ‘Adelaide Park’ with its image of the boy biting “a chunk off a Waterford goblet”; his uncle
talked him out of his scream and prised open
the locked bloody teeth to extricate
the delicate wedge…
– yet even now the poet’s teeth “catch the half-inch-long scar on his tongue”. The poems here – some raw and ragged, others stilted and stunned – offer a marked contrast to those of Part I, which are anchored in the bedrock of stable family life.
The section’s penultimate poem, ‘The Moscow Circus on Ice Goes Home’, is spoken by a former high-wire artist whose days, since he broke his neck, “are numbed”. Concluding this slightly heavy-handed narration is the image of a “clutch of shards of broken shell”. This image clearly highlights the disparity between these brittle, splintered lives and the comfortable cosiness of much of Part I. In the first section’s ‘Easter’, for example, the eggshell is a symbol not of fragmentation but of new life. This ties in with the religious imagery which suffuses the volume, from the title, which refers to the description of Christ in Revelation, through the Christ-like figures which appear in two of the poems, down to the Biblical epigraphs and quotations scattered throughout.
This is a collection which, aside from the family poems of Part I, focuses intensely on conflict and death – yet Morning Star is, at heart, redemptive in its vision. The final poem, ‘Eschatology’, likens the site of loss to the “blank slate/ page/ screen” confronting the poet. Likewise, in the poem ‘Morning Star’, the lead-light memorial’s “lacuna in glass” embraces a space left empty by the name of a man who was not lost at sea as his family had previously assumed. In such spaces can be found the beginnings of new life, whether this be, as ‘Eschatology’ contends, through “love,/ language and memory”, or through poetry. At times the verse is overly-reliant on these hackneyed sentiments – the cringe-factor kicks in with lines such as “a pain in that tight space where he/ had once been sure his heart had been” – and one must question the ethics of celebrating pain, whether or not it is one’s own, as an opportunity for new growth. Nevertheless, there are a number of stand-out poems in the collection, and Dallat is to be commended for what is a searchingly intelligent exploration of the enterprise of writing poetry of witness.
Page(s) 84-87
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