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Vona Groarke: Other People’s Houses. Dublin: Gallery Press, £6.95.

Conor O’Callaghan: Seatown. Dublin: Gallery Press, £6.95.

Justin Quinn: Privacy. Manchester: Carcanet, £6.95.

     Yvor Winters was of the opinion that Yeats was a careless poet and a damaging influence. True enough: the manners of greater poets become the mannerisms of followers. These three Irish poets share a tendency to abandon sentences for what Helen Vendler has called in Heaney’s work “a poetry of the noun”. The device involves deliberate employment of sentence fragments. An example from Heaney would be “Desert harbour stillness”. Such fragments avoid the “temporality” inevitable with verb tenses, and may make up whole stanzas, in a brick and mortar fashion. We find examples in Groarke and O’Callaghan, respectively:

Infinity suggested by a white plastered wall
that leads the eye beyond attendant trees
to intimate the sky –  a world elsewhere.
                           (Groarke, ‘The Image of the House’)

Home from home for the likes of us and foreign boats
and groups with oilskins and unheard-of currencies
in search of common ground and teenage prostitutes.
                           (O’Callaghan, ‘Seatown’)

O’Callaghan’s volume wears the device out, especially in conjunction with anaphora (see the first poem, ‘Seatown’, and the last, ‘Slip’, among others). The problem with such a device is that it deprives the reader of the pleasures of syntax. Other marks of Heaney’s influence run through each of these volumes. He did not invent the short declarative sentence, but when Groarke, in ‘Indoors’, follows the “opaque, unruffled dark” with the sentence “I step in”, or Quinn uses “Us upheld” in ‘Offshore’, one hears the influence.  

     The title of Vona Groarke’s volume, initially Poems about Houses when she was the featured poet in Thumbscrew 11, is Other People’s Houses. In Metre 6 Bonnie Costello wrote, “the trope of houses itself feels a bit threadbare”. That’s because, with the exception of one, the title of every poem included either mentions houses or alludes to them. How many of the poems would have a right to exist beyond the confines and protection of the trope’s uniformity? But the monotony is actually a clue: the obsessive repetition of houses reveals the hyper-literal strategy of these poems: the prosaic voice (blurbed as “remarkably assured” and “beautifully regulated”) dwells on the simplest structures and topoi, as if to imply a metaphorical possibility through its absence. The poems are heavily indebted to the sonnets from ‘Glanmore Revisited’. For instance, many recall Heaney’s

But when the slates came off, extravagant
Sky entered and held surprise wide open.

Thus the echo in Groarke:

The roof straddles the house.
Yet for all its confinement and poise,
it is, in turn, preoccupied with skies.

And where we find Heaney

         in the same locus amoenus,
Tenants no longer, but in full possession
Of an emptied house and whatever keeps between us

again we have Groarke:

                                    We lived in
Other people’s houses then. Now,
we have a stake in a place of our own
which keeps us steady and tied.

     It is not just that Groarke’s volume strikes one as highly derivative. One also wonders if there is a reason for the theme. Consider the concluding poem, ‘The Haunted House’. We are instructed to “think of home”; then the second stanza indulges the fantasy of going home again. The narrator would like to go back but not to stay, and who would not? But we read of a “thin voice singing ‘I dreamt I dwelt’”, and the poem simply cannot support such a lofty claim. The resolution informs us: “The time is now,/ and I never will step into this house again”. The message? You cannot go home again… One must be satisfied with a few images fleshed into personal vagaries. How is the syntax or diction different from prose?

     ‘Domestic Arrangements’, a series of 14 poems of two four-line stanzas each, epitomises the volume. Each is about a different room of the house, but only four or five are particularly strong in their own right. Most fail because their details are arbitrary. “Like” is followed by “or”, as though each object might have been something else just as well. I quote ‘The Dining Room’ in its entirety:

A conversation piece
where selected features like
a bas relief or urn inspire
and accommodate high talk.

Where appreciated mouthfuls 
are served, then come and go
to tasteful strains of Satchmo
or Astrud Gilberto.

The poem raises too many unanswerable questions. What attitude does “high talk” suggest? What comes and goes? Why echo Eliot? Aside from the need to rhyme, why “Satchmo”? “Tasteful” is a useless word to describe the luscious music of Louis Armstrong or the cutesy Brazilian Gilberto; the two have nothing in common, least of all being “tasteful”. Such appropriation indicates a distance from the reality of the material, or a yearning for correctness: the particular is diminished. Had the poems been arranged in a Victorian manner, leading from one room to the next seductively, perhaps a higher purpose would register, but there’s no logic other than one floor at a time, ending up in the attic. Shouldn’t the bathroom precede the master bedroom? 

     Groarke’s title poem, dedicated to “Conor” (O’Callaghan, whose volume is dedicated to “Vona” (Groarke)), reads like a parody of the post-Williams Lowell talking obscurely about his relationship with his wife. Hearing of the “three/ mile trek for newspapers and milk” one recalls, from ‘The Old Flame’, the sheriff’s “taxi to Bath/ and the State Liquor Store”. But Lowell aside, Groarke might have opted for some variety beyond her theme.

     It was into a playful parody of Yeats’s ‘Innisfree’ longings that Ezra Pound slipped a profound truth. ‘The Lake Isle’ concludes like this:

         install me in any profession
Save this damn’d  profession of writing,
         where one needs one’s brains all the time.

The poet after a career racks his brain over a difficult decision: race into publication, or hold off. If the latter, a feeling may persist that the career is not advancing. If the former, he hears Horace saying:

                                         though’t be
Nine yeares kept in, your papers by, yo’are free
To change, to mend, what you not forth doe set.
The Writ, once out, never returned yet.
                            (Jonson’s translation)

Unfortunately, in Groarke’s volume, as well as O’Callaghan’s, and to a lesser extent Quinn’s, one cannot help but suspect that many slight poems were rushed into print for the sake of the greater collection.

     Conor O’Callaghan’s second collection also looks to a unifying theme: Seatown. Adam Thorpe in The Observer attributes to the poet “an extraordinarily mature and exact voice which promises really great things”, but “mature” and “exact” are not quite accurate here. The poems are undisciplined sprees through often shoddy diction and underdeveloped syntax, driven by nostalgia: everything is viewed through the mist of romantic condescension, descending into a tone one can only describe as “cute”. ‘Johnny’ and ‘Anon’ are in the vein of Auden’s ‘Unknown Citizen’, but the treatment is dull. In ‘Ravenna’ we encounter a failed attempt to visualise a Yeatsian landscape (it starts with an echo of ‘Innisfree’) which unintentionally caricatures its actual subject. The real Ravenna is irrelevant to the poem, for one finds only that it is “not much different from Portrush or Tramore” anyway. As a result one longs for a true description of the real place, contrary to the poem’s intention. The narrator is a lazy tour-guide: rather than describe the inner life of things he spoils them with clichés, such as: second to none, point of no return, every once in a blue moon, hitting the head on the nail, umpteen, you’ve heard it a million times before, on the edge of nowhere, then call it a day. An obtuse sense of tone leaves only bathos, as when we read:

If you’re talking about inheritance, let me put it this way:
there’s a house with umpteen bedrooms and a view of Dundalk Bay that if I play it smoothly could be prefaced by the pronoun ‘my’ when the old man decides to retire to that big after hours in the sky.

“That big after hours in the sky”? Oi wei. How does one talk in such a way about “the old man”? Is he looking forward to such a retirement? A pseudo-sestina, ‘In the Neighbourhood’, plays with off-rhymes (none, nine, noon, neon, known, now on, etc.) in excess, abandoning both the customary six words and their traditional schematic movement. In other words, it is not a sestina; nor is it about anything. We read such statements as:

       I take a raincheck
on Schopenhauer
in an attempt to follow one of the earlier
classic episodes of Twin Peaks.

Schopenhauer is as random as Twin Peaks: there is simply no reason for either of them to be in the poem. The juxtaposition, once again, is bathetic (finding a similar plummet in Groarke’s ‘Open House’, one begins to think the poet who could write such a rhyme couldn’t be a serious poet: “or else rolled back by the great hand of fate/ as happened to Lazarus, or the guests on Blind Date”). O’Callaghan’s only clear success is ‘Ships’, a poem of sectional quatrains with many fine images and a seafarer’s story to be followed.

     Justin Quinn’s strengths as a poet lie in his organic forms and arrangements from the Czech. The title Privacy shouldn’t imply the poems lack universality. We find prose poems, quatrains, couplets, epigrams, and even ‘Non-Enclave’, justified on the right margin rather than the left. One suspects some of his playfulness has a Czech lineage. O’Callaghan’s and Groarke’s poems frequently sound provincial, whereas Quinn’s work, rooted in bilingual struggles, is less comfortable with mere subjectivity. The prose poem ‘Cinema’ explores the poet’s struggle with two tongues. After seeing an American movie in English with subtitles in Z— (Czech) the narrator exits the cinema, only to be caught in an ephemeral limbo between the two tongues, wherein his sensitivity to the sound of both, and how they sound to each other, crystallises. This is a universal experience, at least for those who have attempted to speak a second language.

     ‘Hoover’, the first section of a suite entitled ‘Household Appliances’, achieves an admirable levity through such word pairings as “wadded bliss” and “hungry wheeze”. Calling the vacuum a “dog on a leash” is felicitous, and the final assertion, that the machine helps the couple get their “lives in order”, achieves the proper domestic metaphysics. Weaknesses, in such poems as ‘Epic Fragment’, arise when the poems run on too discursively, outlasting their charge. Also, when we read in the epigrammatic ‘Silence’ that the “short orbits of a fly” are driving the narrator “insane” (smartly rhymed with “pane”), we wish there were more of this insanity, less restraint.

     “Only pure words and deeds secure the house,” wrote Heaney, and these volumes do reflect ambitious pains, working on their sense of place. But perhaps by holding off a bit longer they could have achieved finer overall results.