Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Weather Permitting is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Whatever the Society’s Choice for that period was, it must - or should - have been pretty impressive to be preferred over O’Driscoll’s fine collection.

     The book is divided into three parts: the first and most substantial consists of twenty-nine poems of varied lengths, forms and subject matter; the second contains a single poem or, rather, sequence of poems on a single theme, entitled ‘Churchyard View’, and the third a series of autobiographical snapshots of the poet’s childhood called ‘Family Album’, with a short coda, ‘Nocturne’.

     O’Driscoll is a poet whose work endorses the truth of J. M. Synge’s words that “... it is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms”. That is to say that the provenance of O’Driscoll’s poetry is in the quotidian life of his native Ireland, rural and urban. He displays and admirable gift for conveying sensuous impressions, the physicality, the scent, taste and touch of things. The vision expressed is sometimes bleak, unflinching, but unsentimentally compassionate, and the language employed is generally simple, concrete, mistrustful of abstraction. His excellent ‘Votive Candles’ ends like this:

When they gutter,
stutter, dwindle, taper off,

what is left
of inflamed hopes

is a hard waxen mass,
a host;

the shard of soap
with which

God washes
His spotless hands.

     The short lines of each rhythmically light and supple couplet carry effective and mimetic internal rhymes and alliterative interaction while the diction is loaded with ambiguities. The verb ‘to taper’ is precise in its meaning of gradual dimunition but it also contains the noun, ‘taper’, a diminished candle; the ‘inflamed’ hopes have been heated and enlarged before being reduced to a ‘waxen mass’ and the word ‘host’ holds both its sacramental meaning and its original Latin meaning of ‘victim’. Finally, since God’s hands are ‘spotless’ their washing would appear to be a symbolic gesture and one of indifference to the hopes and suffering of His petitioners.

     O’Driscoll is a witty writer, but his punning is never facetious. The unrelieved melancholy of ‘Churchyard View’, and some of the other poems in Weather Permitting, might be running the paradoxical risk of trivialising the concern with human mortality, but his is a collection of varied and often moving poems which should give pleasure to any reader who is seriously interested in, and responsive to, the poetry of today.