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Andrew Neilson reviews Leanne O’Sullivan’s Waiting For My Clothes (Bloodaxe £7.95), Martina Evans’ Can Dentists Be Trusted? (Anvil £7.95) and Kevin Higgins’ The Boy With No Face (Salmon Poetry, 12 Euros)


In his essay The Serious Artist, Ezra Pound wrote “it is true that most people poetize (sic) more or less between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three”. It’s an observation which holds much water: many people find themselves writing poems in their confused teenage years, only to never write – or indeed read – a poem ever again once they reach their early twenties. It’s what we might call the moody bedsit phase and as such is conducive to all sorts of poetic outpourings, most of which are not very good at all. From time to time though publishers seize on a genuine prodigy and the poems are published. At 21, Cork-born Leanne O’Sullivan has not only had her debut collection released by Bloodaxe but according to Pound still has two years in the lyric crucible to go.

   O’Sullivan’s primary gift is undoubtedly her voice, which is confident and in a strange way untroubled – she narrates her confessional tales of bulimia and depression with such a sure handling that it creates a pleasing disjunction between the terrible subject matter being delivered and the self-assurance of the delivery itself. This seeming ease of expression does have its downsides, with her language rather flat in places, and it’s true that Waiting For My Clothes is perhaps ten poems too long as a collection. But having said that, there’s no doubting the descriptive skills on show in a poem such as the prize-winning Crescendo:

    …We slide along the vein
    of Mom’s road, our bodies moving through

    the air like seeds through a pistil, and when
    I can feel my hair whipping my jaw again
    I open my eyes and glance at my mother,
    strands of her hair tucking in the salty tattoo

    of the wind, her elbow angling over the lip
    of the door. We descend, sending loose chips
    flying like progress…

   The flatness impinges on this passage at points (the over-reliance on -ing words for example and the odd cliché such as the wind “whipping” the narrator’s hair) but it is the originality of the similes – “like seeds through a pistil”, the witty “ sending loose chips flying like progress” – that stay with the reader.

   If Sylvia Plath is the patron saint of the bedsit poetry I mentioned earlier, as well as the acknowledged mistress of the victim’s confessional, then one might expect O’Sullivan to embrace a Plathian mythologizing of her own troubled past. In fact, O’Sullivan largely avoids this, or at least relies on the elevation of her tone rather than specific allusions to grant her poems the gravity their subjects demand. When she does grasp for a larger resonance, it doesn’t always work. A poem such as For My Brother, for example, is centred on the conceit that the two siblings are “Gods already, immortal and pissed, / taking on life” and it’s one of those moments where the author’s callowness is most apparent. More successful is The Cord which moves from the seemingly innocuous subject of teenage girls’ fondness chatting to each other on the telephone (hence the “cord”) to an ominously dark ending via – an admittedly confused – reference to the Persephone myth.

   The poems which directly confront the tribulations of an eating disorder will not be to everyone’s taste, and indeed the extremity of the condition is reflected in the language deployed – “I trespassed into the body’s chambers / and raped it with two blistering fingers” – but there’s no doubting that this is work that had to be written by the poet, something which isn’t always apparent when we read a debut. For my part, I found the insistent focus on the self in these poems ultimately wearing, particularly when O’Sullivan’s voice is at its most grandiloquent. Pound’s quotation from earlier has another meaning – that all poets are shaped by their experiences between seventeen and twenty-three. The sense of self develops, the lyrical impulse is felt and the poetic DNA is configured – and crucially, this is the case even if the poet is not actually ready at that moment to write, or even aware that they are a poet.The danger for the prodigy who is able to forge these initial impulses into something immediately is that they are burning up the fuel before it has a chance to be properly assimilated. For O’Sullivan to develop as a writer, she will need to concentrate on the descriptive powers she sporadically displays and hopefully move on from the problems that have both bedevilled her and given her license to write thus far.

   The second poet in this Irish triumvirate is Martina Evans, also from County Cork but now resident in London, with her third collection Can Dentists Be Trusted? Evans is also a novelist and No Drinking, No Dancing, No Doctors, her last novel, is a marvellous evocation of a religious commune – beautifully rural yet oppressive – in 1950s Ireland. Her poetry is more problematic however, as Evans eschews much in the way of imagery or formal pressures and relies instead on her novelist’s eye for the telling descriptive detail and her equally novelistic ear for dialogue.

   In the shorter pieces, where the narratives and scenarios she describes are necessarily curtailed, her strengths don’t really get the space to flourish and instead the poems can seem overly unadorned. There’s no doubt that Evans can write but she appears to be more interested in telling a poem rather than writing one, or perhaps it’s a contrived artlessness, but one way or another it can leave the reader a little underwhelmed. Here’s the ending of the opening poem Gas, which describes a childhood trip to the dentist:

    But instead of my normal
    reaction of heart-squeezed
    mortification,
    I only laughed again,
    flashing my silver fillings,
    in Hart’s shop, Clonakilty,
    examining their jewelled jars
    and glass cases
    buying quarters and quarters
    of all different kinds of sweet.

   Personally I like to see a bit more poetry in my poems, which is not to say that there are not successful pieces here, such as Walking on Snow, There is a Room and On Living in an Area of Manifest Greyness and Misery (as Peter Ackroyd dubbed the Balls Pond Road in London: the Biography), but some of the strongest work actually has my dilemma with Evans’s verse writ large across it. Mothers’ Monologue and Catholic Mothers’ Monologue vividly conjure their subject’s voice on the page but in their prosiness seem neither poetry or even prose-poetry really:

    I burst into tears when I heard the organ starting up
                                                                        Be
         Thou My Vision and didn’t I start off again at the
         reception? I couldn’t help it when Father Flynn
         thanked me again for the sandwiches in front of
         everybody.

    This passage, from Catholic Mothers’ Monologue, is witty and even quoted in isolation allows us to see in our mind’s eye exactly the kind of person we are listening to. But is it poetry? I’m not really sure and while Can Dentists Be Trusted? is in many ways an amiable collection, I can’t help but feel that it is in the novel where the talents of Martina Evans flourish best.

   The final poet under review here is Kevin Higgins, published by the Irish press Salmon Poetry. I don’t normally comment on a collection’s packaging, but someone is putting the work in and I was particularly impressed with the presentation of The Boy With No Face. When I think of Irish poetry publishers I usually get to Gallery Press and no further, but Salmon Poetry, based in County Clare, are just as well established and clearly producing excellent-looking books.

   Higgins, who lives in Galway, has something of the rake about him, and at times he can come across like a slightly more mordant, Irish Roddy Lumsden. His best work is short, snappy and satirical, such as Café Du Journal, where the bohemian poet happens to meet a Czech waitress and eyes up every square inch:

    of her autonomous republic:
    from the Bohemia of her behind
    to the Prague Spring of her cleavage:
    in that oh so casual ‘I only want
    the Sudetenland’ manner of his.

   This could almost be the Lumsden of The Book of Love at work, although Higgins is not as “technically crisp” – as he himself hints at in In The Cold Light Of Day. But Higgins is more politically engaged – as in The Hidden Hand, inspired by Nigel Lawson’s famous quote on the free market:

     I’m omnipresent, a bit like God,
     but the difference is, I exist.
     I live in your alarm-clock made in Quandong,
     in the paper this is written on.
     I set the interest rate, decide the price.
     I believe in Milton Friedman
     and he believes in me. I sometimes
     work in mysterious ways; can
     make a billion bucks vanish
     just like that. I made Joseph Kennedy rich,
     tossed Robert Maxwell off his yacht.
     I am the be all, the end all; the hidden hand
     which makes you dance.

   Like all three writers reviewed, Higgins’s language tends to be quite flat in places and, when he moves on from the satiric pieces to a series of love lyrics, the punchiness becomes lost without any compensatory tightening of the verse. Nonetheless, Kevin Higgins is brimful of ideas and makes real efforts to entertain his readers at all times, as well as very occasionally hector them, and The Boy With No Face is certainly a charismatic performance.