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

Carson’s gift of the gab has survived these seventy-seven nearly-correct though alexandrine Petrarchan sonnets.

     They begin on St Tib’s Eve - a saint who doesn’t exist and hasn’t a day - and travel to a heaven no realer than “the twelfth of never”. En route they pass through such places as fairy Ireland, Hibernia, Spenser’s and contemporary Ireland, Napoleon’s wars, Mons, contemporary academic Japan, and imperial Japan.

     The poppy recurs as an “emblem of the opium wars and peace”, though actually it’s of the blood of our war dead, of course. The poems are constantly allusive, everything from Blake, Dickinson, Keats, Tennyson and legend to ‘If you ever go across the sea to Ireland’ and ‘There is a green hill far away’.

Bring me my bow, my arrows tipped with
                                                          aconite,
And I’ll negotiate the border mountains high,
Protected by my sword and shield of samurai
Which gleam beneath the wintry skies
                                               like selenite...

     The inversions (“mountains high”, “shield of samurai”), the “likes”, the clichés (the moon as “ghostly galleon” and “silver coin”, “tattered clouds”, “which fog enshrouds”) and the plonkings are excused, I suppose, by the tragic wearing of the green. True, this is not one of the best sonnets but does show a rhetorical tendency. In general it’s like watching a virtuoso whose pyrotechnics conceal the wrong notes and somewhat outdazzle the inspiration. Though Lowell didn’t rhyme in, say, History, and could lack the punchlines Carson goes for, I’m reminded of his collections of containers for the thoughts of the day.

     ‘The Londonderry Air’ seems to emulate Yeats’s ‘The Fisherman’ in envisaging Carson’s ideal Irishman, “who wore the suit of Lincoln corduroy”, rather than Yeats’s Connemara cloth: ‘Snow falls eternally upon my Danny Boy’. The blurb says Carson uses his “elsewheres” to invent “a fractured vision of an ideal republic”. It’s difficult to see it. The poems suggest no transcendence of the usual incompetent politics, and we have a series of cadenzas on “mad Ireland has her problems still”, reductive though that is.