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

(Lagan Press, £6.95 ISBN 1873687 990)

It was early June, a few days into a Kerry holiday, when we found ourselves slipping across on the ferry to Valencia Island, slap into a plaque, then to local museum contributions about the doughty, Medusauntangling marine biologist, Maude Jane Delap. The name being unfamiliar to me, I was curious. Could she be related to the editor of my piece in Magma 26? The hunch, confirmed, gives me a particular interest in Mick Delap’s first collection, River Turning Tidal.

… there will always be people,
… a ladder of angels, river turning tidal.

Two snatches from MacNeice’s Autumn Journal make an introduction but, owing to a long elision, the quote can be read ambiguously. It’s not “the people” who are the subject of the second line, but the currents and forces of “this life”. Both people and currents are for ever in flux, a theme expanded by Delap in 31 poems grouped in three sections. Typically they are crafted, capable, and there’s a delicacy of perception, a harmony with the natural world that makes them a particular pleasure. The poet won the Listowel Writers Week award last year and part of the prize was to fund publication. In the first section, all the work backtracks to Delap’s paternal family from the west of Ireland.

Greenwich Station is where he starts from, with small, can-be-humdrum journeys intercepted by the “hunch and push of a heron overhead / shouldering aside the failing light...” (Heron). “Gooleyflap”, the poet’s father’s lovely word for the bird, pivots the poem “beside a childhood ditch in Donegal”. Back in London, the great wingflap

… draws tight
the burden of the day, lets go;
draws tight, lets go.

People and places, ebb and flow, hints of elegy - something lost or missed; a pattern has been set.

Cromane is a tiny harbour at the base of a sandy peninsular that rides north into Dingle Bay. In June, though often windy, it has its charm. In winter, you can imagine the bleakness captured in one of Delap’s several sonnets, titled Cromane. Once again, it is birds, this time a flock of plover, on which the poet’s mood rides: “I’ve lost them—and this incompleteness hurts.” But they too return “like feathered sighs”.

To niggle, the lovely phrase earlier—“the murk still cloaks”—is followed by “driving squalls”, “fluted calls” and “wisps of smoke” which seem tired. The same goes for “translucent parachutes” in Sea Cave, though I appreciate jellyfish disappearing into the past and a strong first line, “Out where it first fists Europe”. More of this grittiness, and metaphors from entirely different spheres, could add new dimensions to what otherwise gets close to nostalgia.

The title poem begins the second section by returning to the poet child’s relations with his father, and by association, the heron’s beat. “I watched him pull away - / and howled him back to me again.” This time we stay in London to reflect “hurt spaces

   where the river, mapped mid-flow,
   engages with the hard corners of the city;
   lays down a begging arm,
   bent, palm uppermost, slack.
   Only for each sharp bridge
   to slash it pink,
   each pointed spire to nail it down,
   haemorrhage the spreading stain
   down tide…

And here with the river metaphor Delap is at his best, a note on which the poem might have ended.

Other poems range from London to southern Africa where Delap first taught and constantly visited during 30 years with BBC World Service. Search, for instance, recounts the flooding of the Limpopo in 2000, at which time a child was born in a tree—“the mother pregnant, / swelling with the flood”. The story unfolds via a computer, heightening the absurdity that modern technology brings to a distant and altogether unworldly event:

   freeserve.com RIGHT CLICK
   and the air thickens a little,
   spins tighter SEARCH floods
   SEARCH Africa…

There is a tennis match sonnet with Betjemanesque overtones (Singles) and more dry wit in the unfolding tale of a fellow-travelling cyclist on a train ride from King’s Cross to Cambridge (Mobile) who emerges as man-of-action only through his mobile phone. Delap is good when he listens in. Changes of scenery, intercepting the one-sided conversation, reinforce its self-indulgent banality.

Aquarius Rising makes Newton’s Mathematical Bridge across the River Cam a metaphor to instruct an eleven-year old.

   This bridge is strong on theory, firm in fact.
   Like these black letters laid across the page,
   it orders what it joins.

It is spaces between slats, like the white space between words, that harbour inevitable problems. “Answers come hard, but the journeying shines”, rings the message, before a final “Please let me know”. And the adult with his great knowledge is humble as the child.

The final, family, section carries inherent difficulties - how to make the reader as interested in one’s relations as the writer is. It isn’t just the past—either people or places—but what the delving does to the
poet that opens a poem up and someone like Paul Farley does this superbly. Nothing confessional, more a private wonder. Delap begins a poem to his motherin- law in St Petersburg with some pungent lines:

   Pushkin loved autumn—those first Baltic gales
   roaring through the oaks, sandpapering
   their leaves to parchment…

before he lapses into old snaps, fading colours and more explicit loss. It’s an easy trap. “Your danger is ingrowing toenails”, Edith Sitwell said to young Denton Welsh. “In, in, in”. Naturally, a poet scrutinises his own reactions. It is how to make these observations strike a universal note that someone like Farley seems to know instinctively. Welsh had a touch of brilliance. It was in undertones of sentimentality that the danger lay.

Delap grew up in Hampshire and his mother was English. How far the Irish poems will work for Irish readers is difficult for an English reviewer to say. He makes reference to war-time Kerry, to the 1916 Easter rising and “famine’s struggling survivors” to whom great-grandfather Delap undoubtedly preached. But his poems are, he doesn’t pretend otherwise, an outsider’s return and the Irish, like anyone else, can be possessive about their past. Without the award, Delap might have started with the variety, humour and inventiveness in his middle section.