Snow at the Opera House
by Liz McSkeane (New Island Books)

Out of My Skin
A CD from Máighréad Medbh

Languages
by Gary Allen (Flambard/Black Mountain)

Reviewed by David Woelfel


Toward the end of Liz McSkeane's début collection, Snow at the Opera House, there's a brief poem called 'Water Lilies, Botanic Gardens'. It opens on the near still image of lily-pods floating on the water's surface at Glasnevin; sombre, even peaceful, this is not perhaps a scene one would consider abundant with revelation. Yet within only a few lines the author imparts something of a secret - On the Yangtze river/ the water lily leaves are strong,/ so strong/ a grown man can sit on them.
Many of the poems in this unique collection make similar assertions. Whether a 5,000 year-old Chinese amphora in a Glasgow museum, or a café scene in a Polish city, there's little that remains unchanged under Liz McSkeane's gaze. And yet her interests seem to lie less in the fealty of her subjects than in exposing, in them, an often invisible, alternative nature. Indeed, she sets out her stall right from the opening sonnet - to catch the tension/ of suppressed movement and dimensions/you don't see ('Life Class').
Her observations are acute, her concentration specific. Along the way these poems become so sparsely populated, as if by bringing the lens in close it seems, the surroundings can only but fade from view. But Liz McSkeane is a poet in the exploratory sense. The provocation here is the primacy of the imagination. It seems that by sacrificing the wider viewpoint, only then does the more intimate perspective become possible. That only by possessing completely the particular, can you get a subject to reveal its secrets.
At times though, this can become problematic. The tightness of her grip rarely relents. The author's perspective, while fascinating, can on occasion come at the expense of the reader's own viewpoint. One can, at moments, feel excluded here. Much of the imagery is dislocated, brought onto some dimensional plane of the poet's own making. The risk inherent seems a kind of suspended animation - images becoming more what she wants them to be, than what they actually are.
That said, a number of fine individual poems are rendered. One particular group of three - 'Plea Bargain', 'On Daring to Speak the Truth' and 'Survivor' - are found roughly half way through the collection, and deal with our modern collective awareness of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The guns are here to stop us from running away/ The five of us, lined up, waiting./ Do you see those sticks there... There for us/ That's how'll they'll do it./ They won't waste their bullets... The reader need only imagine the UNAMIR bulletins out of Rwanda in 1994, or the UN enclaves of Eastern Bosnia in the early summer of 1995, from which these specific realities could easily have been documented. Liz McSkeane creates a startling effect in these poems, even implying the ineptness of NGO's, the UN, and the international community in these instances, who often did more to facilitate murder than to prevent it. 'Plea Bargain' concludes - So I will wait, until they start/ and you will wait and we won't know/ if help ever did arrive, until after/ the last blow has fallen.
In the end, Liz McSkeane may struggle to gain a receptive audience for these poems. Readers may find it difficult to keep pace with her unique reckonings. As Thomas Kinsella observes, poetry as an 'art primarily of exploration ... allows for an audience to appear as and when it can.'

If Liz McSkeane's is a poetry of inquiry, then Máighréad Medbh represents the flip side of the coin. This is poetry with surround sound, one that impresses ultimately in the freedom and detente of the expression.
For Máighréad Medbh, poetry is never entirely dissociated from performance. Whether on stage, on the page, or here with Out of My Skin, a collection of poetry on CD, her approach is always with the directness of conversation. Anyone who has seen her live is aware of the sheer physicality of her poetry - the preternatural body movements, the voice on the verge. Be it a social critique of Ireland's past or present, sex or the universality of fear, all of it hits you with the concentrated energy of a Picasso and the tough love of hip-hop.
To start with, a collection of poetry on compact disc occupies a different part of your house than does a book. Instead of sharing space on the window sill with my favourites - Paz, Neruda, and Ondaatje - this collection had a place among the CD's next to my kitchen radio. I found myself listening to it at times in the day when I would usually listen to music, and not when I would normally be reading. Over the last weeks, these poems found their place in my own private 'Top 30 Hits', along with Rubén Gonzales and Damien Rice. It could perhaps be said that poetry via CD may also require a different frame of mind.
The poems recorded here cover a lot of ground, in style and content. Some take on a particular playfulness, such as 'Clockman', with a Kafkaesque onomatopoeic rhythm and Cat-In-The-Hat like quality. Others are more cognisant. The issue of love is never far from the surface of these poems; in certain lights it's oyster-fed and tender; in others, egotistical, even abusive. It is always fragile.
I found myself replaying three tracks in particular - 'Lughnasa', 'Beltine', and 'Samhain' - for the simple resonance that she is, in fact, singing. And yet throughout, there's the inescapeable and redemptive power of the voice.
Many of the poems aren't new. Some have appeared previously in reviews, while others have been drawn from her 1998 narrative, Tenant (Salmon Press), a fictional recreation of Ireland's famine years. Among these is a rendition of 'Mór', which remains one of her finest poems to date.
It remains to be seen whether audio collections are a viable medium for today's poetry, with its preference for nuance and abstraction. I have to admit some small part of me was at a loss not having a book in my hands.

Although Languages is Gary Allen's first book, there's an aura of inevitability about it. Indeed, many of the poems collected have appeared previously in an array of reviews throughout Ireland and the UK; no less than twenty-two such journals are noted in the acknowledgements. Along with four chapbooks brought out in the mid-nineties, one might reasonably assume a collection to be the next logical step. But the inevitability here lies less in the vita than in the assuredness of the voice - an author who knows exactly what he's going to say, and possessed of a rare poetic facility with which to say it. That after reading this remarkable book, one is left with the unusual, but quite real, affirmation that collections like these are only ever a matter of time.
The book opens with the arrival in Ulster, in 1750, of John Cennick, to preach this muddy acre/ showered with stones and dead dogs ('Thou Great Redeemer'). Cennick, a Moravian evangelist and one-time colleague of John Wesley, was himself a hymn-writer of some note. Here, he becomes the historical opening bar to Gary Allen's poems and the various subtle vernaculars explicit in the title.
These are the languages of labourers and council estates, of family histories and those forged by a proximity to violence, sectarian or otherwise. They also belong to those who often struggle to find a voice at all - a son's relation with his father, his grandfather, and his God - though in each instance, the author's faith has diminished.
A large caste of characters people these poems - cabinet makers and factory employees; a prostitute from Surinam collecting her child off a school bus in some unidentified European city; a young girl getting off the ferry in Liverpool en route to an abortion clinic. The author's observations of them are unemotional, his narration understated. The poetry itself slides effortlessly beneath the surface here, allowing his characters to pose naturally. And yet, all of them seem to be at once contributing to the poet's understanding of his own past. His own patch, as it were.
Throughout, there rings a susceptible note of exile. That these voices only achieve a kind of clarity from a distance (Gary Allen spent years living in various parts of Europe before returning home to Ballymena; and a number of the poems are in fact set on the Continent.)
Ultimately, these poems render beautifully the only legitimate human victory - that which lies between acceptance and resignation. As readers, we are not present as interpreters of the maladies and crimes evident in these poems, but rather witnesses to a durable humanity emerging from them. By the end of the book, we've come full circle, with the author as a young boy saying his goodbyes to a dying grandfather, I kissed his parchment head/ and with fascinated profanity, I whispered/ into his cottonwool-plugged ear, Your God is dead. No doubt the same God John Cennick carried north with him from Dublin 250 years before.
The community of this book stretches far beyond the poet's native County Antrim, or even Ireland. And it should not be limited to the present markets for poetry. Let's hope his duel publishers, Flambard and Black Mountain, realise such an impetus.

David Woelfel is from Boston and spent a number of years living in Killarney, County Kerry. His poems, stories and reviews have appeared in The Stinging Fly. His fiction has also been published in The Dublin Review.