Niall McGrath: Reversion. (Sixties Press, Sutton, 2003. 0-9537570-3-X. 165pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, pb, £9/$15/€15). James Liddy: I Only Know That I Love Strength in My Friends and Greatness (Arlen House, Galway & Dublin, 2003. ISBN 1-903631-44-0, 102pp, pb, no price listed) Brian Arkins: James Liddy: A Critical Study (Arlen House, Galway & Dublin, 2001. ISBN 1-903631-08-4, 118pp, h/c, no price listed).

Reversion by Niall McGrath is a collection which frequently suffers from a lack of intensity in its language:

All I do know is I was fascinated by this natural cone then and always am, every time I view this mountain peaking into the heavens. Something keeps calling me back to gaze upon this serene, majestic hill. And I know I shouldn't be obsessed with something merely material; if I could detach soul from senses perhaps at least I could possess the liberty I've always craved. Yet every time my eyes feast upon this beautiful work of art I can't help but convince myself there is a creative energy more magnificent than my own kind.

Not untypical of the collection. Setting it out as prose, as has been done here, highlights the rhythmic lassitude, the lack of any cadence or verbal patterning, of any sonic energies that might indicate a pressure brought to bear upon language. McGrath's fondness for rather clichéd adjectives and phrases and (abstract) nouns, and for a lexis which frequently eschews precision of sensory observation, contributes to a poetry of very low pressure, a poetry, often, of bland discursiveness. Nothing could make it less like the poetry of Seamus Heaney (to which it is compared on the back cover) in which all the former qualities exist to a very high degree.

The collection also contains a number of appropriations of poems from other languages, most of which are not acknowledged as translations. In particular, it does the publisher no credit at all to allow the reader to assume that McGrath, therefore, is the translator of such works. 'Thus Spake Arjuna', from the Bhagavad Gita, is a particularly egregious example of part of a poem that has been superficially tinkered with by McGrath. Such tinkering with a word here and there from an existing translation does not give the writer the right to regard the resulting 'version' as a translation, let alone his own. No writer with any knowledge of Sanskrit, and of this poem, would have described, as McGrath does in his version's fourth stanza, what was a full pitched battle between armies as a "fracas."

I Only Know That I Love Strength in My Friends and Greatness is by the US-based Irish poet James Liddy. The collection is dominated by the presence of other writers, living and dead, and of Liddy's acquaintances. This imbues the collection with a very delimited focus. Unless one finds this preoccupation of Liddy with his gayness and with other writers and friends interesting, one is not likely to enjoy this collection. At the end one longs, perhaps, for the air of more diversified company, of a world not exclusively devoted to an author whose major concern seems to be himself, his Catholic upbringing and the activity of writing. Having said that, it is significant that when some of these concerns are not directly brought to our attention the poems can be impressive; as in 'The Cabala,' 'Francis' and 'Triptych 2002'. Here Liddy engages with an area of experience which, though not outside that of other poems in the collection, transcends the overtly personal context which characterises them, and that gives the collection its rather claustrophobic atmosphere. Liddy has said that he aimed to write in a way that no one else would write in. There is not much evidence here of such a singularly original voice, or vision. The desire simply to be unconventional, at the formal level, does not, per se, produce poetry of merit and interest; only if it is combined with a sensibilty which is able to transmute what might be a private region of experience and feeling into a style which is able to accord with the experiences and feelings of many other readers will it succeed in a way which singles it out from the general run of writing. It should be acknowledged, though, that Liddy's poetry does avoid the paradigm of anything like an 'official verse culture', and of what one critic called that 'path of least resistance,' which is often exemplified still in a topical and subjective form of realism.

The critical study of James Liddy, by Brian Arkins, other than attempting to flesh out the concerns of the poet and his life and background can hardly be said to further the poet's reputation. Arkins is no literary critic – he is, in fact a Professor of Classics – and this is made clear from very early on in this book. Having referred to the Beat Generation and their bohemianism, dissent, antinomianism, and sexual freedom, which influenced Liddy, Arkins goes on to write:

The aesthetic which results from these attitudes requires direct encounter with human (sic) experience. Hence Kerouac:

'I have to make my choice between this and the rattling trucks on the American road. I think I'll choose the rattling trucks, where I don't have to explain everything, and where nothing is explained, only real.' Hence Kavanagh's “Write about what's in front of you, write about what's on the table.”

Liddy follows that aesthetic in a brilliant exposition of the antinomian in our time.

To naively confuse what is simply advice about the principles of good writing ('write about what's in front of you') , something which was and always has been offered to any aspiring writer, with an 'aesthetic', leaves one immediately in no doubt about the credentials of Mr Arkins to write a critical study of a poet's work. Any poet's. One wonders why Arlen Press could not have found a competent assayer of the work of Liddy. This book would have served Liddy better by not having been written at all.

 

Copyright © Martin Anderson, 2004.