Poetry reviews: Michael O’Loughlin’s tribute to Liberty Hall and Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s rich rhymes

We turn to poetry for what was once described as 'news that stays news’

New verse and vocatives from Doireann Ní Ghríofa. Photo: Pat Boran

Paul Perry

May 16 2021 02:30 AM

Liberty Hall by Michael O’Loughlin (New Island, €12.95)

To Star the Dark by Doireann Ní Ghríofa (Dedalus Press, €12.95)

We the Jury by Wayne Miller (Milkweed Editions, €12.95)

Poetry collections published during the pandemic have largely dodged the immediate impact that the virus has caused to our lives. What a relief that is, but it’s also no surprise in that poets are often writing poems years before they are published and, in any case, we turn to poetry for what Ezra Pound once described as “news that stays news”.

Michael O’Loughlin’s Liberty Hall (New Island, €12.95) has at its centre Ireland’s eponymous first skyscraper, and the site of the start of the 1916 Rising. A totemic image then for a collection which includes images and prose memoir alongside poems that trace the displacement and alienation of a poet obsessed with Marina Tsvetaeva’s notion that the whole world is a suburb.

Ever since his 1980 collection Stalingrad: The Street Dictionary, O’Loughlin has been a subversive force in Irish poetry. Whether he is describing New York or Paris, there’s a feeling of unheimlichkeit, or estrangement in the poet’s relationship to the world.

In ‘What I had Overlooked’, the speaker tells us he “never considered not leaving”, and that a departure from “hateful” Dublin, as he calls the capital in a poem to his daughter, was inevitable. And yet, a fond memoir of “corporeal archaeology” as the poet cycles through Dublin remembers the poet’s father: “When I first moved into the area, the ground floor of my former home in Dublin was a Polish supermarket where I bought pickles, sauerkraut and rye. Now, it’s a Palestinian restaurant called Jerusalem.”

O’Loughlin remains refreshingly counter-lyrical to the dominant chord of pathos in much contemporary poetry. The engines of his poems are often fuelled by anger. He is a poet not just of language, but of strong opinion and ideas, and one with an international and political dimension. Liberty Hall is a welcome and brilliant addition to his work.

There’s also a political dimension to Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s To Star the Dark (Dedalus Press, €12.95), a collection which comes on the back of her successful and bestselling hybrid of essay and autofiction, A Ghost in the Throat.

In the poem ‘At Derrynane, I think of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill Again’, she revisits the author of the famous Irish lament, ‘Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire’, binding her at once to a dual tradition of Irish and English language poetry, while at the same time catapulting her into a digital age where pixels, GIFs, and the “fractured glass” of smartphones inhabit her luminous praise-poems.

‘Seven Postcards from a Hospital’ is written from a neonatal ICU, and ‘Waking Again’ movingly remembers Savita Halappanavar.

Unafraid to use the vocative exclamation ‘O’, the poems in To Star the Dark are playful, serious, joyful, and moving – exploring Eros, the body, and history in language which savours its own rhyme-full richness: “Darken, quicken, mud and mother; the blade grows dull, the shepherdess sullen”, from ‘A Spell in a Shed’, or in ‘Fragment Torn from the Book of Showers’, where Ní Ghríofa’s writes, “Open your mouth, pronounce/the fall/in asphalt, the is/in drizzle/the awe/in squall.”

One of the most outstanding American poets of his generation, Wayne Miller in his fifth collection We the Jury (Milkweed Editions, €12.95), offers us astute explorations of morality and justice. In ‘Progress’, the poet tells us, “My grandmother attended the last public hanging/in US history, which occurred/in Owensboro, Kentucky, in 1936.” Vendors sell hot dogs, popcorn, and drinks.

The violence of contemporary society permeates Miller’s poems with graceful and metaphoric resonance. Wars, armistices, re-enactments, and, of course, trials are the guiding motifs throughout.

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In another extraordinary poem where the private and public intersect, we hear of how the poet’s father arranged for Miller as a child to be taught to sail by George Trabing, who “was among the very kindest/and most generous” of men, but also a convicted killer. Who is the jury, who, the accused?

These are the philosophical underpinnings to a collection which has a keen historical awareness and concludes that “not one of us/will truly understand what we have done”.

Indeed, in a time of political turmoil and civic strife, Miller’s poems face the unvarnished truth of racism and inequality with unsentimental and intriguing utterance.

“Tell all the truth, but tell it slant,” writes Emily Dickinson in one poem, and that is what Wayne Miller does in his unshowy, provocative, and profound poems.