Eamonn Lynskey

American poet Billy Collins in Introduction to Poetry* writes about the merits and dangers of analysing poetry. Collins requires critics to ‘waterki/across the surface’ allowing for transcendence and transformation but also that magical X Factor (Emily Bishop describes it as hair standing on the back of her neck). However, to Collins’ chagrin, ‘all they want to do/ is tie the poem to a chair with rope/and torture a confession out of it’. I mention Introduction to Poetry as I’m about to delve into three new collections from three respected publishing houses, Salmon, Dedalus and Turas Press. All of these publishers are Irish, all have International status and all are on a level par regarding quality of production and presentation. Also, just to say: no poems were harmed during this review!

A regular columnist with Senior Times, Eamonn Lynskey is a multi-published, award winning poet. His fourth collection ‘Material Support’ (Salmon) `is described as “masterly in its interrogation of the wide spectrum of ordinary – and not so ordinary – experiences and how poetry might address them,” (Fred Johnson). The poems are somewhat concerned with how memory underscores the day to day, a form of osmosis, present and past sliding into each other. Time and its relentless passing looms large, even those hours when the poet is only ‘technically’ living. (Prayer). Prayer is a shock of recognition, how so much time is spent without purpose, ‘all those wasted ages hunting car keys.’ The closing line is supplicatory, ‘Lord, please hear my prayer’. In exchange for such useless waste, the poet seeks

This Janus like ability is also present In The Where, a poem about missing women. Those tragic days are remembered as ‘Unremarkable’ yet ‘a mainstay in its superstructure/didn’t hold - a bolt came loose,/a strut, a fret inched out of place’. While able to inhabit the events preceding the disappearances, before ‘something cloven intervened’, the perpetrator’s mind-set too is explored, ‘And darker than the deed itself/the heart that hides it, will not tell.’ Unusually in poetry collections, Lynskey gives a comprehensive listing of inspirations to guide the reader through individual poems, demonstrating scholarship. Lynskey is a prolific reader as well as writer. These listings, while adding to the reading pleasure, are not strictly necessary. But we learn, for example, that Prayer, mentioned above was composed in a dentist’s waiting room. Ironically, no time wasted after all, the experience resulting in a fine poem. Also referenced are the scaffolding devices, including mythology, philosophy and biblical references, together with other sources; an echo of Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’. A particular personal favourite is He Walks His Several Cities. There’s more than a Joycean flavour in the notion of an individual traversing the city. This opening poem, lays down the poet’s concerns regarding transitional bridges (both real and symbolic) between ‘past and present/ and then back again’. The poem skilfully negotiates architectural memory, ‘a maze/of little Jewish garment factories/instead of restaurants and pizzerias’. The past, its many excursions, can take him down blind alleys also, a poignant trick of the senses; a realisation ‘he is like a refugee who cannot/shed the memory of what he’s lost’. He Walks His Several Cities is an ambitious poem, peeling back layers of personal and historical memory; back to Burgh Quay. In a companion poem Lesson Street Bridge, Evening, there is a change of mood, an attempt to move on, to: ‘try/to resurrect a semblance of the self -/the lights are green again.’

‘Material Support’ is a collection where the poems more than “waterski across the surface”. Often poignant, sometimes amusing (Lynskey has a wry sense of humour), always thought provoking, the poet’s keen observant eye ensures we gain insights into what it means to be human (and ageing) in an ever changing world.

‘and hold it up to the light/like a colour slide/or press an ear against its hive’, (Introduction to Poetry) Based on this criteria alone, Eithne Lannon’s ‘Everything Gathers Light’ is a feast. For all the senses. In this gorgeous collection, Lannon inhabits the liminal space, literally breath to breath. She distills and decants language, offering meditative maps for mind, body and spirit. With exceptional deftness, in this, Lannon’s second collection, she takes us into a deeply personal interior world, exploring emotional shifts perceived through perfectly balanced siftings of light and shade. Or, once more to use a Blakean comparison, her ability ‘To see a World in a grain of sand’. (Fragments from ‘Auguries of Innocence’).

The Sound opens with ‘This is the moment/you hear it again, along/the forest floor,/deep in the valley/where the walls/of the world open - /mushroom, moss, wood, fungus, old memory’. Lannon uses nature and its myriad contrasts and parallels as conduits for her deep connection with the natural world. These poems aren’t purely exquisite description (which they certainly are) but testimony to a finely tuned awareness of even the minutest shiver of chiaroscuro. Words caress, whisper, detonate wonder, serve as luscious poetic fruit, juice-filled. Ripe. Music fuelled. These poems are symphonies of pattern and rhythm the body recognises as either pulse, breath itself or heartbeat. There’s an urgency here, a commitment, demonstrated in the last line of the collection’s opening poem (The Sound),a call to us that ‘now you hear it. Now.’

For Lannon, physical self is a landscape interchangeable with the natural world. Rowing in Eden writes the body into ancient oak, ‘tongue the sound of rippled rain,’ the body itself is ‘the body of the woods,’ and the poem seduces with phrases such as ‘in the river of your inner life’. This collaboration interpreted