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Irish Times
11 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Collected Poems by Gerard Fanning: Elliptical, at times cryptic works built on mood and atmosphere
Collected Poems Author : Gerard Fanning ISBN-13 : 978-1943667154 Publisher : Wake Forest University Press Guideline Price : £19.99 I hadn't come across the late Gerard Fanning's work before encountering it whole, as it were, in the shape of this Collected Poems. It comes with helpful apparatus – a foreword by Gerald Dawe, an afterword by Colm Tóibín – a contemporary and friend of Fanning's at UCD – and an interview with Fanning and Conor O'Callaghan. All of these angles are helpful, perhaps even essential, to the new reader of his writing. These poems are elliptical, at times cryptic; they mostly don't so much perform as talk quietly into their shirt sleeves, operating in an air of manila envelopes and uncompromisingly referential Europhilia; they're lit by a sort of coastal glare, and often feel as if they're squinting under exposed scrutiny. Tóibín rightly says that poetry wasn't – for Fanning – Auden's 'memorable speech', and these are poems built on mood, atmospheres – his avowed Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon admiration hint at his wide range of references, from film and literature to something more playfully esoteric, more guardedly private and coded. He was a government man, a life of 'benign Glengarry Glen Ross', in his own words; on the road, and on the right side of intrusion. On the page, too. If the early work from the 1990s has an abiding flavour it's one of withdrawal and departure, a sort of whistling chilliness, looking for – as per one of the best of his early poems An Evening in Booterstown – 'a pale permanence'. READ MORE He has something of Tom Waits to his titles – often proper names, recognisable or otherwise, are thrown around; we're located but we're left out a little too – this is a poetry of overhearing, eschewing careless talk, or the loose lip. [ From the archive: Poet and Rooney Prize winner Gerard Fanning dies Opens in new window ] At times in the first books he can exclude us entirely – one feels the need to ask for a primer, or Rosetta Stone, for some of his piled-up enigmas, but later he seems to relax into a more open, approachable clarity. Rhyme comes in, but by Slip Road his language as a whole is, largely, more open, more parseable – poems like These Days allying a new clarity to an encroaching sense of creeping dread, spotlighting a melancholy undertow that was always there, tidal like so many of his landscapes – 'I will be sent for, soon, at night'.
The Independent
15-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Book of a lifetime: Collected Poems 1937-1966 by Martin Bell
The only book Martin Bell published in his lifetime was his Collected Poems, a hardback between mustard-coloured paper covers with a wood engraving showing a contemplative puritan poet. There was nothing else until 10 years after his death when, in 1988, Bloodaxe published the Complete Poems, edited by Peter Porter. It is unusual to publish nothing but your Collected Poems. Your productive life appears to be over the moment it begins: the rest is, by implication, a kind of coda. So it was in some ways, but not all. I met Bell in 1969, two years after his annus mirabilis, as a first-year art student at Leeds where he ran a weekly poetry group that I attended. He had been a Gregory Fellow at the university, awarded in 1967. He would have left London just as his book was appearing to vanish into his hated North. 'A shilling life will give you all the facts,' wrote WH Auden in his poem 'Who's Who'. Bell has never had a shilling life but the poems remain original and full of energy. Al Alvarez said he wrote 'a rather bitter, tensely colloquial verse based, it seems, on a radical dislike for both himself and pretty much everything else', but that does him no justice at all. The poems glitter with laughter and desire. His 'Ode to Groucho' begins with an invocation whose first two lines are, 'Pindarick, a great gorblimey Ode/ Soaring on buzzard wings, ornate' and continues in the same high spirits, through 'a back-cloth rattled by oom-pah' into a celebration of the anarchic. There is, it is true, self-hatred and self-mockery but they are part of a comedy that comprises terrors left over from the war and mischief aimed at the controllers of life: headmasters, mayors, all the snobbishly high-minded. Italian opera was his love. The great tragic aria combined with the buffoonery of below stairs was his natural métier. That strange unwritten shilling life should tell how he is represented in Philip Larkin's The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse by a single poem, a translation, the only translation in the book. It is 'Winter Coming On', subtitled 'A caricature from Laforgue'. It is a magnificent poem in which Bell turns Jules Laforgue into a heartbreakingly yearning opera buffa. Together with Larkin's own 'The Whitsun Weddings' it is one of the two great poems of post-war England, not written from Larkin's train but by a demob from the platform, the B&B and the park bench. I always return to him. To him and Eliot. There hasn't been anyone like Bell since.
