Savoir-faire, sunlight and a slew of sonnets with
ANNE Haverty’s new collection, A Break in The Journey, travels vast distances, from Liberty Square, Thurles to Ypres, Armenia, Aarhus, Saint Petersburg and beyond the Earth into the Milky Way. The ‘mute longing’ of the opening poem The Nun and The Greyhound captures that restless imagination — ‘the old itch’ as it is named in At the Pier, one which decries in another poem, ‘It’s what we make / and what we do / that make us strangers me or you.’
The emotional journey the collection charts is a significant one also. In short lines, the poems embody a resigned, hopeful note where ‘even in grief/ we can love’.
There’s reflection on process, and poem-making in odes like Oh, Our Fragile Lives ,or Poemless, and voices which shift from the intimate to the declamatory in, for example, Far: ‘I too went far/ farther than Byron’.
It’s not that borders and boundaries mean nothing, but that they are permeable to the active and engaged imagination.
The argument of the poem is less important perhaps than the freedom each poem allows itself. So, while the poems name place after place, they are or exist, at the same time, in a curious nowhere, hovering ‘beyond the normal/ fears of our insular habitation’.
Here is a poet who has the savoir-faire, the sophistication, and accomplishment to let the poem be, and, quite magically, when she does, the lines linger, like a memory, or a melody with a delicate, but persistent music, even if and when, her, or our, eyes shut
‘to the mockery of white’.
Despite the title, John O’Donnell’s Sunlight, New and Selected Poems, has a much more architectural feel to it than Anne Haverty’s collection. The poems, within, negotiate the formal rigours of the inherited line and its stanza form with care and skill, and a workmanlike nous. You are on safe ground here, the building-blocks of the poem suggest.
Indeed, form can often reveal a poet’s preoccupations, so it’s no surprise to see the sports-themed sestina Injury Time, with its