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Myth-making dragons slain
SINCERITY Carol Ann Duffy Bloodaxe, £9.95
Though crying out for an introduction and judicious editing, as are virtually all the pieces, this and several other sometimes chewy essays are of historical interest.
Best among them is The Winefuhrers, by Donald and Petie Kladstrup, about the Nazi commander posted to Champagne, who requisitioned half a million bottles a week for the army and Luftwaffe during the war. On his arrival, when the Champenois learned he was in the same line, they were relieved: “We were so happy we got someone from the wine trade, not a beer man”, they said, unaware of what lay ahead. This is a fascinating sliver of resistance politics, of subterfuge, defiance and the dreadful price paid by some champagne houses.
Surprisingly for the author of the unforgettable novel Bright Lights, Big City, McInerney’s selection from fiction is oddly flaccid. Opening with Roald Dahl’s well-known but sinisterly gripping tale Taste, there’s an enjoyable if overwritten chapter from Rex Pickett’s novel Sideways, later made into an unforgettable film, but there is nothing else of distinction. What, you can’t help thinking, is McInerney doing squandering his talent on such a project?
There is, however, an excellent vignette by Canadian essayist Irina Dumitrescu of her engineer father’s hobby – then passion – of winemaking, whose unappetisting results somehow connected him to his Romanian roots. This is the best piece in the book, a portrait of a funny, eccentric yet ultimately sad pursuit of a lost self, written with honesty and panache.
Of the experts, meanwhile, only MFK Fisher and Jancis Robinson avoid falling prey to hype and mystique. “Wine is a pleasure, not a dreadful duty,” writes Fisher, while Robinson ruefully recalls occasions when as a professional taster she did not always get it right: “blind tasting is a truly humbling experience”.
There is no doubting McInerney’s devotion to the subject, nor that he revels in its association with the well connected and rich. The problem is, he has chosen narrowly, and not well, and in so doing, in a collection that utterly lacks class, has merely confirmed that wine is a snob’s paradise. Thus an anthology that should sparkle like Bolly is instead as thrilling as Alka Seltzer.
CAROL Ann Duffy celebrates anger in the pivotal section of this magnificent collection which, somewhat reductively, is promoted as marking the end of her ten-year tenure as Poet Laureate (actually she leaves next May). These are not occasional poems but, collectively, a crafted selection of substantial statements by a writer at the height of her powers. Yet the rage at loss, political and personal, is softened when she speaks of her now adult daughter Ella: “the house pines when you leave... I knew mothering, but not this other thing/which hefts my heart each day”.
Scottish-born Duffy’s parents May and Frank also tug the lines at the heart’s command. When he “ships out” the poet recalls “The room relaxes/so we are fatherless,/ husbandless, and this is my mother’s house”. In inimitable fashion she records their final reunion: “On the beach at Roundstone/where my parents’ ashes/had separately embarked/I walked out of love.”
The Irish poet John Montague, when accepting the post as first professor of Irish poetry, wryly remarked “The English (sic) laureate slays dragons while my job is to embrace mythologies”. Duffy chooses in this book to slay myth-making dragons, specifically the “Mandrake Mymmerkin” in the White House. In Swearing-In you can choose between “thatch-fraud, rug-rogue” or maybe “news-maggot, lie-monger”. I settle for “bigot-merchant, shite louse”.
This is an inherited venom. In the poem Britannia she recalls Frank’s response to the 1966 tragedy in Aberfan and associates it with the aftermath of the Grenfell fire. “My father shouted/the Coal Board were criminals, murderers;/raged again when they looted the Fund./I should not connect the two, but I do.”
Central to Nick Laird’s apparently amiable new poetry volume, his fourth, family phases are couched in family phrases: “I would like you to take a few seconds/to write me out one beautiful sentence”. But even that poem, Incantation, comes loaded with the writer’s native wistful ambiguity. It concludes “Held up at the gate I sit down and open// Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt”. For despite the international locations and cosmopolitan themes of many of the poems, Laird is Irish and shares to good effect his fellow Ulsterman WR Rodgers’ “spiky consonants of speech”. As the younger poet remarks, “meaning has, historically/ had very hard edges”.
Ailbhe Darcy’s second collection might well have been entitled Instamatic. There is a photographic immediacy about the poems in the early section that become captured images later in her homage to the Danish writer Inger Christensen’s 1981 alphabet, translated into English by Susannah Nied in 2000.
An earlier poem, Ansel Adams’ Aspens, celebrates the American artist-photographer Ansel Adams “helpless in his Biltrite pram” for whom “the sky must seem a matter of fact. It’s the mind/ beneath he wants to grasp, stowed in its smart black// enclosure.”
Christensen gave us a bleak post-Hiroshima “darkening thatch of glossery”. Darcy replaces the Dane’s melancholy on what must “exist” with a pragmatic alternative use of the word “insist”. It is a beautifully conceived conceit, a creation which, with crafted stealth, entrances the reader into a satisfying state of mysterious doubt. In Angelus, Darcy had, with typical insistence, declared: “In some forgotten future each displaced caress/must creep home to make its peace with us”. Amen to that.