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Recent Reviews |
A selection of recent reviews of Salmon titles. Click on the book images to find out more about each title.
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The Lucky Star of Hidden Things
Afric McGlinchey
Review: The Lucky Star of Hidden Things reviewed by Thomas McCarthy for The Examiner, Saturday April 13th, 2013
"Diaspora speak with new rhythms and perspective"
Here are two new collections by poets of the Irish diaspora, two writers of Irish parentage who returned to Ireland with a different story to tell.
Both are out of Africa, with McGlinchey following the star of Sadalachbia, the harbinger of an African spring, and Casey homeward-bound with Afrikaans as well as Munster Irish in his vocabulary. Their presence is enriching and melodic: they carry rhythms of affection that is continental in its humanity, inclusive, and multi-cultural:
’The board flicks names: Brazzaville, Lilongwe, Kinshasa, Babouti ...Our destinations will land u sin the ice-chill, erase all memory of this temperature, the slow, languorous sway of sun people.’
McGlinchey was elaborately educated at Rhodes University and Cape Town, but her African nature is aural and sensory. Her poems are an anthology of sensations, collected and stored in the mind as she does her athletic free-running across page after page of this, her first collection.
She may editorialise on Harare life, remain discreet about the dampness of Cork, but, on the evidence of this book, she’s cracked more egg shells than most poets, and, what’s more, she’s seen
’a girl/in south Sudan walk a thousand miles with only insects/ for food, then deliver an infant in the desert.
Quite simply, this is a beautiful collection from a supremely gracious new voice in our midst.
Reviewed alongside home more or less by Paul Casey
Reviewed by Susan Millar Du Mars in Skylight 47
The Lucky Star of Hidden Things is an unusually assured debut. A quick glance at the acknowledgements tells us poet Afric McGlinchey has been writing and submitting work for a long time, and has the accolades to prove it. A glance at the poems tells us McGlinchey has lived, does live, a full life. She has the observational and reflective capacity to render that life – the small, vital moments of it – accessible to the reader. All the shades. textures and moods are there, and with them comes resonance.
McGlinchey is at her best in unforced moments of witnessing. Sometimes her touch is light, as in ‘On not flicking my tea towel at his departing behind’, a poem about her teenage son in which affection wins out over irritation. At other times her voice becomes quieter, detached yet infinitely tender as it tackles Iife’s more painful truths. My favourite poem is ‘Last Conquest’, in which the poet describes helping her elderly, ailing father take a bath. McGlinchey uses words like ‘conquest’, ‘king’, ‘remote’, behemoth,' to give us a sense of how big and powerful, how grand, her father once seemed to her. And now he is ‘bird-thin, bone-white’. At the poem's end, father and daughter stand side by side in a lift: ‘face I tight-jawed doors, and wait / sorrow’s invasion borne / in a tomb of silence’. lt’s a moment all of us have lived through with loved ones: the one in which there is so much to say, nothing is said. The inclusion of ‘tomb’ reminds us there is only one destination possible for this journey. This poem gave me the fluttering-breath-in-the-throat feeling that the best poems do. I won't soon forget it.
McGlinchey has a great ear. You'll want to eat her words like figs, tearing through the membrane of sense to taste what is rich, sweet, yielding: ‘saddle sweat, smack of salt, almond; / twang of diesel. turning milk’ (from ‘Night Scents’). She has an imagist's sense of which small detail to serve up in brief, unadorned lines: ‘All that's left / dusty footprints / on a windowsill'(from ‘Red Letter Day’).
Afric's first name honours the continent on which she has lived most of her life and from which she takes much of her arresting imagery. There is a glossary in the back of the book explaining vocabulary of Shona or Afrikaans origin. The book's first section is called ‘In my dreams I travel home to Africa’. I needed the glossary lots in this section. l started to feel like l was reading a National Geographic article, rather than poetry. There's not a thing wrong with integrating words from different cultures into poetry – in McGlinchey's work, they stud the poems like jewels. However, grouping so many poems on Africa together means the jewels' glow becomes a glare. Far better to stir these poems into the whole. Reading them together, our attention is drawn to what is different about this land, these people: I prefer poetry that emphasises what cultures share.
This is the type of grouping error common in unwieldy first collections: certainly not a fatal flaw. It makes me feel protective of McGlinchey, though, as it may leave her open to the charge of being an ‘exotica writer‘. You know the sort. They liberally sprinkle foreign names into their work so you'll know they've travelled a bit. They completely overlook the point that moments of great meaning happen all the time on our own cross streets, in our own kitchens. McGlinchey is not an exotica writer. I'd place her instead amongst a group of current poets who are descendants of Whitman with his blade of grass: ‘l celebrate myself, and sing myself / And what I assume you shall assume / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you’.
The modern children of Whitman write poems less overtly political, and polemical, than some of their contemporaries. Their voices are quieter: their focus on the smaller details – the blades of grass – through which they access what both connects and transcends human experience.
McGlinchey. with her blend of the sensual and spiritual, her deep humility as a witness, her yearning for both the safe and the sublime that home can offer, is a Whitmanesque poet of enormous promise. Both she and Salmon Poetry can be proud of this lyrical, evocative début.
Interview: Afric McGlinchey interviewed for Al-Khemia Poetica on Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Read the interview here>>
Other Reviews:
'A début collection...rich with sensuous detail. McGlinchey's voice...is always assured.' Noel Williams (Orbis)
'McGlinchey's strength lies in her ability to record the noisome flux of the world.' Dave Lordan (Southword)
Chopping Wood with T.S. Eliot
John Walsh
Review: Chopping Wood with T.S. Eliot reviewed by Chris Murray for writing.ie
John Walsh's Chopping Wood with T.S Eliot published, Salmon Poetry 2010, is a taut wonderfully controlled collection of poems that forms a panoramic exposition of modernism but never once sacrifices form to mere expressiveness. There is a directness about Walsh's vision that is encapsulated in each poem's edifice or super-structure. Chopping Wood with T.S Eliot provides an exemplar of how form and distillation free the poet's voice.
This puts me in mind of Ted Hughes' reference to his practice of sometimes retaining an image in his 'black box flight-recorder', the poet wryly observes disaster and proceeds to condense it spectacularly, be it about Tara in Yes Minister, or the dangerous beginning-flight of the bird in Tipping Point.
'Tipping Point' is the pivot upon which the book turns, it is editorially placed almost at centre of this work , and it interweaves it's theme with the other poems in a manner that denies simple utilitarianism or easy answers to the conundrums the author likes to present the reader with. Tipping Pointis the weft , the dark thread, that landscapes this book, be it in frank memory of his native county or in our peculiar Irish euphemisms for war and grief. The colours that dominate this book are the dark-greens of bower and forest, or multiple shades of russet, red, wine, blackberry and autumnal shades. These colours are not decorative nor are they intended to be so, they provide a backdrop to the business of living.
Tipping Point is an almost obdurate poem. The poet works with his hands and he's not going to change an iota of his creation to accommodate the wee bird that comes bashing and smashing into his careful construction.
'A bird just hit the kitchen window.
A dull thud. Maybe too hard.
I don't like when this happens. I get
the feeling the energy is wrong.'
Later, the sense of pity and concern is balanced against the author's own creation,his home and how an unexpected occurrence, such as harm , cannot be allowed to interfere with the idea of home. There cannot be a compromise for 'safety' countenanced by the owner, who has planted the trees, who has constructed from his hands the place that is his and those of his family.
"So it disquiets when like today
the pattern is broken and something creeps in to make one think
how finely the balance is poised,
how easily it could tip the other way."
The theme has pivoted between stanza five and six,
(Stanza 5 )"That's what makes it so worrying, so strange
(Stanza 6 ) I feel sorry for them."
Place, home, the work of the hands are the important things in this book. Instruments, and utilitarian objects are there to solely express the human voice and experience. They are and should only be constructions of ingenuity, tools, the web, the bureaucratic forms involved in an adoption process, the sense of gambled and irresponsible governance, all of these things impinge upon the reality he is attempting to create. Things feel wrong or out of sync in Sales Pitch ,
"The Blackberries are early, they look like they're a bit
confused. It's barely August and here in Ireland we put up
with this mushy rain, mobs of fly-things in the wind-still,
lawnmowers going on the blink and mulched balckberries,
no good for eating, best left to wither on their stems.
(from Sales Pitch)
Nature confronts the poet along his route, his circuits, but he refuses the romantic vision with alacrity. Walsh's admiration for the male blackbird's tenacious ways, is balanced against his realism,
"With all due respect, I feel he carries it a bit too far.
All this Le sacre du Printemps goes to his head,
when all it really means is mouths to feed.
I'm still struggling to get out of bed,
never mind attending to other people's needs.
(Igor)
Walsh never once breaks with either form or lyricism, the poems look clean on the page. They are structured and underpinned with a very definite foundation, here he can accomodate his snarly rejection of wonderment, or illustrate the needlessness of utilitarianism. Here, in these poems, he can confront nature and study animal adaptions to circumstance, be it weather, or human encroachment intoanimal spaces. He is very confident in his work as a poet, even if he constantly questions the veracity of his own poem-making ! The Poet take his entitlement of revenge in relation to the cultural destrution of the royal-centre, Tara in Yes Minister, where the idea of the Minister's clean hands and his failures in terms of ecological protections are spelled out to him,
"But he says he is not in a position to go there
for he afraid to get his hands dirty
and he'll have to go washing them all over again,
wasting everyone's time and energy,
including his own.
Seamus Heaney thinks it's a disgrace
But sure noody listens to him."
(Yes Minister)
The debacle at Tara and a severe inability to join the dots on policy in ecological issues is something both the press and government have not realised is in the gift of the poet who will sing and describe the characters and miscreants as part of their observations and ideas about Ireland. This is a magnificently understated poem , which likens the Minister to Lady Macbeth. We do not think he will ever get his hands clean. The words and actions of government do not tally with each other. Few historical episodes in the Irish annals have exposed such a failure in duty, it is the poet's place to chronicle these disasters when the reams of press-release have been consigned to the shredder or tip.
Words will have their veracity, of that the poet is completely sure. He is writing a celebratory work , a memoir and he invites us to partake of it's history. It is not a wonderment but a voice of experience. It is up to the reader to delve into what we have created here in terms of our flawed grasp for modernity. The poet will not hide it from us. He makes us look at what prescriptive and hollow language has achieved for us in the midst of an apocalypse of ecological disaster brought on by our willingness to accept the drone of political language and refusal to look at what our hand has achieved.
home more or less
Paul Casey
Review: home more or less reviewed by Dave Lordan for Southword (Munster Literature Centre)
home more or less
The present is undoubtedly a period of transition and of transformation in Irish poetry, one in which the meaning of the very term "Irish poetry" is being opened up, interrogated, changed and expanded by those who practice poetry in Ireland. In fact, things are changing so much that the term "Irish poetry" simply fails to account for the range and variety of contemporary practices here. Experimentalists may argue that this has been the case throughout the 20th century, at least, and it is true that many marginal and avant-garde practitioners have preferred to place themselves globally. But this was in parallel to, and often in reaction to, a mainstream which was overwhelmingly dominated by poets and poems which clothed and rooted themselves in versions of Irishness, and never shut up about it. These days, however, who can really claim that Ireland is anything more than the name of a convenient accounting trick? Who can tell what the mainstream of Irish poetry is nowadays? Poems using ancient Celtic myths, or political myths concerning modern day Ireland as their ur-text, certainly don’t count for what they used to. These kind of poems published by poets of our generation often seem way past their sell-by date, and (given that the main challenges for artists in any discipline remain making it now and making it new) sadly lacking in contemporary nous and artistic ambition.
It's the condition of wandering exile which gives rise, perhaps, to the most understandable attachment to mythologies. Cast away from the land of our birth we may need the sustaining lie of the motherland to keep us on our feet. There are many poems in which a mythical Africa and a mythical Ireland and even a mythical Cork are well couched and beautifully presented in Paul Casey's home more or less. But I was much more impressed with the poems which eschewed cultural signposting, such as the mysterious and novelistic 'Return', or poems which offered an invigorating cut-up of the source material such as 'Imbas', 'Spell of Rest', and 'Puzzle Invocation'. These I found intriguing, memorable, original.
One of the most interesting recent developments in poetry in this jurisdiction is the emergence of a multicultural and multilingual poetic in place of the centuries' deep bilingual one, a process gestured to by the recent Landing Places anthology of immigrant poetry, and confirmed here by Paul Casey. Although it talks a lot about national identities and relies to a certain extent on mist-shrouded national mythologies, home more or less, at its most mongrelly innovative, can be read as undermining the attempt to place art according to political geographies or "linguistic communities". home more or less contains poems entirely or partially in the languages of English, Gaelic, Afrikaans and Zulu. Is an Afrikaans or a Zulu poem an Irish one?
The question may seem absurd until we remember the absurd fact that most poems we call Irish are written in the othertongue of English anyway. In any case a piece of art is never absurd until we approach it with our own absurdity. An attempt to place a poem in a category in which it patently does not belong is absurd and generates absurdity, misinterpretation, misunderstanding, and misleadingness. The best art resists and refutes attempts to claim it for any labelling prerogative. Our artistic practice should be the means by which we individually unlabel ourselves and shed all the imposed and mispronouncing layers of nation, myth, religion... The collection's stand-out poem 'Learning Afrikaans in the SADF' brilliantly personalises and dramatises this confrontation between the free and uncategorisable and the old and diabolical machinery of labelling and exploitation:
'Sorry sir, I don't speak Afrikaans', I managedand what replied was my introductionto the classified, sonic weaponrythe inmost algorithms of apartheid's armature.Haai pasop roef! Jaa nie fock nie boetie ... Jy!jy's net nog 'n fokken dom rooineck ne?nou draai daardie wit mosdop opjou kop jou klein poes bliksom se doos!
The refusal to be a good Afrikaner, a good racist, a good killer, literally drives the drill Sergeant insane:
Eruptions of spew andfury jowl-contorted soundshalf-formed hieroglyphs....
I hear an echo of the conventional critic/anthologiser railing against the brazen and unsummarisable variousness of our poetic present, losing their angry mind because we refuse to a make sense to them in the way they might wish to knock the damned sense right out of us.
© 2013 Dave Lordan
Dave Lordan was born in Derby, England, in 1975, and grew up in Clonakilty in West Cork. In 2004 he was awarded an Arts Council bursary and in 2005 he won the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry. His collections are The Boy in the Ring (Cliffs of Moher, Salmon Poetry, 2007), which won the Strong Award for best first collection by an Irish writer and was shortlisted for the Irish Times poetry prize; and Invitation to a Sacrifice (Salmon Poetry, 2010). Eigse Riada theatre company produced his first play, Jo Bangles, at the Mill Theatre, Dundrum in 2010. He has lived in Holland, Greece and Italy, and now resides in Greystones, Co Wicklow. His third collection of poetry, we are not falling, we are being thrown, will be published by Salmon later this year.
Review: home more or less reviewed by Thomas McCarthy for The Examiner, Saturday April 13th, 2013
"New collections of poetry from Afric McGlinchey and Paul Casey."
Here are two new collections by poets of the Irish diaspora, two writers of Irish parentage who returned to Ireland with a different story to tell.
Both are out of Africa, with McGlinchey following the star of Sadalachbia, the harbinger of an African spring, and Casey homeward-bound with Afrikaans as well as Munster Irish in his vocabulary. Their presence is enriching and melodic: they carry rhythms of affection that is continental in its humanity, inclusive, and multi-cultural...
...Sensuous too, Paul Casey learned his Afrikaans courtesy of the SADF: 'Haai pasop roef! He responds
'Like sub-Saharan thorns translation skills mutate and still their flowers must dilate.
He coped with the expected harshness of South Africa, and ended up teaching scriptwriting at Nelson Mandela University. Mindful of the Zulu proverb that poetry sits still while hunger is a wanderer, he hungered after another language, and as if to prove that the hunger of wandering is settled, he has written a poem for Alan Titley:
Cathain a bheith tú ag teach ar ais? tá said ag monabharcad é sin i ríocht na ndaoine? tá fhios again...'
Casey is more political than McGlinchey, and therefore more disturbed culturally. His naming of names or pointing at milestones, from Kavanagh's bench to the reworking of a Douglas Hyde translation, looks like part of a sophisticated effort to find a landing-place with enough flat grass to allow a descent.
With his mixture of humour, robust language and neurasthenic wandering, he is a serious talent; a man to demand attention. He might be addressing us all with these words:
'There you are little sisteran Irish mist about your cheek.'
Reviewed alongside Afric McGlinchey's The Lucky Star of Hidden Things.
Silent Music
Adam Wyeth
Review: Ailbhe Darcy reviews Silent Music for The Stinging Fly (Summer 2012)
Adam Wyeth is a poet of ideas exquisitely wrought and swarming, demanding a reader awake to complexity on a subtle scale. Silent Music is a debut of astonishing assurance, perhaps in part because its eye is so well-travelled: born in Sussex, Wyeth lives in Cork and his poems range beyond to New Orleans, Naples and Zimbabwe. It's an eye self-conscious about its ranging, changing focus. The collection opens on Google Earth - "We whizzed out, looking down on our blue planet, / then like gods - zoomed in towards Ireland" - thus providing a kind of frame of distance.
There are times when Wyeth brings an outsider's eye to the rural Irish that seems as much the lens of poetic licence as Synge's once did. 'Rough Music' imagines a community ganging up to shame a wife-beater by non-violent means:
The whole village came out to clamourand clash, a constant crescendoof pots and pans outside his house -
Although often about noise, the quiet complexity of Silent Music is reminiscent of Scottish poet Don Paterson, and arguably Wyeth's work, in all its subtlety, ambiguity and quietude, could come straight from Britain's 'New Generation', which is rather infamously not a place to seek any rigorous interrogation of poetry's own language. And yet, Wyeth's 'Life is Shit', like Paterson's 'The Lie', is as unexpected and troubling as any more innovative lyric out there. I won't quote it for fear of ruining the surprise, a surprise earned through the quiet control of the rest of the collection, but which also suggests the danger of that control: that it might too often lull us into comfortable and intellectual appreciation at the expense of feeling, let alone action.
Wyeth's work is full of turning and looking back. Whereas 'Dad' pinpoints elegantly the feeling, when you look back over a short road trip, that everything has been changed by the journey, 'Chimanimani Mountains, Zimbabwe' insists that there is a home, an origin, to be regained if you want it: "She will slip through the gateway - // and see her past rolled out.../ knowing each contour as her own cartography."
Session
Pete Mullineaux
Interview: Pete Mullineaux interviewed by Denise McNamara for the City Lives column of The Galway City Tribune, Friday 19th October 2012
"Educator Pete is driven by creativity" - Denise McNamara meets writer and teacher, Pete Mullineaux
Pete Mullineaux is a man on a mission. That mission is to inspire as much creativity and imagination and across as many different forms as there are out there.
If ever there was a man to exude creativity, it is the amiable Bristol man.
A Jack of all trades in the arts world, he is a published poet, songwriter, musician, dramatist, actor, comedian, educationalist and lately, just for relax- ation, a fiddle player.
This week he turns his attention to two favourite themes that crop up often in his writing: fairness and equality.
As part of the Baboró children’s arts festival, Pete is holding workshops with national school children which encour- age them to write poetry which will tip the balance towards a more just and equal society.
Held in association with Poetry Ireland and Trócaire, this poetry encounter is designed to get kids to think creatively about the world and their place in it.
“There’s so much information out there. We know there are 250 million child labourers in the world for example, we know there are 25,000 who die every day from hunger. But our leaders seem to lack the imagination to do anything about it,” he insists.
“These kids are coming up with weird and wacky ideas to tip the scales but they’re no weirder or wackier than have been tried by governments which are not working. Imagination can change the world. Our imagination is the greatest gift we have.”
The workshops instill confidence in young people to express themselves and help them get over an innate fear of being wrong which can dampen cre- ativity, he believes.
“It’s about knowing the importance of having a voice. We have a voice to articulate the imagination, we can sing, write, draw – but a lot of people don’t have a voice. This is about instilling the confidence in themselves that what they feel and what they think matters."
Free workshops are also being held in the Galway City Museum for families on Saturday to allow parents to compose poetry with their kids, creating a rich memory for posterity.
Much of Pete's working life involves teaching, al to of it teaching poetry to school kids of alleges through his association with Poetry Ireland, which runs the Writers in Schools Scheme, one of the longest running arts-in-education programmes in the country, which is funded by the Arts Council.
He leads a regular creative writing course in Oughterard as well as other creative writing courses with older people throughout the city. He teaches act- ing classes in the Galway Arts Centre and works with the Galway Youth Theatre, training the young actors in the art of devising plays.
Outside of teaching, there is his own writing. He has published three collec- tions of poetry, the last one in 2011 entitled Session, which is inspired by his love affair with the fiddle and the regular music sessions.
One of his favourite ways to relax is to get lost in the fiddle with the Dusty Banjos, a community session for beginners and improvers held weekly at the Western Hotel in Prospect Hill.
Pete’s previous poetry collection was A Father’s Day, featuring stories about dads and dedicated to his own father, “an extraordinarily caring and kind and self-sacrificing person”. That came out in 2008. The first was called Zen Traffic Lights, which was published in 2005.
The very first poem he had published was when he was just 13.
His class was asked to write a poem inspired by the annual harvest festival and the poem, Harvest Festival, was featured in the school magazine. McMillan Publishers then wrote to him asking if they could include it in an anthology featuring such luminaries as Keats, Yeats and Shakespeare, called Poetry & Song.
It was his mother who nurtured that side of his talent. “She was always act- ing in school plays and embarrassing me. She always played the principal boy – Aladdin, Jack or Dick. I remem- ber from a very, very young age she was reading and telling us stories, mak- ing up poems. She gave me a sense of love of the language and words and story.”
But it was music rather than poetry that took over his life when he moved to London in the late 70s.
He played in a punk band called The Resisters before going solo as Pete Zero performing in two Glastonbury Festivals, once sharing the stage with the Pogues. Protest singers such as Bob Dylan and Woodie Gutherie were his biggest inspirations.
His top hit was Disposable Tissues, which the BBC chose as their crazy song of the week.
Making a living on the comedy and performance poetry circuit proved a bit difficult. He decided to instead study drama as a mature student in Middlesex University and went on to teach drama
It was in London while working for a campaigning group for the elderly that he met his wife-to-be, Moya Roddy from Dublin, who was also a writer.
When the couple’s only child Cass had turned two, they decided to move to Roscahill in Connemara where they had friends.
“I got fed up pushing her around parks in London when I could be pushing her around the countryside. We came in 1991 and have never left.”
Unsurprisingly his daughter, now 22, is big into the arts but has chosen to study law and German. Moya continues to write and has published a novel, short stories as well as plays for theatre and the radio.
The couple have frequently collaborated and in 2010 they wrote the radio play, Butterfly Wings, which aired on RTÉ.
To wind down he plays the guitar and now the fiddle, which he believes is excellent training for him.
“Learning the fiddle reminds me what it’s like to be on the receiving end. I do a lot of courses with active retirement groups and many of them are afraid of writing, they might have had a bad experience with it. Learning the fiddle is so difficult. It helps me to keep in touch with how scary learning can be,” he explains.
“The fiddle is where I go into another place. You can only play it when you get into the zone. I like to play in the bathroom. I went to a Martin Hayes workshop and he said he loves my poetry – I have poems about the fiddle. He too likes to play in the bathroom,” he grins.
As well as the teaching, he runs the poetry “slam” at the Galway Arts Centre and MCs a “Grand Slam” poetry final at the Cúirt literary festival in the city in April.
He also hosts a Cúirt slam at the Electric Picnic festival mind field area in Stradbally every year. Pete is currently working on a sci-fi children’s book aimed at the 12 or 13 age group.
“This is my first novel and it’s a new venture. I do so many school visits, it would be great to have my own book to share with them. I really want to enjoy writing it.”
Review: Session by Pete Mullineaux reviewed by S.J. Holloway for Orbis, Spring 2012
CAUSE AND EFFECT: REVIEW BY S.J. HOLLOWAY
It is indicative of the content of Mullineaux's third collection that many of the poems take as their source small town, small bar folk songs, and their performances. The unity of musicians, although perhaps strangers, found in the reconstruction of traditional Irish music underpins the book: communities and connections appear and fade; the renditions of these songs are themselves equally transient. That seems to be Mullineaux's main lament as well as his joy. Poems such as 'Loosening the Grip' and 'Dusty Windowsills' both celebrate and mourn the music to which they refer. In 'Concertina', for example, there is
nothing strange then in a concertina sounding jollywhile the player's expressionis so often grave, giving little awayof what lies beneath.
The book's other main preoccupation is water, specifically the otherness or confusion of being in its presence. '[A] compromise / with nature, to survive in water / you meet your nemesis half way' ('Boats Marinating') and 'Today we came upon two animated swans / with their fluffy young, taking the tarmac / away from the river / like refugees' ('Dry River Blues') allow the poet to explore this displacement alongside that of the music. For he is an outsider, an immigrant to the rural rooms of Galway and Mayo, and in this sense he knows that to relay the music accurately is somehow to be on the inside looking out rather than the reverse, and this frustration is evident.
The problem with much of this collection, fine though it is, is that these pastoral, almost private readings thus often lack external relevance. It is possible to read a few pages at random without realising that you read those same pages some hours before. As the poet says in 'Naming the Tunes: Swinging on the Gate/The Cup of Tea': 'Music or thought, which comes first? / What subliminal transaction occurs [...]?' Yet this is not to say that the poems are not worth rereading, or do not contain levels of meaning which can only be discovered with time, but merely to suggest that in dwelling so often on the causes of music rather than its effects leads to repetition, if not in language or syntax then in tone.
For the music he speaks of is more than cultural, more than a fact of life. Perhaps this explains why lines as awkward as 'For all the brightness is within' from 'Cave Music II' can sit alongside such beautiful phrasing as 'a CD inside is playing: / Cathal Hayden's fiddle / soft as water' from 'Powell's Doorway'. As many poets have discovered before Mullineaux it is extremely difficult to transpose the sounds of music into words. Here it is done most effectively in part III, when his attempts to describe or define the causes of music are transferred to its effects. These reflections and resonances are evocative and insightful, whether human as in 'A Precarious Pint', or related to the natural world as in 'Fiddle Fox', 'Shags' ('Where are they going with such intent - these troubadours?') or the marvellous 'Requiem', which talks of cows anticipating their calves being taken away:
we make recordings of whales and dolphins[...]but the cows are singing in their campmarking their losscelebrating the grassthanking the rain.
That the poems about the performance of music are slightly esoteric is unsurprising, but in looking past the sounds themselves and concentrating on what they might represent Mullineaux crafts genuine and perceptive surprises. More, please.
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