"What I like about Mark Granier's work is his sense of the edgy play in words themselves, together with his straightforward command of narrative happenings. In their lightness of lyric touch, these poems introduce a speaking imagination that's generous, quiet, keen-eyed -- so, Dublin after a snow-storm is "roofed / in a silence deeper than Sunday", washing does "its line-dance", and windmills (in a Rembrandt etching) go cartwheeling across the horizon. In his deft illuminations of the ordinary world, Granier shows us the thin partition dividing a chilled sense of mortality from that throbbing everyday life we live and try to be aware of. Airborne is at once buoyant and "down to earth...", as good poems should be." Eamon Grennan

MARK GRANIER's first collection, Airborne, was published in 2001. He was awarded an Arts Council Bursary in 2002 and won the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize in 2004. His second collection, The Sky Road, is forthcoming from Salmon.

Flying Over Dublin By Broomstick

I'd had it in mind, how I'd go about teaching them.
Having greeted them person to person, as much as is possible
for a teacher greeting the gaze of expectant children,
having given each of them paper, a handful of crayons,
with a flourish, rabbit-from-hat-magician-style,
I'd write in bold letters, with pieces of coloured chalk,
a title for them: Flying Over Dublin By Broomstick
and leave them to whatever welled up in their minds.

But not much at all seemed to well up in their minds.
"Imagine yourselves on broomsticks", I said,
"airborne, reeling across rooftops!"
"Let yourselves go!", I said. The big shy silence
of their incomprehension showed I would have to pay
for being merely a tourist in my own childhood.

from 'The Drum Rolls of Doom', a review by James J. McAuley Poetry Ireland Review 72 SPRING 2002 

It's a surprise to find that Airborne is Mark Granier's first collection, for he's left his name on the poets' attendance sheets, here and in Britain, "for over two decades", the jacket informs us. His poems are typically brief, epigrammatic like 'A Show Of Hands', or imagistic in the W.C. Williams manner, like 'Portrait Sketch' or the exit poem, 'Vanishing Point'. Hence the book seems slight for two decades' work. Only one poem, 'Tree-Diving', a boyhood memoir in ten quatrains, requires a second page. 

Mr. Granier's craft relies on the precision of his diction, for he leaves himself very little room to convey "increments of meaning" through figuration or prosodic devices. That he succeeds so admirably in so many of these poems is testimony to his wit and flair for puns, chiselled descriptive phrases, and skillfully veiled metaphysical undercurrents. Here's 'Advice To Adolescents': 
 

Rave to the slackly made and woefully sung

(the worse the better); be moody, unstrung

for days, in love with drum-rolls of doom.

Never tidy your room.

'Ancient view Of Amsterdam', on a Rembrandt etching, opens with a pun, "A skyline accumulates from scratch", and closes nine lines later with: 
 

... a windmill, and further off

in the dismantling haze,

three others, lighter and lighter,

cartwheeling across the horizon.

There is a touching elegy for the Diceman, and a mock-apocalyptic poem about being awakened by a vacuum cleaner, and several more of such quality as to have Mr. Granier shadowing the likes of Louis MacNeice, W.R. Rodgers, and Eamon Grennan, who writes a commendation for the jacket. 

from 'Better Lives and Loves', a review by Maurice Harmon, The Irish Times, February 2nd 2002

The opening poem of Mark Granier's collection of well-wrought lyrics turns a view from Killiney Hill into an aesthetic experience of "the glide and reach of space". The poem does not strain after effects. Its ability to make aesthetic and emotional connections between the individual and the natural world is a central element in the poetry. Over and over the poet achieves memorable visual images: "the night's / foam-flecked cave", "the moon's unbeaten gong", "light's immaculate shroud". Grainer also has an apocalyptic vision. An event imagined in 'The Instrument' as a vacuum machine "sucking up the dust to which we shall return" is given greater imaginative scale in the sonnet 'When'. The sustained sweep and power of this poem is finely achieved.

from The Irish Emigrant Bookview section, edited by Pauline Ferrie, October 2001

This selection of the poet's work from over two decades is filled with the sights, sounds and sensations of our external world and the sense of looking at the world from above. In "Tree-Diving" the poet as a young boy views "the whole nodding neighbourhood" and fantasises about diving to earth, while in "Holding Pattern, Dun Aengus" the watcher finds herself "at ease in the swim of air".

All is air and colour in this lyrical collection; in "The Walk" the antics of the dog are described as "tightening and loosening big knots in the air..." while in "The War Years" the wishes of the poet's mother are "...perfect and bright, / a flotilla of parachutes drifting down out of the night..."

Diverse themes are apparent in an affectionate portrait of "The Diceman" and an ironic view of the unacknowledged importance of the vacuum cleaner, while in "Advice to Adolescents" the poet exhibits a satisfying brevity.