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The Sky Road Poems by MARK GRANIER
| Paperback | 130 x 204mm | 72 pages | ISBN 978-1-903392-59-1 | May 2007
Mark Granier's first collection, Airborne, was published in 2001. He was awarded an Arts Council Bursary in 2002 and the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize in 2004. The Sky Road continues to explore themes that emerged in the first collection - nature, death, art, love, travel - though here the road, both actual and metaphorical, is a central motif. "Mark Granier's new collection brims with prizes by this seasoned practitioner of the lyric form. As in his previous collection, Airborne, these poems demonstrate an unfailing capacity for surprise, wonder and delight at the various world we move about in; this time the idiom emerges with additional resources, such as self-deprecating irony and stylistic aplomb. The poet has been honing a fresh blade with the last century’s masters and wields this new instrument with relish.” Seán Lysaght
"These compact, carefully crafted poems are capable of packing a considerable charge. Whether writing about the natural world, the city and its phenomena or about relationships, Mark Granier weighs what he experiences with truthfulness, poise and an attractive sense of what language can do. Refusing to be hurried, he suggests by implication that the reader would do well to follow suit."Lawrence Sail
"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." Eamonn Grennan, on Mark Granier's first collection, Airborne
On A Harley Parked Outside Waterstone's
Chrome guts gleaming, long, low slung and over the top, propped at an angled swerve, to doorstop the eye (opened fully as a centrefold) it all, see, depends
on what holds in its own compact eye uptilted on a down- turned antler: scoop of savannah-red brick, edge of the top of Dawson Street, slashed by a blue
Indian-summer evening; deep, unhindered miles and miles, the Sky Road's rippling banner angled above the sloth hour.
The Sky Road reviewed by Fred Johnston of The Western Writers' Centre, Galway
"...pure, sensitive poetry..."
Some idea of what the discerning reader is in for can be gleaned from noting that a draft of the poem, ‘The Circuit’ won first prize in the English section of the 2002 Féile Filíochta International Poetry Competition, but even prizes apart, many of these poems have served their time in small magazines and other noteworthy publications. Whether tackling the gently historic or the amorously immediate, Granier has a touch as sure as an old master; he is one of a tiny number of poets who have come up relatively quickly but have had the talent to match the acceleration. In a masterstroke of poetic archeology, ‘Find’, the historic is made palm-sized and holdable: “No modern paving-brick, this/lopsided ovoid, raw/stone drawn from the mud//of a cobbled, medieval Drogheda./Unshaped and shapely/as a handy wedge, . . ” To draw ’shapely’ alongside ‘unshapely’ takes courage, but it works. Granier is a distinctly lyric-bound poet, who hears the music behind the shapes that are mere words:
“A tear in evening’s lavender cloud-carpet. There’s time to take in a bolt of hard blue .....” - ‘Singapore-London-Dublin’
For this reviewer, it’s the wonderful and deceptively simplistic four sectioned poems making up ‘Western Stills,’ with titles such as ‘Moon on Inis Mór’, ‘Approaching Dun Aengus,’ ‘Indreabhán, 5 a.m.’, ‘On The N6′ which illustrate best what Mark Granier can do. Here image and feeling are fused into a photographer’s imaginative but still absolute focus: an oar is ‘bone-white,’ a snowman is a ‘thawing ghost’, there is ‘wave-thunder’. This is word-magic. A button-review cannot do justice to what is arguably one of the finest, most totally poetical collections of poetry this year, completely unmarred by affectation, rush, or corner-of-the-mouth smartness. They are mature. Best just go out, buy this memorable little book, sit back and let it blow through you. And congrats to Salmon for finding these poems and giving them a place to put their feet up.
- Fred Johnston
