Books: Poetry round-up

Carcanet £12.99

Dear Pilgrims

By John F. Deane

Carcanet Press £9.99

Venus as a Bear

By Vahni Capildeo

Carcanet Press £9.99

Heliopolis

By Hugh McMillan

Luath Press £9.99

Review by Hayden Murphy

The freedom to wonder, the liberty to imagine, a wish to be precise and the right to be contrary motivate all four writers under review.

It is a great pleasure to be embedded once again within the eclectic wordwomb of Glasgow-born (1951) Frank Kuppner. During the 1990s my Irish Times editor and I attempted to make him a cult figure in the suburbs of Dublin, or at least in Galway city. Maybe it worked. Who can tell? The fact that he is comparatively sidelined in literary circles in Scotland I find baffling.

In this his eleventh collection Kuppner presents 501 quatrains in five books. The titular Mandarin wanders and scrounges across an “alternative Imperial China”. Brevity is alien to him. He is both gregarious and expansive and yet evasive: “his views on the real world always were somewhat opaque”. His is the clamour of conceits from a bar-room Confucius who has discovered that “the new sort of tree is not really a tree at all!/It is in fact, something more resembling a large carnivorous insect./Not a very cheery thing to learn when deep in the heart of a forest, is it?”.

This Mandarin, not related to the fictional vagabonds of de Beauvoir, even has a male ‘#Me Too’ moment when: “unable to continue his work this morning/On The Fundamental Maturity of Most Chinese Poetry/ Because his wife has just beaten him senseless with the heavy manuscript–/Although, in fairness to her be it said, she did at least glance through it first.”

Then, of course, there are those speculative visits to his ageing “Aunt, the retired Imperial Concubine, Swaying Blossom, /At her charming Hillside Retreat, near the Pearl Breath of Spring Lake”. Will she be in, or even alive, when he visits again? No spoiler here. Read this book. Preferably aloud. Emote enthusiastically. Recover. Re-read it. Recommend it.

John F. Deane was born on Achill Island (1943) off the west coast of Ireland: “I am child of the island, son of its earth, spirit/ of Atlantic waters”. After a period training for the priesthood he settled in Dublin. With focused zeal he founded both Poetry Ireland and Dedalus Press, including among poets in translation Nobel Laureate Tomas Transtromer. Since his retirement as editor in 2006 he has become an acclaimed and award-winning poet. An iconoclastic disbeliever in fashion, a pilgrim soul, he probes the spiritual to articulate its foundation in doubt: “I will name things, he thought/to hold them warm inside my life”.

Celebration and compassion are central to his eighth collection with Carcanet. His daughter’s wedding evokes an epithalamium: “I prayed that –/to the question that you would need to ask – the answers might always be/the loveliness and wonder//of creation.” In the sustained Letter from East Anglia, dedicated to Dr Rowan Williams, he is on pilgrimage to a place where there “were words that made as one/the raw earth of our scrublands and the heaven of our hopes”. Towards the end of Mosaic, a six-section poem, he states “So have I lived/in bemused communion with the crinkled skin of language,/the grace of love, given and received.”

In the wonderful imaginative world of Vahini Capilido, who comes from Trinidad (b.1973) there are no borders: “I want you like I want a wall/ I want you in bits.” So from the rubble she creates verbal tapestries, starting with “a bubble of babble/swagger and swallow” (Brent Geese). Moving to highjinks with Petrarch: “Ill and inky, like a beast/but weaker, and lacking all sense/except to go towards the light –”. Though ever aware that love will have her “hanging on to language/by its clichés”.

In her seventh collection, she creates her own inimitable clichés: “a circle lands on the meadow of the retina”. Observations are held to be creative creatures. She introduces them to ‘Abroad’. To Trinidad where “my every day is a being in of being /a mixity of worlds”. To Inishbofin where “a looked for line between wet sky and water/seems non existent:”.

She becomes mediator between images and memory at The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: “The measure of my universe. /Till now I had not known the meaning of adoration”. Her creatures are by now word-dressed, lovable honey-eating bears. Preferable to humans, most of the time. Oh, and she likes cats: “aesthetic chest sitter(s)”.

Dumfries and Galloway-born and based Hugh McMillan has over the last two decades become a popular and prolific poet. At times too prolific. The former history teacher is at his best in the compressed pamphlets he has produced for Mariscat and Roncadora Presses. He was twice winner of the prestigious Callum Macdonald Award with the latter. However, his second substantial collection from Luath has both form and substance. Over six sections he excavates “the tyranny of history books” and with reforming glee allows poetry become “that piece of electricity/ between the sting and the poison”. His Liberty Tree has nests of beguiling cuckoos.