Poetry review: David Nash's changing landscapes

There’s a pervasive sense of grief for promise not fulfilled in David Nash's  latest colllection, 'No Man’s Land', 

• No Man’s Land 
• David Nash 
• Dedalus, €12.50 – €20.00

David Nash’s  collection, No Man’s Land, is filled with poems that act as monuments to absence and loss. 

The poems in this striking collection are notable as much for what is not present as for what is. 

All through the book we see landscapes changing, not being what they were or what they should be. There’s a pervasive sense of grief for promise not fulfilled. 

As he says in ‘Snow Drop’: “what might have/been, what might have/been, what/might have been.”

It’s not just changes in nature that this book concerns itself with. We also see poems that grieve for loss of language, means of expression, the Irish language in particular. 

In ‘The Geata Dearg’, a poem about a gate near his family home, we are told that he’s spoken the gate’s Irish name “more often than most of my English”.

Again and again in this collection we see that the poet, or the voice in the poems, is not a distant observer of his surroundings, of his language, of nature, as he says in ‘The Geata Dearg’: “I came out of this world, not into it”. 

It’s notable too that Irish language phrases and words are used repeatedly in the collection though, at times, this can feel a little forced, as if the poet is determined to stick to his theme regardless of where the poems really want to go. 

The same is true of the frequent attempts to mimic the presumed spoken English of rural Ireland.

More than once in the book we’re offered the grim suggestion that our planet is older than we are and could, perhaps, shrug off our absence.

In the poem ‘The River’, he says: “Should any of us drown…the river/must be considered to have carried out its duty” and “When the river has had it up to here with us, it will point out/to sea”. 

More than this, in ‘Snow Drop’ we’re reminded that there’s a great big universe out there, one in which even our planet must know its place “Out/in breathless space/the universe/is testing/its own waistband”.

The other great absence in this collection is personal relationships, other humans. 

We see none of the things that normally populate contemporary poetry collections such as love, heartbreak, illness, grief, or parenthood. Indeed, one of the few times that we see a personal relationship addressed in detail is in the book’s opening poem ‘Nettle’. 

Even here the grandfather figure is present as a ghost, a memory. 

This is all surely intentional, but it does have the effect of making it harder, at times, to connect emotionally with the weighty subjects addressed in the collection.

We learn little about the poet directly in this book. His inner self is reflected in the world around him. Nature’s changes are changes in him, nature’s wounds are his wounds. 

But what of the human forces that are driving all this loss and apprehension? On this, the book is strangely silent. There are, perhaps, more poems for Nash to write on this.

The collection’s final poem ‘Why You Should Really Think About
Rewilding’ is all the best things about these poems in microcosm.

He opens with “We are standing/in what used to be/our forest” and later tell us that “our wide-eyed jungle/died”. 

Then there is the hovering fear that this is just the start, things can get worse: “This is an overture”. 

But, in Nash’s universe, there is always a reason to fight for the things we love; a reason to stay in the game; a reason, in short, to hope. 

The poem finishes with the line: “What I’m saying is/take a chance on it./The seed is reckless.”

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