Poetry review: Worthy journey despite crashes

David McLoghlin’s ‘Crash Centre’ is a candid collection of brutal reflections on the abuse suffered and survived as teen. Picture: David Creedon

• Crash Centre 
• David McLoghlin 
• Salmon Poetry, €12.00

Words like “unflinching” and “courageous” are overused when describing art but they certainly apply to David McLoghlin’s third collection.

Crash Centre is mostly a candid and sometimes brutal reflection on abuse suffered, and survived, as a teenager. 

The setting is a boarding school and early in the collection we’re introduced to the character of Fr Narziss, a man who initially wears a thin mask of charm but quickly reveals himself for what he his as he cuts the poet off from his friends, the rugby that he loves, and finally, from his own body.

Mostly, the language in the collection is very direct, with none of the comforts of metaphor or irony. We’re immediately introduced to the subject in the book’s first poem ‘Dissociation’: “frantically trying to wake the young hero…something is happening…someone is doing something/to him.”

Things are clarified even further in the collection’s second poem, ‘Talking About It’: “I said to a therapist/I think I was ( — /abused.)” 

There are strong echoes of Larkin’s struggles (expressed in equally direct language) in poems like ‘Love Again’ or ‘Aubade’: “An only life can take so long to climb/Clear of its wrong beginnings…”

The book takes a decisive turn in the poem ‘Hostage Walk’ when the speaker finds himself alone with Narziss. 

First, we’re told that it was a day “when crows were aloft…” — an unmistakable harbinger of ominous new beginnings. It’s then revealed that “he’s booked the smaller room/this time, the one with no large window, only slit embrasures”. 

Again, the language and imagery are uncompromising and direct. Things are exactly what they appear to be.

As we turn the pages, Narziss emerges as a sort of Grendel in a priest’s frock, returning again and again to devour a different vision of the poet. But, like all monsters, he must meet his Beowulf. 

This book is that reckoning, the poet’s memory the chosen terrain. The interactions between the two are played out in increasingly claustrophobic spaces and are recounted in increasingly claustrophobic poems.

In spite of the darkness, there’s music and striking imagery in here too. The description of a Samurai execution in ‘Three Person Sword’ is unforgettable: “The Poise, stillness lake-mind/necessary to make that cut…the beauty of terror.” 

Mixed Media references a “painting with spikes” in one of the rooms where abuse takes place. The last line is disturbing but powerful as the speaker describes himself staring at the painting, “disappearing into its eye.” There are many such moments in the collection.

This is, as one would expect, sometimes an uncomfortable reading experience. McLoghlin lays his body, with all its scars, before us. But, these are fine poems and well worth the journey.

The collection does sometimes digress. The poem ‘David Kieran’ is a beautiful, wistful recounting of a boy who suffered from Cystic Fibrosis, whom the poet supposes “died…before he could know romantic love.” 

As if determined to keep him alive somehow across the years, the poem closes on a splendidly sad note “Two years without touch, /as I again touched someone/ — someone beautiful — I remembered David.”

On a quest such as this, it would be impossible for every poem to be successful. Some efforts, like ‘Tom Crean Sings Sean-Nos at the Tiller in the Southern Ocean’, are more prose than poetry and read like notebook extracts. Others, such as ‘Blocking’, are a little loose in form and tone.

But these are in the minority. Right across this collection McLoghlin reveals himself to be a master conductor of our emotions, keeping us by turns heartbroken, enraged, entranced.

The poems, and the man, are to be saluted.