Poetry review: The fine art of surprise

Some of the best poems in Bernard O’Donoghue’s latest collection come when he strays beyond his comfort zone. Picture: Larry Cummins

• The Anchorage 
• Bernard O’Donoghue 
• Faber, €18.85

Bernard O’Donoghue’s latest collection, The Anchorage, contains a familiar mix of reflections on rural life combined with scholarly references. 

The poem L’Aiuola, for instance, begins with a quote from Dante before moving into an achingly tender recollection of his schooldays: “In the morning it was raining, so/we were sent unwillingly to school”. 

As so often with O’Donoghue, a seemingly simple opening to a poem leaves us unprepared for what’s to come. In this case, later in the day, his father’s hat is seen “framed in the dim glass/of the classroom half-door, motioning to us”. 

The speaker’s sister, we learn, is about to die and he and his siblings must be brought home. In the poem’s closing lines we are left to contemplate “the flower garden/that Theresa had tended all her short life”.

These poems, while gentle in tone, are acts of remembrance; monuments to people, to communities, to ways of life now passed.

Even a glance at the list of contents, containing titles such as Kate’s Magic Egg and Jim Cronin Recalls his Parting from Denis Hickey, gives a strong indication of what’s in store for the reader. 

The act of poetic naming is a tradition that runs deep in Irish literature. It’s a surprisingly difficult skill and O’Donoghue does it better than most.

  Walking the Land is a particularly fine example. The first lines, predictably, set us in the past: “In the days before the auction of the farm/the cold March of 1962,/I led potential buyers through the fields”. 

Of course, the speaker doesn’t want to part from these fields that are so much a part of him. Each one must be called upon in turn: “the Gate Field; Jackson’s; the Western Field;/the Stone Field…The Cottage Field…The Well Field…and the Furzy Glen/where we had seen long-eared owls/winging mystically through the twilight”. 

Potential buyers, however, see the land very differently: “none of these were considerations/that weighed much with…the men/who were pondering a bid for our farmland”.

This sense of something precious being lost pervades the whole collection. Every ghost summoned makes the reality of change more poignant.

The characters in this collection are portrayed with affection and empathy but their lives are never romanticised; there’s a darkness hidden beneath the surface of many of these poems. 

In Safe Houses, the speaker tells us a straightforward story about visiting a relative in the communal area of a nursing home before closing with the ambiguous lines: “not grasping what they’ve been exiled from,/some corner where the serpent cannot reach”. 

The Pulsator, a poem which quietly draws attention to religious and social divides, offers a similarly enigmatic ending. 

In this poem “A man called Joyce from Galway” comes to repair the milking machine and has to stay the night. 

The following morning, Sunday, he is asked if he wants to get up for Mass: “But he said that he was Church of Ireland,/And turned his back.”

The poems in this collection are almost whispered to us, as if O’Donoghue is afraid that speaking too vehemently, or being too consciously artful, will break the spell they hold over him, and us. 

At times, though, a change of tone and pace would be welcome. 

In fact, some of the very best poems in the collection come when O’Donoghue strays from his comfort zone. 

Unbroken Dreams is a superb, hopeful, meditation on death while Immortelles, a poem ostensibly about carnations at the end of summer, brilliantly evokes Larkin’s Love Songs in Age.

The Anchorage, mostly, offers us the kinds of heartfelt poems that O’Donoghue has built his reputation on. Its very finest moments, however, come when he surprises us.