Poetry review: Bold poems full of verve and ambiguity

One of this collection’s great charms is Patrick Cotter’s trademark use of the absurd to tackle serious, or mock-serious, subjects

One of Patrick Cotter’s unique skills is his ability to summon animal figures to engage with a range of complex subjects. Picture: David Creedon

• Quality Control at the Miracle Factory 
• Patrick Cotter 
• Dedalus, €12.50 pb/ €20.00 hb

Patrick Cotter is, in an unconventional sense, a poet of nature. Many of the poems in his fourth collection,  Quality Control at the Miracle Factory, could be described as poetic fairy tales, similar in tone and content to those found in Anne Sexton’s peerless  Transformations.

Unlike Sexton, Cotter doesn’t reimagine traditional stories. These are very much 21st century poems with many being either about animals or written from an animal’s perspective.

One of Cotter’s unique skills is his ability to summon these animal figures to engage with a range of complex subjects. 

Humanity’s dysfunctional relationship with the natural world is a consistent theme in this collection. As much as we try to possess nature it, ultimately, possesses us.

In the poem On Pruning and Other Matters, we’re introduced to a man with a tree growing from his head. 

Whether gift or curse, he’s forced to live as an eternal wanderer while people in town squares “throw coins at him, pin banknotes to his twigs”.

We’re not told what sins have been committed to deserve this fate.

The poem offers no resolution, the afflicted man simply moves on to the next town “leaving a pair of sparrows flying overhead,/searching for their missing, cheeping nest”.

It’s hard to say if this story with its uncertain moral conclusion is posited entirely in earnest but that very ambiguity is what gives many of these poems their peculiar strength.

Animals, then, serve many functions in this collection, one of which is to act as signifiers of loss. 

The collection’s opening poem, The Mare I Meet the Week of Your Death, is tender and deeply moving. 

Here, sorrow is artfully communicated through detail and quietude: “Her prehensile lips form a glove/concealing a hand opening and closing the jaw/full of honed piano keys dicing the flexible green/blades of the roadside tufts, the wall’s farside/little Eden, little wilderness”.

Despite this, the horse’s sheer beauty offers a sense of endurance: “Now she turns an eye the size of an anemone’s bright/corona to blaze on me … her impatient ear flickering … from such fractions of life are sagas seeded”.

The book’s language and tone become much more direct in the section of the book entitled Songs in a Time of War. Spilt Milk, for example, is an unadorned description of a sniper’s victim: “The blood … pools like mercury … iron in the haemoglobin creeping preferentially/towards magnetic North … At day’s end it will be/a lickable snack for a neighbourhood cat”.

We know nothing of either the victim or the killer’s back story. The fact that both are faceless and nameless in an anonymous war only adds to the sense of mechanical butchery.

One of the book’s great charms is Cotter’s trademark use of the absurd to tackle serious, or mock-serious, subjects — such as the relevance of art and artists to modern day Ireland.

A Horse Called Franzine Marc, for example, is a poem about a horse with a taste for painting and sculpture who “would sneak … into the National Gallery, iron shoes pocking/on the marble hallways and staircases”. 

We’re then told that the horse “knew enough/about Duchamp and Beuys to be unembarrassed when/she dropped, with tail raised, an ephemeral treasure … An Arts journalist could not cease/speculating if this was meant as guerilla art/or critical commentary”.

The poem closes with a bizarre but arresting image of Robert Ballagh sitting on the horse’s back “conversing, agreeing with her approving neighing”.

Who is the butt of the joke here? Art? Art critics? Artists? Us, as readers? All of the above? As so often in this collection, Cotter doesn’t offer simple answers, but the sheer verve of the approach has to be admired.

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