Commentaries

Mr Clarke’s poems constitute a commentary on Irish life, the earlier poems passionate and mediaeval, the later ones hard-bitten and acrid with disgust. The poet’s own words to Robert Frost describe his process exactly – ‘I load myself with chains and try to get out of them.’ Those who like the rhymeless intellectual Irish ferocity will like these poems very much.

The ‘correspondence for the stage’ which Mr Duncan has constructed from the seven original letters between Abelard and Heloise is as good as anything he has done. The two characters come to life, the quality of obsession in their love is fully captured by Mr Duncan’s colloquial rhetoric.

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Yet something is missing. One hears a man’s voice speaking, a woman’s voice speaking, personal, exact, and those two great archetypal figures of romantic love somehow cease to exist.

Mr Gunn’s poems are wholly his own. One learns not to look for visions and affirmations among the best poets now writing only a sad hangover honesty appropriate perhaps to the Hydrogen Age. This poet’s verse-structure is itself like the ring-mail he describes in his poem ‘The Byrnies’ –

Byrnie on byrnie! As they turned
They saw light trapped between the man-made joints,
Central in every link it burned,
Reduced and steadied to a thousand points.
Thus for each blunt-faced ignorant one
The great grey rigid uniform combined
Safety with virtue of the sun.
Thus concepts linked like chain-mail in the mind . . .

There is little difference between the marauding Norsemen, so perfectly evoked, and the young van-driver in ‘Black Jackets’ who wears tattooed on his left shoulder the name of his gang, ‘The Knights’, and on his right shoulder the slogan ‘Born to Lose’. These two poems, and several others, are beyond critical ferreting. Mr Gunn understands our barbarian age better than it understands itself. He knows its animal vigour and nihilist endurance, and between the words, like blood or serum, he allows a suggestion to seep out of what it has lost.

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