DAMIAN SMYTH
Downpatrick Races
Lagan Press, £6.95

LEONTIA FLYNN
These Days
Cape Poetry, £8

MATTHEW HOLLIS
Ground Water
Bloodaxe Books, £7.95

Craig Charles once bemoaned the off-duty comedian’s lot: sitting in a crowd, unable to relax and laugh as he was constantly thinking how he might have done that gag, or analysing the mechanics of a rival’s shtick.

It’s like that in poetry — I find myself with so-and-so’s third collection, weighing it up against its predecessor, or thinking how I might have handled that tricky last stanza. This, I think, is why I like debut collections — not the ‘commodification of youth’ (the three poets reviewed here have a combined age of over 100), but the pleasure of a new voice, a new iconography, a new personality (no ‘death of the author’ cringing please: poetry is at heart a performing art, with poet and poem in combination).

Though I’m ever wary of generalizations about national ‘literary traditions’, the wistful family anecdote seems to claim a central position in Irish poetry. Even experimentalists are prone to the occasional yarn about ‘me auld Da’. When Tom French won the Forward prize for Best First Collection in 2002, it was noted how many of his poems began with ‘My father...’, ‘My mother...’ and so on.

Damian Smyth’s Downpatrick Races takes this further, being a whole collection of poems about his family, his home area and its characters and history. I’m more than open to the wiles of poets who woo me with a ‘Let me tell you about myself...’ (the ego is poetry’s diesel), but ‘Here’s another about my cousin Johnny...’ might well see me reaching for my coat.

Yet, unsure that I would, I warmed to Smyth’s book (despite a printing error meaning the last eight pages were missing). ‘This is my town and all of us there’ he writes in ‘A Gift from Downpatrick’ and sure enough, we have Big Bill and Wee Joe, tales of Smyth’s jailed rebel brother and his blind granny. The ‘local worthy’ anecdotes are nicely turned, if at times little more than props for a barstool punchline. The poems about family tease out sentiment (his grandmother’s ‘beautiful old voice squeaking and creaking’) without blowing its late-night sax, side-stepping the over-familiar and selecting poignant details such as his mother’s fondness for dreaming through clothes catalogues.

A one-theme debut (should we say ‘concept volume’?) is a rare thing. One presumes Smyth has written poems beyond the scope of his parish, (naturally, wider points about small town existence are being made) and I would say a few poems arising from love, travel, the roll-call of miscellany would have strengthened this book.

The blurb claims these poems are ‘evocative’ and, yes, the best of them are, a hard trick to pull off. ‘01396’ recounts the workings of the old telephone system, while ‘The Celtic Invasions’ captures the unease and curiosity the Celtic countries felt about Europe (or the idea of Europe)back in the 1970s, halfway between war and federacy. Like spending a few days there, Smyth returns us to the town’s main fixtures — the racecourse, the River Quoile, the Arkle Bar, named after the mighty racehorse. But when the poet steps outside the county town, and adopts a more lyric tone, I like him best, as in ‘The Chieftain’s Daughter’ where he recalls his younger self wondering if he might...

                      at autumn find
sap-made celtic bloodstains on a stone,
flee the knife-flash of sun on a closing gate,
be saved by the chieftain’s daughter

...or in ‘The Loop’ where ‘a station cut off when the tide of the rails went out / is holding its breath for the celandine...’ And my favourite poem in the book was ‘Bearings’, an eerie piece about a flooded lough encroaching inland, the town’s inhabitants drawn from their quotidian duties to watch for a possible miracle.

In recent years, I have hosted an annual reading for the Eric Gregory Award winners. Now, I begin to see the books emerge as younger poets such as Kathryn Gray, Jacob Polley and Belfast’s Leontia Flynn gather enough material for a debut. ‘Have you seen the size of the blurb?’ someone commented on Flynn’s These Days. Right enough, there on the back are recommendations from Longley, Greenlaw, Paulin, Burnside and Carson, forecasting, variously, élan, self-possession, lyricism and assurance. Two proclaim her ‘the real thing’, as loaded a phrase as exists in poets’ cant. Having seen Flynn read engagingly, having read quite a few of her short, bittersweet poems, I knew her to be fresh, impressive, funny, but I worried about the task of living up to a debut from Cape, all those heady blurbs from stentorian peers.

Inevitably then, we have the Irish family anecdote, but I call off my cynicism when Flynn writes as winning a piece as ‘By My Skin’, about her singing father bathing his eczematous offspring — ‘the air is bright with a billion exfoliate flitters / as he changes track...’. As in many of her poems, the tone is breezy, charming, brimming with wit. And there’s the rub. Aren’t this season’s ‘real things’ in British and Irish poetry supposed to be ‘seriousness’, ‘political engagement’, philosophical introspection, shallow postmodernism, the sugary legalese of academic verse? Blurbed up or not, what are we to make of a poet whose typical poem is a dozen lines, free of tricks, far from lapidary and happily so, whose prime subject is boys and who dares to be (whisper it) funny?

All these aspects make These Days thoroughly readable, of course, but whether it withstands being read repeatedly is open to debate (as is whether that matters one bit). Certainly, there are things here (‘April, 7P.M.’, the fourth of the five poems titled ‘Without Me’) so slight, their inclusion is questionable.

But Flynn is neither a purveyor of light verse, nor a performance poet. She’s subtle: her thing is to hammer bolts of strangeness through a yarn, to thread conversational vignettes with strands of lyricism. The fifth ‘Without Me’ is about two people playing frisbee with the lid of a rat-poison bin, yet continues, ‘you would have sworn that its flat arc was a pendulum / compassing Tyrone’s prosy horizon’, setting the poem up nicely for a slick and moving ending.

Slightly longer pieces here have more weight (not always the case), especially the clever title poem and the ruminative ‘The Furthest Distances I’ve Travelled’. But perhaps the best recommendation of Flynn’s style, her poems being often short, is to offer the collection’s opener ‘Naming It’ in full:

Five years out of school and preachy
with booklearning, it is good to be discovered
as a marauding child.
To think the gloomiest most baffled
misadventures might lead so suddenly
to a clearing — as when a friend
taking me to her well-stocked fridge says:
look
this is an avocado and this
is an aubergine.

I first encountered Matthew Hollis a decade back in Edinburgh when he was a promising student poet. A confident and astute writer and a good reader, his debut could have come much earlier, and Ground Water offers a prudent selection of his work, with many interesting pieces from his previous pamphlet The Boy on the Edge of Happiness being left aside. This may well be in order to strengthen the collection’s thematic bond, the poems returning again and again to liquid themes: rain, milk, sea, whisky, downpours, snow.

Hollis is a lyric poet, quietly musical, ever thoughtful. The beginning of ‘Skin Contact’ is typical:

Beyond the gravel and the clay-stone stile,
where the small town narrows to a model,

I step into the vines and the last night air
and wait for the dawn to come about...

Here and elsewhere in the book, we see how well Hollis has learned from the clutch of poets who were in ascendance during his time in Scotland, especially John Burnside and Don Paterson and from poets such as Longley who in turn had been such an influence on them. It’s tempting, in fact, to adopt the East Anglian Hollis as an honorary Celt.

He has a delicate precision: try ‘I’d run the gat of the riverbank, checking / the traps for knapped rabbits; my father closing / the cloth on his sickle, petal by wintering petal.’ (‘One Man Went to Mow’) or ‘the half-attended paddock wall / scribbled with blackthorn and broke-wool.’ (‘The Fielder’). And he has a neat way of sliding in unusual words, especially the jargon of work (kerf, ullage, pikepole).

One of Hollis’ specialities is the melancholy love poem, relationships and their twilit aftermaths being seen through with resilience or reluctance. In ‘Sandwriting’, ‘senseless to your whereabouts, I drank instead / to each single letter of your name’ while in ‘Here Are Some Words’, ‘you are leaving our bed, and stepping out / of the circle that marks what we know / from what we will measure apart.’

And from the melancholy, he can turn too to the sinister: one of the best pieces here is ‘The Sour House’ which tells of a man whose house is filling up with the festering milk he cannot bring himself to cancel after his parents’ deaths: ‘airing his house, the rancour / would catch as far as the common’.

The subject of family appears again here, sadly in the shape of a sequence about Hollis’ father’s death which ends the book. Yet ‘Our Father’ rails against the tempting glibness of elegy : ‘no allusions, no clever connections / to the wilting of flowers’; and in ‘The Wash’, a fine, rain-soaked piece, Hollis comes sideways at the subject of cancer : ‘It’s not the flood I fear but what comes after...’.

The judges of the Best First Collection prizes are going to have a difficult year, which is good news of course. As well as the books reviewed here, there are strong contenders from Kona Macphee, Jacob Polley, the late Dorothy Molloy, Cheryl Follon, Jonathan Asser, Sasha Dugdale and Kathryn Gray. Good luck to them.

Roddy Lumsden’s Selected Poems: Mischief Night will be published by Bloodaxe in July this year.

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