In The Irish Times Review of National Theatre Declan Ryan writes:
There’s a distrust of “interesting times” in John McAuliffe’s latest collection, National Theatre (Gallery), a sense that “a quiet life goes out, which he suddenly wants”. This is a book which feels poised on its various precipices, looking backwards and forwards, waiting with an admixture of alarm and dawning recognition that “the world is more and more like an altered/photo of itself”.
It’s also a book aware of its knack for constructing clinching symbols, from an ordinary life being – in some ways – eulogised, “It does, in spite of everything, this left shoe, do more than speak for just itself”, while “A life swims/into the fortress of a formal device”. Not unlinked is an elegy for Martin Amis, which is not only a fitting match for the novelist’s capacious, ever-attentive, loquaciousness but a nod towards the ways in which, in the right circumstances, “pleasure [was] something you could double/into paying work”.
The impressive Fog Lane has a fabular quality which links several of the book’s seemingly competing instincts – at once hymning the everyday while creating patterns, and a resonant, metaphorical, set piece which cuts through the bafflement and disinheritances of the poems’ speakers. The world, to some degree, feels like the ball in Fog Lane, “Not yet given up as lost/or out of reach”, while the I of the poems so often, as per The Scientific Method, is “a participant observer, not unobsessive”.
Interestingly, the ghost of Robert Lowell crops up more than once, and the sense of using the daily bread of experience to talk, at times elliptically, about wider, political upheaval, to witness “one of the great trees of state going under,/the capital of a long childhood gone west” seems apt, as does a quote from Lowell’s elegy for TS Eliot, “lost in the dark night of the brilliant talkers”.
