Swans We Cannot See reviewed by Nessa O’Mahony in Poetry Ireland Review
Andrew Jamison’s third collection with The Gallery Press happily continues that poet’s engagement with the canon, opening with a quote from Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger – there are also evocations of Georges Bertrand and John Millington Synge later in the volume, not to mention a delightful cameo of Ciaran Carson. Kavanagh’s verse epic was an unflinching dissection of blighted masculinity in a period of religious and economic repression. Though based in Oxford, Jamison is writing of an Ireland that would have been unrecognisable to Kavanagh, so it’s about how the poetic male gaze has changed over the decades. The opening poem, ‘Listening to the Swan’, situates the speaker far away from the shrivelled fireside of Patrick Maguire. Here is the poet as twenty-first-century father, picking his child up after work and taking him to look at a swan. The poem is specific about biographical and geographical details …
on the still river backwater at Sutton Courtenay
where I’ve taken you in my work clothes
after I’ve picked you up from your long day
at nursery while I’ve worked to keep you
at nursery
… and makes use of one long, breathless, and unpunctuated sentence over 29 lines that suggests the speed with which experiences of parenthood can be over almost before they begin. The opening poems offer a tender, often comic view of parenthood, where poetic muses need to jostle with the child for the poet’s attention . . .
Domestic poems are interspersed with longer, more philosophical considerations of the state of the nation, often with comic effect . . . The social satire is sharply observed, the ventriloquism playful but hitting its target in a way that causes discomfort . . . ‘
Jamison is especially expert at the forensic dissection of modern mores. In ‘To Abingdon’ he describes a ‘Quintessence of suburbia, roost/ of aspiring middle to senior leaders, / hub of reasonably priced supermarkets’, but there’s always space for evocations of the past, as in ‘Heaven as a Newsagents’ where the aforementioned establishment is described as’cramped, badly lit, the front … frosted over / with an advert for Lambert & Butler. Cash register / and shop-door bell ring.’
Making, either the making of poems or other acts of artisanship, is the book’s major focus. . . This is a varied, highly enjoyable collection, from a unique, idiosyncratic voice.
Read the full review in Poetry Ireland Review #144
