Review of The Lookout Post in Poetry Ireland Review
‘How to Use This Poem’, the first poem in Kevin Graham’s The Lookout Post, offers some clues as to that book’s differences from Ryan’s. Leaning in empathetically where the more reserved Ryan holds back, Graham’s poems spark instinctively into affirming flames at the death (‘The current you will feel will be equal / to the square root of peace multiplied by sky’, ‘your heart a floodgate, flooding’). A sonnet ending ‘oars still as light, / waiting for the moon to honey in the night’ presents a higher tolerance for chiming resolutions too. These are warm and open-hearted poems, greedy for sensation and tracking their occasions ‘like sharks running close to the surface’. At the same time, something in the mix often moves in to veil or mute the closing epiphanies (‘ and still there will be oblivion’, understanding the truth / in never really knowing’).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, that patron saint of unknowing, thought that eternity meant living fully in the moment, and Graham would tend to agree ‘And it strikes me there is only /the moment’ – though his saying so in a poem on the suicide of a classmate puts that present moment under some extra load-bearing strain. ‘Things come alive when / they’re not yours to keep’, Graham writes in ‘Locale’, learning to ‘kiss the joy as it flies’. Someone whose image-rich poems knew a lot about inhabiting the present moment is Elizabeth Bishop, whose fingerprints are on many of these pages. Why, a seal even pops up at one point ‘to say hello’, even if Graham does not sing it any Baptist hymns. ‘Elizabeth Bishop in Ireland’ follows the American poet on holiday, but can’t resist getting in close – a little too close to skim some palpability off the unsaid (‘You cut a gloomy figure standing there / at the edge of existence but I’d say / you were a riot’).
Elsewhere, Graham fights back against the temptation to use the figure in the landscape for an epiphanic drive-past. He writes sensitively about parenthood: in ‘To a Boy Blowing Bubbles in the Rain’, a child’s gaze trained on a beggar finds him unhooking a false eye, to ‘make[s] us regard the dark hole / of our pity’. The fact that ‘every corner of this city has been / pissed on’ further damps down any tweeness in the offing. Despite this vignette of dear dirty Dublin, Graham is not much drawn to urban grime, with his dissonant elements occurring more in a spirit of ‘clouds above an idyll’ than anything harder-edged. In another poem on sudden death, ‘On a Bridge Suicide’, Graham remembers a Scott Hutchison lyric asking ‘Is there peace / beneath the roar of the Forth Road Bridge?‘, and finds himself ‘moved / by the notion of hope, that we might I never ask the question.’ I will now float my theory that when poems ask rhetorical questions, the answer is invariably ‘no’ (‘Was there another Troy for you to burn?’); if there is peace under the bridge it is of the kind that passeth understanding. The poem turns up tragically late and casts about for something to say, something better than nothing, while knowing that nothing can really suffice. We would like to believe that ‘poetry is strong enough to help’, as Seamus Heaney misquoted Seferis in The Redress of Poetry (he actually said ‘Cavafy, in times of stress, is not strong enough to help’). The gesture will never not be worth making, but its power to help remains an open question.
Nods elsewhere in the book to Mahon and Larkin underscore the book’s lyric credo. In ‘Locus’, ‘You ask for clarity so I set / a glass of water on the counter’, and I think of Larkin raising his glass of water ‘Where any-angled light/ would congregate endlessly’. Graham believes in moments of clarity parting ‘the brightening air’, and some quality of transient illumination that survives its own extinction; (‘And honour the blackbird, / how it beguiles and is then gone’). At its more elegiac, The Lookout Post can give the impression of being but ‘a catch in the breath … amid the deepening shades’, pouring itself lovingly down its own dark (‘There is only the reflection / of all we cannot see’). None the less, suave and humane collection that it is, it emits a warm and cheering glow as it does so.
— David Wheatley, Poetry Ireland Review #141
