It is no surprise that Long Distance, by the author of the widely praised The Time Being (2021), reveals the deepening impression of a poet who is both chronicler of all that fades and passes and observer of ‘our giant reapers’ that harvest wind for ‘our new elixir’.
In forms that range from sequences of sonnets to haiku he acknowledges and brings to life vividly worlds familiar and strange — what he calls ‘the remote and the ordinary’ — as he hovers somewhere between them. A schoolboy absorbs the effects of Seán Ó Riada’s cortège. There’s a translation of an early photograph and the ‘surround sound’ of a corncrake while settings reach from his home place in West Cork to Queensland, Australia, and a mountain in China’s Hunan province.
‘I have work to do / to keep it all as it is,’ he writes in resonant and remarkable poems cognizant that ‘a long note / from an angel’s throat once sung / can never be silenced’.
The atmosphere of John Fitzgerald’s Long Distance (Gallery) is set up at the off, its opening poem Familiar speaking of “Staring intently”, with “eyes wide to everything”. Fitzgerald is a watchful, modest writer – open to admitting mistakes, to revisions, and the need for second, reshaping, looks.
If there is a reluctance towards flashiness, an accounting for the “if” in each proposition, Fitzgerald still permits “a small allowable/indulgence” every now and then, rising to the performance of his poems with an occasional turn towards full, knowingly uptuned, rhyme, but largely his is an artful understatement: “But I have work to do/to keep all this as it is:/remote, dishabited, ordinary”.
It’s a book populated by ghosts, by the need and at times discomfort of elegy. There’s a freeing-up that goes with the disappearance of old certainties, as well as the loss: “Now that you are dead I can write this”, Clanrath begins, in which an old secret can be unburdened, and there are poems in memoriam of Seamus Heaney, as well as closer, blood, relations.
The abiding sense is of time slipping – or racing – away, “wanting to leave you a voicemail/that explains where all the years have gone”, while in Steeplechase we see “Time galloping beside me”. Time is a constant refrain, both the word and the force – and there’s a sense of an accepting kind of powerlessness in the face of it, which complicates and consoles: “Only those with few imperatives remain”, “I must believe/this is the Universe/letting me know/that my call has been received/and logged and will/be dealt with in due course”.
These are poems which avoid easy answers, at times avoid conclusions entirely, which suggest “there’s no meaning to our presence here on Earth,/except what we can engineer from happenstance” yet ennoble that witnessed mixture of luck, and coincidence, nonetheless.
— Declan Ryan, The Irish Times
