‘For all the amiable good humour of the voice of these poems, they never stray far from the things that really matter in modern life,’ Bernard O’Donoghue wrote of John McAuliffe’s Selected Poems. ‘The domain of the imagined is always at the service of the world we know, to cast light on it.’ The poems in National Theatre go further, navigating present-day strains and pleasures even as events — driven by national politics and global weathers — alter and define their range.
The title poem’s ‘storms of hot air’ generate turbulence which clouds the currents of everyday routines. Horace, the Roman lyric and elegiac poet, remains a touchstone for John McAuliffe’s civic poetics and Rome itself becomes a character in the book, host to a G20 summit whose crisis management recalls the cycles of violence which that city has survived.
Other writers — Derek Mahon, Martin Amis — are subjects of notable elegies. ‘Domestic’ poems dramatize, with tact, joy and sadness, the evolving relations between child and parent. All through, art’s place in human days is valued as ‘life swims / into the fortress of a formal device’.
