‘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’.
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”.
— Declan Ryan, The Irish Times
Publication date: 10 October 2024
Details: 64pp
ISBN PBK: 978 1 91133 886 4
ISBN HBK: 978 1 91133 887 1
Cover: ‘Still Life with a Plan’ (2017) by Sonia Shiel, courtesy of the artist
