The Stone Jug is the third collection of poems by Frank McGuinness. The first of its three parts is a series of evocations of his native Buncrana in County Donegal, ‘my home town, my hard town’; another is rooted in the styles and subjects of Old English poetry.
The centrepiece of the collection is ‘Gyrfalcon’, a sequence of sixty sonnets whose ecstatic energies embrace affairs, recriminations and a set of ghostings by the dead. ‘I believe only in what’s rough, red and raw’, he writes — a claim this edgy, ferocious, passionate work supports.
. . . to hell with hell.
Hell is the heart breaking.
— ‘Leaves’
At the centre of The Stone Jug by Frank McGuinness is a group of sixty sonnets tracing the course of a trans-Atlantic love affair. The distance and difficulty of the relationship ignite the poems. They are a remarkable rendering of gay love which in its passion and intensity is the equal of any other kind of love but also carries its own particular freight of difficulty . . . McGuinness’s sonnets are written from the heat of the moment, fuelled by anguish, anger and anxiety as much as by passion. — Peter Denman, Poetry Ireland Review
At the centre of The Stone Jug by Frank McGuinness is a group of sixty sonnets tracing the course of a trans-Atlantic love affair. The distance and difficulty of the relationship ignite the poems. They are a remarkable rendering of gay love which in its passion and intensity is the equal of any other kind of love but also carries its own particular freight of difficulty. The sonnet sequence is a traditional and well-tried form for love poetry, reaching back through Berryman’ s sonnets and Victorians such as Meredith and Barrett Browning to Elizabethans like Spenser and Sidney. But if any sonneteer can be sensed standing alongside McGuinness’s poems, it is Shakespeare — and the Shakespeare of the turbulent sonnets towards the end of the numbered sequence, not the reflective sonnets that take a carefully thought-out image or simile as their starting point: ‘Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore’ and ‘Full many a glorious morning have I seen.· McGuinness’s sonnets are written from the heat of the moment, fuelled by anguish, anger and anxiety as much as by passion.
The sonnets are only partly rhymed, and the division of the line groupings is constantly changed from poem to poem. Some have fewer and some more than fourteen lines. Les Murray approvingly identified the fourteenth to twenty-first lines of a sonnet as having ‘the quality of sprawl,’ but there is nothing of sprawl in these poems; they are a concentration of energy and intensity. Nor are they shy of swerving into the oblique language of symbol, and they shadow rhyme and form, but steadfastly retain the rhythms and direct address of the speaking voice. This probably carries over from McGuinness’s work as a playwright.
If l believed that, I’d believe the nights
were for the birds, believe debts were paid
years before they send in the bailiffs. You
come back to me some mornings. I’m awake.
My honeyed tongue singing, singing the blues.
— ‘You’
Before and after the sonnet sequence there are some other poems. There are some short epigrammatic poems, but the more successful are the longer pieces. ‘Mount Fahan’ is a sort of landscape and memory poem, describing part of the Buncrana setting where McGuinness grew up but infusing it with rich symbolic overtones. And at the end of the collection are two effective versions of Old English poems, ‘The Wife’s Lament’ and ‘The Husband’s Message.’
— Peter Denman, Poetry Ireland Review