Clarity in vision, thought and language, distinguishes The Time Being, John FitzGerald's first collection. With poems that explore place and memory, family, relationships and the natural world, John FitzGerald establishes a potent empathy with his reader through a watchful, precise poetry. Some poems enact themselves through their linguistic physicality and rootedness in place. Others search deeper for what it means to be alive and alert in the world today. Moments from America, Iceland and China are set among experiences of the land and countryside around the poet’s home in rural Ireland. All are revelations of one sort or another, their controlled energy producing a drama that is at once private and universal. Delighting in setting, language and form, The Time Being marks the arrival of a distinctive presence in Irish poetry.
. . . and I wonderif my real purpose in returning herehas been to make good the past,ensure that someone gets it right this time . . .
— ‘Seeing Clear’
John FitzGerald was born in Cork in 1962. He won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 2014 and was shortlisted for a Hennessy Award in 2015. A chapbook, First Cut, appeared in 2017, followed by Darklight, a limited edition, in 2019. A recipient of a Key West Literary Bursary, he has lived in Dublin, London and Florence, and since 1995 has worked as University Librarian at University College Cork. He lives with his family on their farm in Carrigdarrery, County Cork.
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| Weight | 180 g |
|---|---|
| Choose Type | Hardback, Paperback |
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Book Information
Publication date: 24 June 2021
Details: 64pp
ISBN PBK: 978 1 91133 808 6
ISBN HBK: 978 1 91133 809 3
Cover: ‘Bird Still Life’ (1973) by Patrick Hennessy from the UCC Art Collection © Royal Hibernian Academy
Reviews
Stolen moments and brave imaginings
John FitzGerald’s The Time Being opens, strikingly, with destruction, ‘the smoky/up-throttling roar’ of a chainsaw in a boy’s hand. ‘It was like cutting into pure fear / to sunder it.’ Throughout this confident, graceful and often dark collection, FitzGerald attends to the fear of historical continuance. The farmer, rather than tasked solely with the up-keep of tradition, is figured as a corrector, an atoner, determined ‘to make good the past’.
It is rare to come across a debut from a poet whose voice is so assured and unfaltering. These lyrics are steeped in tradition, echoing Edward Thomas in places, and there are thrilling glints of a brave imagination: a cat’s tongue, in one poem is ‘genital pink’.
Occasionally, one feels that the acuteness and precision of FitzGerald’s work could be deepened by digging into more vulnerable emotional territory, by risking more, Indeed, FitzGerald achieves this in many places. The best poem in the collection, Spindle, digs into an embittered, striking anger. Like the opening poem, First Cut, it carries all the richness of FitzGerald’s descriptive powers and enlists them into a thrillingly dark tale of retribution.
In Spindle, the speaker turns against their ‘ignorant father’ to ‘end his tenure’ to put an end to the influence of an unnamed injustice.
Each September I scan the hedgerow
for your gaudy lanterns
lighting up the tree-dark shade:
pink biretta, plump pods, daring
orange aril.
But I never find them
The quality of the language carries a sense of biting dark, and spite: the tree is both ‘gaudy’ and looked-for, the descriptions of its flowers both botanical and figurative (as in the ‘pink biretta’, a three-pointed cap once worn by Catholic clergy). It is a stunning and grisly tale, with FitzGerald leading us to the ‘Lair of the worse-than-useless, / now skewered in his grave, pig-smelling flesh rotted / to bone’, and in the end lighting a purging fire.
— Seán Hewitt, The Ticket
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