Recent Reviews

A selection of recent reviews of Salmon titles. Click on the book images to find out more about each title.

Leaf, Sunlight, Asphalt

Ben Howard

Review: Booklist 35, January 1 & 15, 2010

As the first poem in Dark Pool (2005) plumbed the deep history of Dublin, so this book’s opener trolls the monuments of modern literary Dublin—streets, pubs, and Parson’s Bookshop—and conjures the spirits of Brendan Behan, James Kavanaugh, Flann O’Brien. Howard manages iambs as well as anyone since Christopher Marlowe (you think Shakespeare did seemingly effortless blank verse like nobody’s business? Well, he did, but Marlowe blazed the trail for him), he entrances us as effectively as a certain piper did the urchins of Hamelin. So we follow, enrapt, on the other Irish rambles of part I here, along the reminiscent trails he takes through his Midwest homeland in part 2, and as he considers present-day haunts and friends (some, alas, newly departed) in part 3. Wisdom and wit are encountered throughout. For the latter, see, especially, “The Little Drummer Boy Considers a Sabbatical,” while the former abounds in the three occasional poems of part 4, in particular. Few other contemporary poets make ordinary living seem as rich and rewarding. –Ray Olson 

www.booklistonline.com


Review: Estudio Irlandeses, review by John L. Murphy

For Ben Howard, Leaf, Sunlight, Asphalt extends this poet’s own Eastern perspective, sharpened by his own Irish exchanges. A critic of its literature and a practitioner of Zen, Howard places himself at the same crossroads that Carr meets. For Howard, however, Dublin represents not home as it does for Carr with his garden, but a reminder of a past literary glory and a present but elusive revelation.
 
“The Glad Creators" opens part one. He wishes he’d been born a decade earlier, “an able novice setting out,/ Equipped with confidence and cautious diction/ But all the same a lamb among those lions/ Who frequented McDaid’s and Davy Byrne’s,/ Reciting Yeats or Ferriter by heart/ Or bellowing invectives to the rafters/ Or sitting meekly with a ball of malt” (13). He conjures up Behan and O’Faolain, Kavanagh and Flann O’Brien, and Parsons Bookshop with “May O’Flaherty/ Who made a temple of a common shop” (16). Howard takes on his forebears but betrays no anxiety for their influence. He sizes up each lion, and returns each glance steadily.
 
“Dublin in July” contrasts South Great George’s Street, “this street that’s no more Irish than its name” filled with panini, tandoori, noodles, and “The cell phone bleating from a stylish belt” (20). Here, he asks: “What has become of that revered, imagined/ Dublin of O’Brien and O’Faolain,/ Its taste as Irish as a ball of malt?” It may be found in Liverpool or Boston or a pint of Guinness, Howard muses, but not among the traffic press of Vespas.
 
Evanescence flows through these linked poems as through Carr’s; both know their return to a place they sought will weaken their memories from what they have read, once revealed as real. Howard fondles his latest poetry volume in 2004, in a place with “bamboo screens suggestive of repose” (22). Yet, its name warns of a lesson learned by Carr. “The Samsara Bar and Café” stands in Buddhist teaching for “the never-ending/ cycle of birth and death, the end result/ of ignorance, aversion, and desire”.  He contemplates his new book of verse, one more poet with one more added to a long line of Dubliners native and not. He recognizes a truer moral that tempers his morale, sitting in the café with “its sparse calligraphy replete with meanings/ well beyond my ken”.
 
From such moments of comprehension and mystery, Howard creates his contemplation. His verse moves firmly, as confidently as the “cautious diction” favoured by McDaid’s lions. Yet, as with Carr, Howard hesitates. He retreats from hubris. “Leaving Tralee’ finds: “As for the page/ I’m writing over tea too hot to swallow/ I see it as a sieve, through which the pungent/ odor of last night’s fish” from the clattering kitchen reminds him of the passing patrons in his hotel’s lobby, “and all the sights I have or have not noticed/ are passing to their final destination” (27). His yellowing journals remind him of an “aging hymn” and seem “no less formless than a jotted dream”.
 
Part two surveys his Midwestern childhood. “Original Face” takes on the Zen koan: “What was your original face/ before your parents were born?” (31). He concludes, after gazing at a photo of his mother and father on a canoe earlier in their courtship about “the son who can’t be seen/ but nonetheless abides/ somewhere in those waters,/ those high Midwestern clouds” (32). He anticipates, in hindsight, “all the hoarded thought of forty years together” that his parents shared.
 
For now, Howard recalls his own dimming childhood memories. For Carr, these filled with death: ManU and his mother. For Howard, they remain more innocent tastes and smells and sounds. Part three invites Thomas Merton’s “lucid silence” to continue such a return to purity. Howard lives near where Merton summered as a poet-critic himself before he entered the Trappists; Howard finds Merton’s hard-won wisdom elusive today. Like that English professor turned monk, Howard lingers within nature for solace. “One Time, One Meeting” (also the name of Howard’s spare meditations collected as his blog) summons in Zen fashion the entry of the ethereal into the ordinary. It begins: “Picking up the phone to call my son,/ I entertain the thought that every act,/ No matter how familiar or banal,/ Might be construed as unrepeatable/ And all of life as ceremonial” (49). Precisely, Howard as has Carr moves forward on his determined path, to blaze into the everyday a trace of the otherworldly, which in its own universality permeates life.
 
Life passing, mortality for both poets waits. “What I May Rely On” reads in full: “Turning into nothing, all those days/ Remain in memory as though their patterns/ Persisted when their dyes had long since faded./ Here is the morning sun. And here is dusk/ Consuming every tree on the horizon”.
 
It continues: “Turning into forms of which I know/ Only a little now, my own two hands/ Tell me that the bones beneath that skin/ Are what I may rely on to continue,/ Whatever may come of mark or wrinkle” (58). Howard finds in his body’s reduction to not skin but bones his own sign, a Jolly Roger of sorts to mark his sailing over another ocean towards a port he cannot imagine. Carr came full circle back to his Dublin garden to find renewal as the seeds planted on his departure grew into flowers. Howard circles too, within the persistent patterns of nothingness that endure far longer than any plant’s dye, lost in the diurnal glow of savage sun and altering night.
 
The collection finishes with “Right Livelihood”, on the occasion of his retirement from teaching. The speaker fumbles as he struggles to find for his professorial peers the proper tone. He refers to Philip Larkin, who called in his university appointment his supervisor “Toad”, but then opts for a more diplomatic, and Zen-like, address. He chooses ‘Frog’, but “not the frog that brought/ enlightenment to Basho” (66). He chooses a croaking hungry creature as his avatar. Seeking to ease aspersions rather than to cast them at his colleagues, he calms himself.
 
Borrowing “a leaf/ from Basho’s heritage”, he calls his collegial faculty by invoking the Buddhist injunction to Right Livelihood and Right Speech in hopes of truth. He seeks in his verse as in his valedictory speech a signifier “that indicates what’s there/ and never what is not;/ that waters seeds of joy/ and equanimity”, but one that in truth also calls out “greed and cruelty” when necessary. As with Carr who admires in the refusal to capitulate to defeat Basho’s own example of fortitude under pressure, so does Howard evoke the same haiku master’s heritage to guide him on a path less directly trod by the Japanese poet and his Irish follower, but one which whether in the streets of Dublin or the corridors of a college in upstate New York keeps to the same fidelity.
 
John L. Murphy coordinates the Humanities program at DeVry University in Long Beach, California. His current research includes the invention of the concept of "Celtic Buddhism".

Along The Liffey: Poems and Short Stories

Sheila O'Hagan

Review by Eugene O'Connell for The Irish Times, 5th December 2009

Along the Liffey, Sheila O’Hagan’s first book in 14 years, has a curious “coming of age” feel to it, poems and stories that reached a tipping point in the author’s head; that needed to be told. The stories, five in all, are strategically placed throughout the book to offer a counterpoint, a different register to the loftier diction and more formal concern of the poems.

Dodo and I, a streetwise tale of a brow-beaten wife on a rare night out, is deliberately placed at the end of a high minded sequence of poems that explore the passage of time and death – it should be noted that the celebrated September 4th poem is re-titled here as Elegy to Ted (McNulty).

The Traveller, a gothic tale of how a woman cajoles a “travelling man” to impregnate her – she is in a childless marriage – is a startling shift in register from the sequence of poems (referencing classical myth and legend to illustrate the simmering resentments that lurk beneath our so-called civilised veneer) that went before.

The choice of a “travelling man”, a member of a submerged social group is quitely subversive but reflects her social conscience: she has campaigned for the homeless and prison rights groups in London and Dublin.

O’Hagan seems to have deliberately orchestrated poetry and prose, the formal and the informal, high and low registers of language to manipulate our reaction to the controversial but urgent themes she raises.

It’s quietly subversive too in its evocation of the deeper reaches of the female psyche – “sins of the flesh” are not exclusive to one gender. Along the Liffey is unflinching but sympathetic – as one would expect from a writer of O’Hagan’s standing – in its portrayal of the human condition.

Eugene O’Connell’s most recent collection of poems, Diviner, was published by Three Spires Press. He is editor of the Cork Literary Review.

In Sight of Home

Nessa O'Mahony

Review: Marie Lecrivain for Poetic Diversity, a Los-Angeles based online magazine (December 2009)

All of us are traveling – at some point in our lives – whether we want to or not. Strangely enough, we often travel in tandem with others at different times – say, like, in centuries, or even eras, and Nessa O'Mahony's, In Sight of Home, a novel in verse, unevenly and successfully illustrates this concept.
    Home tells the story- through letters, journal excerpts, and poetry, of two, actually, three women – Margaret, Lizzy, and Fiona - searching for personal, and, in Fiona's case, professional fulfillment. In the beginning of Home, Fiona, a writer/poet, discovers the story of Margaret Butler and her serving girl Lizzie, two women who emigrated (based on actual historical accounts of the Butler family) from Mother Ireland to Australia at the latter half of the 1800's. Various personal issues, and what seems to be an overwhelming case of ennui force Fiona, along with her treasure trove of letters, to pull up stakes from Ireland to resettle in Wales.
    It's worth noting that in the United States, the Irish diaspora to America has been documented to death through various books and films, but not so much their immigration to Australia/New Zealand. With the notable exception of Colleen McCullough's watershed victory of The Thorn Birds (Richard Chamberlain wasn't fooling anyone back then), I, in my limited literary travels, I haven't come across much, and it's refreshing, as the third generation descendent of Irish immigrants, to read another version of the tale.
    That being said, In Sight of Home, is, at first, difficult to approach; a novel in verse buoyed by epistolary tracks, along with the swiftly shifting points of back and forth from the mid-19th to the 21st centuries, is a bit dizzying. The universal themes of womanhood, along with O'Mahoney's excellent and well-crafted verse, save Home from a land of literary confusion. Whether it's Margaret's obsession to maintain the status quo while occupying what she considers to be “alien soil,” or Lizzy's struggle to make a place for herself in the Butler household, or Fiona's quest for an identity outside her familial boundaries, each one's journey is honestly and painfully expressed. As Home progresses, and Fiona delves further into the story of the Butler clan, her own life, both internally and externally, takes on aspects of Margaret's and Lizzie's, particularly when the question of motherhood arises, as in “Extracts from Fiona Sheehan's journal, 16th May, 2003”:

    Three weeks late.
    Each morning the trip,
    the wait, the stomach lurch
    at finding no red
    dotting the towel,
    clockwork abandoned.

    The bathroom closes in,
    wooden sauna
    walls loom.

    I take the kit out of the bag
    crinkled with constant opening
    and closing.

    Nausea rises -
    it could be a sign
    or just nerves.

    But I know what I don't want:
    another life
    has no claims on me.
    It's too late for that;
    I've watched friends, paid dues
    with visits, teddies, the odd poem.

    Not my time.
    I put the box back, resolve
    to wait a while longer.


    In Sight of Home is an ambitious work, combining vastly different literary genres, as well as different eras into a provocative and rewarding read. O'Mahony has set the literary bar higher with her new offering regarding the universal and ongoing story of womanhood. It's enough to inspire me to consider writing a novel in verse (considering at this stage only), and it's given me a whole new appreciation for the depth and bravery of O'Mahony as a poet, in that she is fearless, and evolved enough, to take risks.

The Watchful Heart - A New Generation of Irish Poets - Poems and Essays

Edited and Presented by Joan McBreen

from toddswift.blogspot.com:

Brinton On A New Irish Anthology - Ian Brinton reviews
The Watchful Heart, A New Generation of Irish Poets edited and presented by Joan McBreen

If you are trying to encourage diners to try a newly-opened restaurant which you rate very highly then there is little point in commenting on each dish on the menu since you will end up with one, or at the most two sentences, serving a descriptive purpose that could have been put there by the restaurateur. With this in mind I have decided to give an account of this remarkably fine new anthology by concentrating upon two very different poets whose poetry and prose appears in that ‘box where sweets compacted lie’. read the full review>>>



Seed and Breed.  Review by Nessa O'Mahony, Poetry Ireland Review 99 (2009)

Poetry: Reading it, Writing it, Publishing it

Compiled and Edited by Jessie Lendennie

Review: The Midwest Book Review, Autumn 2009

Just as there is an art to writing poetry, so there is an art to the publishing of it. That's why "Poetry: Reading It, Writing It, Publishing It" by Jessie Lendennie (co-founder and managing director of Salmon Poetry) is such a useful compendium of practical information and useable insight drawn from poets and publishers in such diverse literary cultures as Ireland, Britain, America, Canada, Australia, and even Zimbabwe. The twenty-nine contributed essays are grouped thematically into three major sections: Reading It; Writing It; Publishing It. For anyone who aspires to write verse and have their poems published, Jessie Lendennie's "Poetry: Reading It, Writing It, Publishing It" is very strongly recommended and very useful reading.