Review
O'Hare's modern sensibility renders a poetry collection with unusual resonance, asserts Ailbhe Darcy.
- Falling into an O
- Lagan Press
Pop Stars
Canadian poet Nick Thran’s ‘Coastline Variation #86’ describes a group of friends “pooling what little we know / of constellations,” making up names when their limited knowledge runs out.
Eventually, “All that comes to mind / is television”, but the poem ends triumphantly:
I make no apologies. We gather what scraps we can,
rummaging over the junk-
yard of stars. The end
of our labour: an armoured
El Dorado, our surefire plan to plow
all the clear way through the darkness.
Francis O’Hare shares with Thran a pop sensibility that allows him to make of a junkyard of stars a glittering ode to plurality. His aesthetic is immediately clear when he presents us with a set of epigraphs that draw on Frederico Lorca and Frank O’Hara, but also Invasion of the Body Snatchers: “Sometimes I think I’ve seen half of more movies than anyone else alive…” ‘Correspondences’ - a poem that filters experiences through the memories of films, songs and literature - acts as an ars poetica: “A guy called Jennifer asks my name. / The Parliament, or maybe The Crying Game.” O’Hare successfully evokes the modern human condition: the average person has collected so much of the detritus of culture that he or she experiences everything through that filter.
Although littered with the placenames and landmarks of Northern Ireland, this poetry renders Co. Down equivalent to Russia, Paris, the Wild West, the New York of American Psycho, anywhere at all. Marlowe makes appearances that suggest the influence of Muldoon’s peripatetic ‘Immram’ – and Muldoon’s psychic rootlessness generally. Lagan Press declares as its aim “to publish works of literary, artistic, social and cultural importance to the north of Ireland.” It has here published something of much wider significance.
