Review
An essential collection of local poetry to own, says Ailbhe Darcy.
- The Night Ships
- Lagan Press
The Night Ships
Sam Gardiner’s poems are finely crafted and tightly controlled. Formal control is a vital thing in a collection like this, that is so much quicksand - that so much doubts Bishop Butler’s ‘everything is what it is and not another thing’.
The sanded edge of the land is
both light and dark, sea-wetted or
sun dried, café noir or au lait…
(
(‘The Unavoidable’)
Playing on Shakespeare’s “a rose by any other name”, Gertrude Stein famously declared that a “rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” She would later boast of the line, “I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.” For Gardiner, uncertainty or fluidity makes the rose pink. In ‘Pale Reds’, the figure beneath the pink umbrella is “a three- / or four-year-old” praying for rain in the sunshine. Shedding one’s “uniform” leaves a self “floating free”, open to suggestions – “Be a frost tonight, / I replied, and waved my spade at the moon.” – and a heap of body parts that can be reassembled “with a few minor improvements.” ‘Identity Crisis’
Vociferously admired by David Wheatley, a poet-critic with the keenest of eyes for the local literary landscape, The Night Ships is an essential volume. It makes the essential enquiries of life.
…so listen to what the experts say
and you will hear the exact opposite
as well, then it is up or
down to you to make your mind.
But let’s enquire further and when no
one answers let’s go round the back.
(‘Short Circuitry’)
