Oven Lane and Other Poems
By Michael Coady
(Gallery Books)
Review: Tom Mooney
I love the abandon
Of abandoned things
(from Letting Go)
Elegies tend to be a lament, and they occur frequently throughout this memorable volume, a revisiting of a collection first published in 1987, or, as described by Gallery, an ‘amplified’ edition, which is accurate, because Coady is best read aloud, all the better to indulge the phonic range of the Tipperary vernacular .
It appears to me that Coady’s first lines flow easily, and then he allows the theme and the structure to unfold of themselves, independent of himself, bequeathing to the reader the pleasure of encountering many styles, so that the collection is one of contrasts, and the voice can alter from one poem to the next.
You will be struck by the subterranean coursing of an elegiac stream in poems such as Sally Edmonds, Job Wilks And the River and Assembling the Parts, where the poet familiarises himself with the untimely passing, invariably tragic, of young people, such as the girl in Abandoned Churchyard.
Shattered is the stone
Above a girl made mad by
Unrequited love.
The only haiku in the volume, Coady lays the framework with the forceful progression of syllables from the emphatic ‘shattered’, and in that word is the essence of the poem’s impact. It’s a rare thing indeed, when a poet knows it is time to stop.
It would be misleading to package the poet’s empathy with the dead of his poems as mere observations on mortality: in rushed poems, alliteration can become vitiated through indiscipline, but Coady has nailed the art in The Fruit (stiff in ledgered certainties, scripted in the hedge school of suppurating fields) and again in Job Wilks And the River with the same consonant, a poem which unashamedly plunders the emotional booty of A.E. Housman.
Job Wilks, a 28- year -old English soldier, accidentally drowned at Carrick-on-Suir in 1868, and the ever observant Coady is moved by a commemorative stone erected in his memory by his comrades. The concluding verse contains the pathos of a grieving parent:
On a July day of imperial sun
Did your deluged eyes find
Vision of Wessex, as Suir water
Sang in your brain?
To spend some time in the company of Coady is to unmask the detonated seed of a fresh awareness.
………………………………
Phronesis
Life to Everything
(Edition)
Borrowing a quote from Plato for an album of nine original tracks, recorded over three concerts during the London Jazz Festival, is a tall order to measure up to, but not if you are as a tight a unit as Phronesis, with music credits shared equally by Danish bassist Jasper Hoiby, British pianist Ivo Neame and Swedish drummer Anton Eger.
Urban Control is quintessential Phronesis: a blank canvas prepared by Hoiby’s attacking bass, mimicked by Eger’s rapid fire bursts and rounded by Neame’s circumambulations.
It was another ancient Greek, Homer, who pioneered a feature of writing that lends itself to jazz, ring-composition, which fuses disparity after a walkabout, and Phronesis excel at it. Hoiby delivers Nine Lives from the darkness and is at hand toward the end of the digression.
However, listen to Deep Space Dance repeatedly and what you assumed was primarily a mano a mano between the fluent bass and the acquisitive drumming is turned on its head by the soaring piano: Icarus destined for the sun.
There is much to savour in this recording, and it depends on the bias of your ear as to what instrumental delectation takes your fancy: Herne Hill is almost un- Phronesis like at the beginning, but stunning interplay between Neame and Eger propel the music into sensory overload.
I couldn’t quite escape the lure of Hoiby’s bass, like a lone stallion in a brood of mares, with meteoric ostinatos, when quite suddenly the interaction of the instruments is brought to a close by a shocking coda.
The recording seems a bit too polished to be entirely down and dirty live, but that doesn’t matter because there isn’t a redundant track here and the addiction is constant: there is never less than a spirited rhythm in Eger’s percussive shots, and they elicit the music’s individuality.
And because of what Eger does, and the variegated beat, you can relish the accelerating temp of Hoiby’s extremes, from manic plucking to occasional cello-like strokes, almost in a heated debate with Neame’s finger work, intoxicated toccatas which, like the Dylan Thomas line, are the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.
