If readers need a reminder of what language can do, how it can be rescued from the spin-doctors and made new and enthralling, they need look no further than this superb collection.
Joseph O’Connor, The Sunday Tribune, Books of the Year, 25 December 2005.

In whatever mood, the writer’s gaze is clear-eyed, observant, unflinching in the face of pain and the awareness of mortality.
Hugh McFadden, Books Ireland

New light on old memories

Belinda McKeon

For Philip Casey, who last published a book of poems almost 15 years ago, the light of experience seems to have changed.

The sun’s rays struggle through dust and cloud, the masks of moonlight are hidden, and the glare of electric bulbs drain energy from the core of the earth; in his new collection, looking again and again to the troubled places from which light now comes, Casey is very much writing in the shadows. From there, he wreathes his words in memory and reflection, breaking through at times to an image or a phrase that is both true and memorable: the moon’s ‘‘chilled zenith’’, a butterfly ‘‘like a hand/ conducting a silent adagio’’, the way a ‘‘child’s yellow gansey jibs/ above the thunderous pool’’, brothers gripping ‘‘adhesive stars of frost/ on the aluminium milkcan’’, or the sight of a bomb victim blasted on to a rock, ‘‘her body on fire’’.

He coats those words too, however, with heavy disapproval of the forces which have dimmed the sky’s luminosity, and the weakest poems are those which declare a concern for the environment without displaying any original or intimate engagement with that environment; there is no advance on catchphrase or common parlance in a poem which carps of how “the sublime/ is hawked to market the superfluous” (Trashed) or in one which contrasts “an ancient, holy place” to traffic jams and profit-seeking (The Time of No Time).

Meanwhile, Casey’s yielding to nostalgia in his interrogation of place becomes a bandwagon even more tiresome, adhering frustratingly to the formula which insists that a sight triggering a memory is, in and of itself, work enough to be called a poem. Nostalgia, in Casey’s poetry, seems either to weaken or to sedate his language, delivering him into the hands of cliche and sentimentality - a waste, given the sharpness of eye which shapes his words at points in this collection.

Skim over the generic homecomings, the misty-eyed homages to a poet
(Eternal Water) or a pastor (In Loving Memory of a Country Priest) and savour instead the force and tightness of poems like An Indian Dreams of the River - ‘‘sleep comes like a caravel of conquistadores’’ - or Starling, with its vision of a mathematician plotting the flight of birds:

. . . her study darkens with the noise

of thousands of wings, of wheezing
chucking and clicks, of whistling, coughs

and kisses, and a bewildered flock

blunders into the room through the screen.

Dialogue in Fading Light: New And Selected Poems, By Philip Casey, New Island, 66pp. €12.99

Belinda McKeon is a writer and journalist

© The Irish Times, April 8th, 2006
[reproduced courtesy of The Irish Times]

[With the gracious consent of New Island Books, Dialogue in Fading Light can be downloaded free under a Creative Commons licence from
Irish Literary Revival]