Review of Loose Canon by Michael McNamara pub Subterranean Blue Poetry

[sheenaghpugh]

My accent now echoes those around me.
     We blend in. Displaced adapters.

This lively collection opens, appropriately, with a poem called “No Fixed Abode”. The abode in question is Newport in Wales, a town which has been absorbing newcomers for a very long time:

     From Coomassie Street to the Jamia Mosque
     the Somalians, Syrians and Eastern Europeans
     have inherited the patois of a multi-cultural community.
     “Awyite? Laters b’ra.” Now - see those strange shaped mountains?
     They are Celtic hill forts. Beaker people burial barrows.
     Pagan migrants and blood letters. Artists and innovators.
     Us.

The speaker, himself displaced, is moved to reflect on his Irish roots and on the concept of “home”. The long, loose lines of this poem move easily and anything but prosily; it’s a style that suits him. Sometimes when he uses shorter lines, I can feel him pausing to think at the end of them, and the momentum falters. This tends to happen when he’s trying to make a point rather than listening to the sounds and rhythms he creates. Usually he listens a lot to them and they often impel the thought–line of the poem – for instance, in “Wise Whispers Extant”, “whimpers” leads on to “whispers” which in turn suggests “prospers”. Or words and images suggest their opposites – “walk through closed doors/with open veins.” In this he reminds me a little of Kate O’Shea, whose thought process in her collection Homesick at Home is similarly often shaped by word association of various kinds.

At around 140 pages, I do think this collection is too long; there are poems in it, particularly towards the end, that need more polishing and haven’t really progressed from vague thought to finished poem yet. Basically he has two modes; observational and contemplative, and I much prefer the former. I don’t think this is purely personal preference: when he is in observational mode his poems have far more momentum than when he is considering life, the universe and everything. His language is sharper too; it is in observational poems like “Returns” that we get lines like this, with its inspired opening adjective: “Unaffiliated sheep are painted red and blue by home team supporters”. These observational poems are also free of the verbal tic, prevalent when he’s philosophising, of asking an inordinate number of questions, to which the answer may or may not be 42.

He needs more control: there’s thought that provokes and musings that go nowhere, wordplay with a purpose (like “From nights out, on the mean, bleak street/to nights, out on the three-piece suite”) and mere playing with words. And he could do with a bit more rigour sometimes, to eliminate the odd slack, cliched or sentimental phrase.  However there’s no doubt that when he’s on form and in control of his deeply felt pleasure in words, he can be both skilled and memorable. “Returns” may ramble a bit, but besides the unaffiliated sheep we get this striking evocation of place:

     Achill Island. One unforgettably sun steeped day.
     Still. Like a breath held. So still. Bordering a bleached, deserted village,
     a white sand sanctuary, a beach spilling in to clear, ice blue water.
     The mute Slievemore mountain, a grave with my name at its foot.

And in “Somewhere” we have these eccentric yet oddly effective line breaks creating a huge, eloquent hesitancy:

     Something called loneliness. Which
     was once just a word. Becomes a
     feeling. Somewhere on this journey.


This is 140 pages to dip in and out of; I would never claim it worked all the time. But when it does, it can be memorable and promises better for the future.