Review of The Same Roads Back by Frank Dullaghan, pub. Cinnamon Press

Frank Dullaghan's first collection, On the Back of the Wind, was much concerned with childhood memories and family relationships, which is arguably a theme particularly associated with the Irish poetic tradition from which he comes. At that time, the place where he now lives, Dubai, had not really begun to surface in his writing.

The Same Roads Back marks a definite shift. It does in fact begin with a section of family-memory poems, centred this time around himself and his mother, rather than the father who dominated his first book. Dullaghan always handles this material deftly, unsentimentally and often with a touch of humour (as in his confounding of the policeman in "Border Boy") which serves to individualise them. But because there isn't exactly a shortage of this kind of poem, it is a theme that creates few surprises for the reader. The more the impact, then, when, following this section, we suddenly come on a vein of wayward, surreal imagery in poems like "She Puts On The Dark", "The Fridge Inside Her", "Turning", "A Man Falling":

the pavement slowly
climbing towards his
speeding brain,
each grain of air lost
to him in passing.
As he dips under
the street lamp, his
shadow leaps from him,
its open arms ready
to receive him

And it's almost as if writing this kind of poem then permanently frees something up in him, because when we get on to the next group of poems, set in places like the Emirates, Egypt, Syria and Tripoli, the language and imagery are not just exact but memorable. In "Naming the Stars: Syria 2013" we see

the wall
ripped from a neighbour's house,

the wind reading his books

while in "The Heartache Café"

That old man in the corner is made of glass.
He is cracked from the heart to the head.
If he moves he will shatter, glitter
across the floor like ice.

I found the Arab Spring poems particularly memorable; after all, it isn't a subject many English-language poets have yet written about, let alone from so close to the scene. But it's also interesting to see, for the first time, poems emerging from his work as a financial lawyer (I wonder what it says about poets that it took the world financial crash to make this a subject that inspired him). Poems like "Winter Field" and "The Crash" are hugely unusual in their subject matter; almost no poets write about business, and it's maybe telling that their most memorable moments are the images from other lexical fields in which he expresses the financial crash:

Everyone wants to be paid
but we have no money.
They call me. What can I say?
I see the wedge cut out of the trunk
as I stand in the tree's shadow.
It is tilting towards me.
I hear its pain, can feel
the snap and rip of its fibres
before they explode.

In the collection's final poem, "The Wide Ocean of the Sky", family concerns and the financial crash merge as the poet addresses his wife:

After the violent storm, wreckage floats to the top.
We gather what we can of our financial flotsam,
back in Dubai, starting over: this rented apartment,

the two of us smoothing clean sheets across a bed.
What else do we need but the surprise of each other?
We know about wealth: it grows on the trees.

"Surprise" is a keynote of the language, imagery and themes of this collection. Later in the same poem, speaking of his and his wife's shared future, he says "What an adventure we shall make of it". Judging by what is here, the same may be true of his future writing.