sheenaghpugh | Entries tagged with frank dullaghan

This is how we live in time.
This is how quickly it passes.

“How We live In Time”

Frank Dullaghan, here on his fifth full collection, is now a grandfather and increasingly conscious of which end of his life is nearest. Not necessarily in a brooding or gloomy way; more with the intellectual curiosity of a poet who has found a new subject that repays observation. And his observation is as sharp as ever, witness the start of the poem quoted above:

     I have no vacation days left, but will travel
      to see my new granddaughter. I shall have to pay
      the days back. We are always robbing
      our future as if it were endless,
      paring days off it like butter for toast.

The shift from personal to universal in that third line, and the way the phrase “I shall have to pay the days back” potentially belongs to both, happens all through the collection and is handled very deftly. There is a great deal of personal detail, particularly about parents and other relatives who have died and who, as so often when one is growing older, can seem more present than the living. But these details never exclude the reader, because Dullaghan is adept at finding the universal in the particular. “Transparency” begins with an image of a man being eased out of a job:

Already, people have begun to look through me.
I have been moved to a smaller desk that is easily passed.

Strategy and future planning meetings are happy
with my absence. I no longer know what’s going on.

But it soon becomes apparent that this really is less a description of one person’s reality than a metaphor for something at once more nebulous and more cosmic:

Most evenings now, I check my shadow for solidity.
In some lights, it lacks substance, its grey cloth

dissolving like a tissue in water. The weekly journey
to my post office box is usually futile, I have begun

to avoid mirrors.

I think it was this technique which enabled the collection to overcome a pet prejudice of mine. I freely admit I normally dislike reading poems, or for that matter fiction, about covid. I feel it has made real life dull and irritating enough without invading the imagination as well. But though covid does figure in this collection (one could hardly expect otherwise, in a collection that must have been completed in 2020 and which is so concerned with mortality), it is not in any sense “about” the virus: covid is just one aspect of a wider theme, the fragility and impermanence of human life. In “The Lists of the Dead”, the lines

     We name the ailments and vulnerabilities
     of our siblings and offspring,
     our distant friends

could be read in a covid context but also recall the conversation of many a remembered granny. And in “The Eyam Example” this wider view enables him to skewer the too easy, and too optimistic, comparison with the famous plague village whose sacrifice we remember, but not “the enforcing barricades, the cudgels”. Will a post-covid world be one with “more compassion” and fairer wealth distribution? Probably not…

     In Eyam, the rich
    escaped before the lockdown was enforced. The poor,
    when it was over, were mostly dead.

Dullaghan has always had a gift for coining memorable phrases that feel somehow just right – “familiar streets arrive at wrong places”, a plane “runs towards the sky”, a beginning day “warms its engine”. Just occasionally, this knack fails him, usually when he is getting worked up about something, like politics; in some of the poems about Palestine and gun culture, his language, though passionate and forceful, is less forensic and more predictable. But for most of this collection, it is fascinating to watch a skilled practitioner with words getting to grips with the most basic theme of poetry, namely mortality, and trying out ways of approaching it, like

the way endings can feel like beginnings
if you come at them from the other direction

(“Flying South”)

and the end of “Crossing Over”:

maybe in the end it is the simplest thing.
Here, then not here. Over.

Poetry is often accused of not addressing contemporary issues, public issues. This is a lazy accusation, generally made by people like columnists seeking for an easy headline, who either don't read much poetry or who don't get the role of nuance in poetry, expecting it to spell out The Ishoos in capital letters for the benefit of the obtuse (a group for whom poetry simply cannot cater and should not try to).

When I recently reviewed Frank Dullaghan's latest collection, Lifting the Latch, one poem in particular stood out for me as addressing a current issue in a way that only a poet, as opposed to a journalist or polemicist, could really hope to do. Frank has kindly agreed to my blogging about it and quoting it in full in the process, so I am.

The first thing to note is the narrative voice. It would have been very easy to choose an "I" voice and enlist sympathy for an individual. But this poem is in the "we" voice, assuming the identity of the countless multitudes who flee, and have always fled, one place for another. And while it empathises with their plight:

We walk with our lives
on our backs, our children,
drunk from walking, by the hand,
our pasts blown up behind us

this sense of multitudes also, quite deliberately, carries a hint of alarm, not from any ill-will on the part of the speakers but because their arrival heralds massive change to a way of life:

We move through your culture,
your story telling, your politics.
[…]
We will move through your memories,

your imagination, your knowledge
of yourselves.

It is the fear of such change that leads so many to be hostile and unwelcoming in the face of this influx. The poem does not deny its reality. But the narrative voice, through its emotionless patience, its inexorable repetition of "we move" and "we walk", not only echoes the trudging feet; it points up the inevitability of what is happening and the utter uselessness of trying to turn the tide, rather than live with it. The mention of the earth's rotation reminds us of how long it has been the case, ever since we came out of Africa, that we have been moving south to north, east to west – another advantage poetry can have in addressing "current issues" is by going beyond the "current". And although the poem never explicitly says so (see above, because it's a poem, not a polemic), its end points to the fact that this movement is not just political. If climate change does what most scientists think it must (and given the kind of noddies on the "denial" side, one is driven to think it certainly will), then what now looks like a flood will seem a trickle and those who now have borders, villages, countryside they can call their own will have to realise their own place in the world is not as secure as they thought. A powerful poem.

There is Nowhere Left
by Frank Dullaghan

We move through your borders,
your villages, your countryside.
We walk with our lives
on our backs, our children,
drunk from walking, by the hand,
our pasts blown up behind us.

We move through your language,
your donated food, your fields
of tents. We walk without hope,
as if this is our new reason for being –
this great walk, this achievement
of pushing the miles behind us.

We move through your culture,
your story telling, your politics.
We walk against the turn
of the earth - East to West, our
great numbers slowing its rotation.
We will move through your memories,

your imagination, your knowledge
of yourselves. Our footsteps
will dog the rhythm of your days.
We will walk across your clean
bed linen, your tablecloths, your
conversations. There is no stopping

now that we have started. There is
no use erecting barriers, arguments,
prayers, for you too are moving,
you too are losing your place.

Frank Dullaghan's new collection is carefully shaped and structured. It has five named sections, and though there is a lot of thematic crossover between them, each does have a distinct character: "Small Town Brewery Blues" concerns the poet's past in Ireland, "The Children Are Silent" focuses on contemporary politics, with "Aisling" we are in the territory of dream and myth, "Lazarus Leaving" is very conscious of approaching age and death, while the final section, "Beannacht" ("blessing") is focused on family and the personal.

Dullaghan's work background in business and his long-term residence in Dubai are unusual in British poetry and have given him some fascinating subject matter. I've mentioned in previous reviews that he is one of very few poets to have actually written about the financial crash of 2008 and its effect on individuals. Although it isn't a major theme of this collection, its ripples are still felt, especially in the long meditation "Love Poem for Oreo", in which the narrator, his certainties and future plans overset by the crash ("how will I provide now/for our old age?") is temporarily too stalled to move on:

The past
will not let the future enter.

But he finds that the adaptability of the neighbour's cat he is temporarily minding in what, to both, is an unfamiliar environment helps him to change his perspective:

There is still a way
of living in the world.

The quiet, dry humour with which the poem concludes, when the cat has gone home

It would never have worked out anyway –
the language barrier, the age difference, religion,
species, politics

is very typical of Dullaghan's writing voice, in which, though the "I" voice is prominent, self-absorption and self-pity are emphatically not. The political poems in the second section are some of his most powerful yet, I think, and the more so for curbing and controlling their feelings. In "Doll" he imagines a child playing in Gaza.

She wraps a bandage
around the doll's eyes
so it cannot see, covers its ears
to grant it passage to a new world
of silence. Then she pulls of
both of its legs, yanking them
from their plastic sockets, discovering
how cleanly it happens, the lack
of blood.

What he is very good at is making the connections and comparisons between his own life and the lives of people in the wider world (one reason, I think, that he chooses to juxtapose sections I and 2). In the poem "Things I Don't Know" he marries political concern with technical skill in a corona-like form, using the last word of each verse to lead on to the next and, in each, contrasting small inconveniences with matters of life and death:

I know about boats. But not like that,
not recklessly, not as small heavy bobbings overladen
in the crash of a soul-sick sea,
not that deadly form of travel.

I know about travel – motorways, traffic-jams,
airport security checks. But I know nothing about
the pregnant belly of a truck, nothing
about gasping for delivery, for foreign air.

Again, a lot of the impact of this comes from his ability to retain enough emotional detachment to shape and control his utterance. This is true even in the poems dealing with age and death. Indeed the wry tone often returns, as in "The Voices of the Dead", which begins "I sit with a coffee and my dead brother". This supernatural encounter does not produce any cosmic answers to life, the universe and everything:

We expect the dead to be wise but they are
only themselves. What did you expect, he says.

You don't think of me that often any more. True.
Life does that. It fills you up with its noise,
leaves little space in your head for the voices of the dead.

Indeed, in "Love Poem for Oreo" the poet reflects that "this is not a time for answers". What you get in this collection, underpinned by considerable technical skill, are questions that need thinking about, juxtapositions that throw new light on each other and, very often, phrases so exact that they linger in the mind – "some moments can last longer than others" ("Remembering Your Green Dress").

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.