A Dublin Poet
Reservations. Poems by Valentin Iremonger. (Dublin : Envoy. London : Macmillan. 6s.) THE verse of Valentin Iremonger—the first volume that this quite famous Dublin poet has published—bears the same relation to the poetry of Sidney Keyes as the neutrality of Ireland bore to the rest of the world's belligerency. Iremonger writes disengaged from all but a private world, through shyness, disdain or sensitivity ; he wishes to be critical, but not angry or apathetic. Keyes was emotionally committed to the war. They resemble each other in being alive to the elegy implicit in experience. They have a com- parable—and it is an extreme—sensitivity, and their performance is of equal maturity. The difference is that where Keyes was able to release himself, faced as he was with fear and its potent stimulus, and was able to achieve a fluency of line that on occasions was heroic, Iremonger is reticent, diffident, reserved, held in. As time has been on his side, he has proved a better craftsman than Keyes, but always at the expense of urgency. He has been able to study, prune and force his elegy. Keyes was cut short.
In Reservations the poet has made a pact with the world to treat things elegiacally. The general mood infiltrates everywhere. Derived from love in an idyllic stage, the emotion is- full of pity, pleksant, despairing and usually reserved. It is in nostalgia and wistfulness that the affinities with Keyes are marked. Beyond this the parallel cannot go. Little poetry so carefully fingers its phrases to make them fit into a new order. At the same time a fan of verbal vitality allows the feelings to circulate easily from phrase to phrase.- These faculties are cultivated and full of force. At present they are applied too often as a distraction, or to reiterate the central theme of quiet suffering. They provide superficial variety, when what we want is fundamental change. They bear also the brunt of a more isolated scrutiny, as the legitimate focusing poWer of metre is dispensed with. There is nothing but their meaning or appropriateness to sweep the reader on. They are used, too, to give body to an always sweet, but sometimes rank, sensitivity. When we reach that stage of the poem where we ought to be given an all-clarifying summary and reconciliation, we find, instead of reason and unification of parts, more and more sensitivity, coupled with more and more phrases. This wears one down, and misses better things. He knows it himself:
" Yet so intoxicating is the song I cannot follow its thought right to the end." As Lawrence said of Homer, " he runs instead to the seed of pathos, that feeblest mode of writing." ,.
The genius of the book is its truth to sensation. Everything that sensitivity and climate can do has been done. He appeals personally to that happy sadness which everybody who writes poetry has at some time tried to express, but none with such well-guarded ingenuousness. Attachment to place is a virtue of Irish poetry. Many of these poems have been fed by the landscape, which in its turn has had to submit to the critical look of the writer. The not-to-be-deceived attitude to nature is refreshing.
" Spring stops me suddenly like ground Glass under a door, squeaking and gibbering." he approach is as cautious as Penelope, among the suitors. The nguage also is wary: " —a tailpiece Of truth, a scut of beauty."
?Always he likes to plant a mine of colloquialism-among the clauses.
, But the central mood of elegy hides in the background—nearly given expression, but not entirely ; recorded, but not given away. Seldom does it come into focus., Then again the fear, or the dark- ness, or whatever it is, recedes, leaving us with an attractive but impenetrable phrase. The core of this mood could be called, vaguely, a sense of inexplicable, unconscious tragedy. Just when iwe aro expecting the tragedy to be revealed, the soothing flow of words continues. The obscure cause of the conflict is appeased with felicities of phrase, and the poet adopts neutrality towards the shadows that made his wounds. This is the ground on which the writer will mature. At present, when the crisis of the poetry is reached, the statements are thin or barely plausible. He carries us to the verge of being terrified, to some brink of horror, but con- ducts us little further than the barking of a dog that guards a door. Having withdrawn himself from " truck with anger and apathy " into a world of feeling, the poet should not be surprised if we want to know the whole truth about that world. He says, " My life's short roots snap and break off in society's tough earth," and for this reason the critic expects the roots to be properly examined. Sympathy he excites and holds. He is never in danger of arousing antipathy. But the excess of charm which his world enjoys, a most Acrasian sweetness, puts it in danger of becoming ineffectual, if not deadly. Certainly it can enthral. RICHARD MURPHY.
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