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An Unscheduled Life<\/em> is a handsomely produced collaboration between the poet Joseph Horgan and the artist Brian Whelan. Born in Birmingham and London respectively, both men are the sons of Irish immigrants, a fact which colours many of the poems and consequently many of the drawings in this volume. Although this is primarily a poetry review, it should be emphasised that Whelan\u2019s pen and ink drawings have a life of their own and do not in any way merely illustrate the poems. Occasionally a poem and the accompanying drawing will share the same title. However, more often the title of the picture comes from a line or phrase within the poem, so that one presumes that the latter came first. To an extent, the overall effect of the poems and drawings together is reminiscent of the work of Stevie Smith. There is a not dissimilar quirkiness and na\u00efvet\u00e9<\/em>, notwithstanding the obvious difference that this is a collaboration between two individuals and that the work is less whimsical and arch than some of Smith\u2019s oeuvre, with a tougher, more urban edge to it.<\/p>\n From the outset one sees how well the words and images work together. The title of the opening poem, \u2018There are still stars in the failing sky\u2019, exemplifies Horgan\u2019s lyricism and demonstrates his fine way with a cadence. It also evinces that sense of fitful resilience in the face of failure and disappointment that is a frequent feature of his poems. Evoking a love affair that seems to be over, the protagonist clings to the hope that something may be salvaged: \u2018My best kisses were there. \/ I hope you kept them.\u2019 \u00a0Aimlessly wandering a city\u2019s nightscape, he comes back to wait outside his beloved\u2019s home: \u2018\u2019I\u2019m knocking on the door again. \/ Come down and let me in.\u2019 This final plea then becomes the artist\u2019s point of departure. With a few deft strokes and a skilful take on perspective he presents us with the foreshortened figure of a nerdy character in specs, who is looking up from the page forlornly. In \u2018Notices\u2019 the poet evokes the loneliness of lives alienated by the impersonal sprawl of a great city: \u2018People in the city die \/ in complete silence. \/ A notice appears overnight, \/ the details \/ of an unimagined life.\u2019 Inspired by the phrase, \u2018loving care\u2019, which he has lifted from the poem\u2019s labyrinth of endless streets, Whelan presents us with the poignant image of an angel cradling a dove.<\/p>\n Gradually, as the artist\u2019s images and the poet\u2019s incantations draw us into a twilight world of nightshift workers, buskers, and the \u2018imaginary love affairs of fading men\u2019, we learn in \u2018Growing up Irish\u2019 that \u2018behind these streets there is another country.\u2019 Horgan then plays with the complex notion of \u2018home\u2019, that highly charged and ambivalent term in any immigrant household. The Anglo-Irish poet Louis MacNeice referred to himself as \u2018the man from nowhere\u2019, while Seamus Heaney has used the term \u2018bilocation\u2019 to describe that sense of being in two places at the same time:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n With doors left slightly ajar our houses,<\/p>\n on Imperial Road or Lower Dartmouth Street,<\/p>\n never closed on a view of somewhere else.<\/p>\n Running away from the swish of First Holy Communion<\/p>\n to a metal slide and concrete interstices overlooked<\/p>\n by those bewildering clusters of high-rise flats.<\/p>\n As if the future had got lost.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Thus we sense that behind Horgan\u2019s cityscapes there is a lost pastoral in which it is just as difficult for him to truly find himself at home:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Going home on the boat was an aberration.<\/p>\n We were to negotiate a different terrain<\/p>\n and coming back again was worse\u2026<\/p>\n In the end Ireland<\/p>\n cut the ground from underneath us.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In \u2018Nineteen seventy was a white new year\u2019 the poem\u2019s protagonist remembers the figure of his \u2018immigrant father \u2026 shovelling clear \/ the snow-built pavement outside our house.\u2019\u2019 \u00a0But, then, as if in a brilliant reworking of\u00a0 Seamus Heaney\u2019s \u2018Digging,\u2019 the father\u2019s forward thrust and his backward lift\u2019 with the shovel remind the poet of \u2018immigrant men driving, digging \/ their way back home.\u2019 In another poem \u2018I met my father in the street and we shook hands\u2019 the poet and his father are Dantesque figures who recognize each other against the city\u2019s teeming backdrop: \u2018I\u2019d recognize that swagger anywhere, he said.\u2019 In \u2018The biography of Billy Matthews\u2019 Horgan focuses again on the theme of emigration, but through the lens of Browning\u2019s \u2018Waring\u2019: \u2018Last known sighting? \/ What was he wearing? \/ Was there, by any chance, a forwarding address?\u2019 The Irish were, of course, merely the first wave of immigrants to populate Britain\u2019s industrial cities, but have since been followed by many others. \u2018Intersection\u2019 is a beautifully poised poem in which Horgan depicts Malik, his representative of a different immigrant community: \u2018At the intersection Malik dances, \/ to a music no one else can hear.\u2019<\/p>\n Now that the young people of Ireland are again leaving their country in droves An Unscheduled Life<\/em> is a timely collection. Much better educated than their grandparents and certainly more pampered, they, too, must face the hardships of exile at a time of economic meltdown. In poems that have the lyricism of Paul Eluard and the solipsistic austerity of Samuel Beckett Joseph Horgan has created a vision of the city that is unique, memorable and disconcerting.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n