{"id":871,"date":"2010-11-03T14:05:00","date_gmt":"2010-11-03T14:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=871"},"modified":"2020-12-09T14:41:08","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T14:41:08","slug":"ken-head-reviews-nigel-mcloughlins-chora-new-selected-poems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/ken-head-reviews-nigel-mcloughlins-chora-new-selected-poems\/","title":{"rendered":"Ken Head reviews Nigel McLoughlin's 'Chora: New & Selected Poems'"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chora:  New & Selected Poems, <\/span>Nigel McLoughlin <\/a>, <\/span>Templar Poetry<\/a>  ISBN:  978-1-906285-35-5 Hardback:  \u00a39.99 123pp<\/span>

Ch\u00f4ra<\/span>, receptacle of becoming, matrix in which things are formed and given birth, is a Greek term taken from Plato\u2019s <\/span>Timaeus<\/span> (c. 448 B. C.), the primary purpose of which is theological, to demonstrate that the universe was divinely created.  The figure of the creator, variously described as father, maker or craftsman, remains shadowy, however, because Plato\u2019s central concern is to argue that, regardless of how we may conceive of a creator, the universe is not self-reproducing, but the deliberate, constructive activity of a craftsman.  Parallels with the making of poetry are not difficult to see, so that, in the context of McLoughlin\u2019s title, ch\u00f4ra, the receptacle of becoming, represents the \u201cwomb-like space\u201d in which his poems are conceived, nurtured and from which, finally, they emerge when read.            <\/span>

The title\u2019s complexities aside, though, Templar Poetry\u2019s <\/span>Nigel McLoughlin:  New and Selected Poems<\/span> is an interesting and attractive volume, which, even in hardback, represents very good value.  It includes generous selections from all four of McLoughlin\u2019s previous collections, <\/span>At the Waters\u2019 Clearing<\/span> (2001), <\/span>Songs for No Voices <\/span>(2004), <\/span>Blood<\/span> (2005) and <\/span>Dissonances<\/span> (2007) and provides an informative sense of the pattern of his poetic development over time.  Among the earliest poems, for example, there are depictions of  an Irish landscape and culture which McLoughlin clearly knows like the back of his hand and is able to bring to life with place names, dialect terms (helpfully explained and translated as footnotes), as well as a rich colloquial vocabulary.  <\/span>The Green Man<\/span>, mythic figure of re-birth, fertility and the coming of Spring, is a good example:<\/span>

The clouds are tangling in your limbs and birds nest<\/span>
in your chest\u2019s heather, settle in the hedgerow of your loins.<\/span>
Yet you come scouring, pelting the cuckoo out with rain<\/span>
that drives a sheen on weed and bush and blackthorn.<\/span>
 <\/span>
There is, also, in these earlier poems and, to a degree, throughout the collection, not only a powerful preoccupation with folklore, ancient knowledge, the remnants of a dying oral tradition, at times as grim and bleak and full of hardship as the lives of the people who possess it, but also evidence of the poet\u2019s struggle, as a craftsman, to find a means of expressing these concerns in his work.  In <\/span>Firesides<\/span>, there\u2019s an old woman:  <\/span>Each Halloween \/ she\u2019d sit spinning yarns \/ teaching the art of divination <\/span>with hazelnuts thrown into the fire which, when the shells burst, would foretell early death;  in <\/span>Darkling<\/span> an old man, a <\/span>latchico<\/span>, an undesirable, who speaks to the pigeons and the air and who, the narrator tells us, <\/span>came \/ early to the outside of this world \/ that he had always known \/ he had no share in it.  He hid his fear \/ behind closed mouth \/ his unransomed loneliness. \/ He died there … and in Kilmakerrill:<\/span>

Between Manorhamilton and Glenfarne <\/span>
there is a place just off the road <\/span>
whose name rings out with loneliness. <\/span>
Kilmakerrill \u2013 a burial ground <\/span>
.    .    .<\/span>
Unearthly at night, no church <\/span>
no God gazes down. <\/span>
You can hear the grass whisper: <\/span>
here a man can be truly dead <\/span>
and a corpse completely cold.<\/span>

In <\/span>Lines<\/span>, McLoughlin tells of old fishermen who all their lives have fished Lough Erne, <\/span>where light stops and weights \/ have failed to hit the bottom<\/span> and which is reputed to take three lives a year as a sacrifice to the old god, but who\u2019ve never learned to swim.  Elsewhere, he describes an old woman with <\/span>a face like a bolted door \/ shut against all the sins of the world, <\/span>a hill farmer, reminiscent of characters in the poems of R. S. Thomas and Patrick Kavanagh, out pounding the land in all weathers, who struggles to keep his farm going when it would be easier to give up, because<\/span> I know every stone \/ and own each knuckle of the ground. \/ The dark mass of the hill \/ is mine to the bone<\/span>, all of them figures in what is often a dark and unremittingly brooding landscape, one difficult to reconcile with notions of comfort and human happiness.  <\/span>

There is humour, of course, a lighter touch and more music in the language, but, in my view, not a great deal.  McLoughlin\u2019s focus seems always to be on the serious, the deeply felt, the painfully human and in those poems which couple such preoccupations not with the past but with his own present he achieves, I think, his finest work.  In<\/span> Drawing Blood<\/span> and <\/span>Meningitis<\/span>, for example, he writes, from his own experience, about the illness of a child.  In <\/span>Meningitis<\/span>, the harrowing lines speak volumes:  <\/span>I cannot watch \/ the needle go in.  I bow \/ my head and pray for good aim \/ and clear fluid.  (Any , blood \/ contamination means delay.) \/ I kiss you.  You do not cry.<\/span> There are a number of other poems, also, in which the suffering of children is at the heart.  <\/span>Half Remembered speaks of A shivering boy \/ incoherent \/ in the dark \/ sweat soaks the sheets \/ the flannel pyjamas <\/span><\/font> and, among the new work at the end of the collection, two poems, <\/font>Rain<\/span> and <\/span>Exodus<\/span> (the first part of which is quoted in full below), deal very powerfully with the manner in which the adult world betrays children entrusted to its care:  <\/span>

The child hasn\u2019t made a sound<\/span>
since he saw his mother<\/span>
shot in the face.<\/span>

Those eyes moon down<\/span>
the lens of his fear<\/span>
take him an inner circle deeper<\/span>

unceasingly.  He never sleeps.<\/span>
A fly walks across his pupil.<\/span>
He never blinks.<\/span>

And neither does McLoughlin.  Indeed, throughout the more than one hundred poems in the collection and across a wider range of subjects than I\u2019ve been able to find space for in this review,  it is the directness of the poet\u2019s gaze that is so noteworthy.  In <\/span>Seanduine<\/span> (pron. shandinnya), for example, he describes a child, perhaps one of his own, toddling towards him along the garden path, the <\/span>da-da-da-da syntax \/ urgent with no words<\/span>:<\/span>

Your head and heart are full<\/span>
of all the things you can\u2019t say yet.<\/span>
You contrive.  You mean like hell.<\/span>
And so do I.  And so do I.<\/span>

Exactly.<\/span>


<\/font><\/p>\n

*<\/span>Reviewed by Ken Head<\/span> \u00a92010
<\/font><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chora:  New & Selected Poems, Nigel McLoughlin , Templar Poetry  ISBN:  978-1-906285-35-5 Hardback:  \u00a39.99 123ppCh\u00f4ra, receptacle of becoming, matrix in which things are formed and given birth, is a Greek term taken from Plato\u2019s Timaeus (c. 448 B. C.), the primary purpose of which is theological, to demonstrate that the universe was divinely created.  The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=871"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23778,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871\/revisions\/23778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}