For now, here are my introductory remarks on the collection. It can be purchased directly from his publisher Doire Press, who are doing great work in finding - and publishing - original voices in contemporary Irish poetry - including, of course, David Butler himself.
A Question at the Shoreline: ‘All the
Barbaric Glass’ by David Butler
All the Barbaric Glass was launched at the Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin, on 23rd March 2017.
The opening lines of the first
poem, ‘Breaking’, of David Butler’s second collection, All the Barbaric Glass, acts as a statement of intent for the work,
one which he steadfastly adheres to throughout:
There
are times you need
to
step outside of colloquy;
to
mute the looping newsfeed,
the
tinnitus of the immediate.
This is a collection that
consciously steps beyond ‘the newsfeed’, the constant information thrown at us both
in daily life and in the online sphere. That world occasional encroaches on
this mission in certain stray moments, but David resolutely stays the course to
give us something beyond mere reportage or internet chatter.
The striking imagery of the
collection reminds us that this work exists at a boundary, most obviously, that
of the physical landscape of the shoreline, the place between land and sea. The shoreline is a very real and concrete
location throughout the poems, but subtly reaches the level of metaphor also,
representing as it does so the space between life and death, loss and love
found, the solid ground of the present and the less certain waters of past and future.
This notion of the blurring of
boundaries is heightened also by the fact that many poems take place in the gloaming,
the dusk-light, that liminal space between day and night, becoming the
shadowland of the poets inner, self-questioning thoughts. The passage of time is marked out through these
scenes as when a young child finds a dogfish washed up on the beach and the
poet observes:
...Small
wonder
the child with bucket stands and stares
and
starts to hear the song of sand;
the
whisper in the hourglass.
Such philosophical
preoccupations are threaded throughout the work but there are also more
emotionally direct pieces, most particularly those about his father and late
mother, such as ‘Death Watch’, ‘Watcher’, and ‘Family Album’. His father’s
descent into Alzheimer’s is not just observed, but observed closely and felt to the core. In the poem ‘Father’, David
takes us far beyond cold statistics or even, indeed, the powerful testimony of
loved ones seen on a segment on the TV news, to a fully articulated statement
that captures the heart-breaking reality of the condition as experienced by
both the father suffering it and the son’s efforts to try to understand it:
What
unsigned city is it you wake in,
featureless,
or with such altered features
the
streets are not familiar, or if, with
shifting
familiarity, like dreamscapes
you
wake from?
The autumnal/wintry setting that
pervades the collection also seems to suggest that the work exists in the wake
of such loss and questioning, where we view the shoreline differently again – not
just as haunting but as one now ‘haunted’ by personal grief.
It should be obvious by now how
beautifully written these poems are. However, this isn’t achieved through a
relaxed, easy lyricism but rather a starkly elegant one. There is an exactness
and precision to these poems, an angular beauty, we might say, somewhat
reminiscent of the that most descriptively rigorous of Irish poets, Thomas Kinsella.
Take these lines from ‘Correspondence’:
There
are more
tongues
here than in a metropolis
gorse
and cowslip and insect
all
flash their intimate semaphore;
a
corncrake croaks Morse; while a skylark
hoisted
high as radio-mast,
is
twittering its incessant machine-code
It is this sense of rigour which offers a controlled, formal elegance to the language, the
observational accuracy perhaps reflecting David’s studies in engineering at
university. There is an eye to detail, as ‘Correspondence’ shows, that other
writers may well miss.
However, there are also moments
of counterpoint placed in the lattice of such a grief-work, where splashes of
colour interrupt the wintry shoreline scenes and present their own vivid
reality. In ‘Grand Bizarre, Istanbul’
Suddenly
the senses are ablaze: scent
has
tumbled into an Aladdin’s cave
that
illuminates the throve of memory...
while in ‘Mellifont Abbey’, bees
...fumble inside auricular lilies
drunk on summer’s insistent song.
At the same time, the contemporary
world of the ‘looping newsfeed’ and internet babble breaks through on occasion
(as it must), impinging on the other reflections of natural setting. Yet found
amid this ‘tinnitus’ is more important news, news that matters and captured in the
vision of “all the suitcases, empty as grief / that bob on the Aegean...”
bringing us closer to the scene, however briefly, of distant calamity.
To end, I just wanted to note
something I only fully appreciated on a second reading of All the Barbaric Glass and one that strikes me as important and
central to this books appeal. That thing is
the presence of the question mark throughout these poems. So often when
poets ‘question’ (especially these days) they are questioning others in
accusatory tones for their social or political ineptitude, their incompetence, faults
and lack. The ‘other’, in this sense, is always an easy target for lazy vitriol.
Here, though, the questions are
those asked of oneself, offering a form of self-reflection and self-questioning
that, in the end, is a method of self-interrogation that leaves no place to
hide for the poet in these poems. This is not, in the end, a collection that
offers easy resolution or explicit consolation, though nor is it one lacking in
humanity or tentative hope.
The last two poems of the book demonstrate
this unerring honesty. In ‘The Injunction’, the poet remembers the Deutsche
Grammophon records his father would play on the old record player in the living
room when he was a child, and how: “Still it reverberates / like a paternal
caveat: /the cough of the stylus defluffed; / the circuitry clearing its
throat; / the expectant static...” In the beautifully strange, and slightly
chilling, final poem ‘Restless’ two lovers look out onto the sea as they walk
the shoreline. She imagines she spies a body bobbing in the surf, just beyond
the rocks. They peer out together, more alert now. He questions her assertion, then
responds:
It’s not, I say again, less sure.
Less
sure of myself, too
and
of us,
with
the sea and wind and world enormous about us.
March 2017
