Angels, Men and Boys: Katy Evans-Bush looks at distance and particularity in the work of Kevin Higgins and David Grubb

Kevin Higgins: Time Gentlemen, Please (Salmon Publishing, 2008) €12.00
David Grubb: It Comes With a Bit of a Song (Salt Publishing, 2007) £12.99

Here, two new collections take the idea of particularity and apply it in different ways. Kevin Higgins’ second collection, Time, Gentlemen, Please, reprises some of the subject matter of his successful debut, The Boy With No Face (Salmon, 2005); his anecdotal political engagement, and disillusionment, forms the main thematic thread through the book.

If Ireland is one of the last English-speaking places where poetry can get you noticed, the political left wing seems to be one of its most contentious corners. Higgins’ poem Firewood – based on some quotes about Darfur (‘It’s problematic to describe this as genocide’, ‘We demand the US keep its hands off Sudan’) from the Socialist Workers Party – has already been the subject of a heated controversy in the Galway Advertiser, to whom the SWP wrote a rather humourless letter of complaint, ending: ‘Thankfully, he doesn’t take himself too seriously’.

Higgins is definitely not one to take himself too seriously. He is consistently little-guy friendly: even in the face of growing up in Militant he is the little guy, never seemingly able to be quite militant enough, always just a little too questioning. He can’t help poking fun at the self-importance of ‘The World Socialist Party of Honeysuckle Heights’ – ‘less the vanguard/ of the proletariat/ than a dinner party/ that kept not happening’ – ‘or the ‘Social Realist Poetess’. His poem, ‘Death of a Revolutionary: Ted Grant (1913-2006)’ ends, ‘I did not say, as you did/ ‘We have kept the faith’.

Sometimes Higgins is literally the ‘little guy’, as in his poems about being ‘a boy/ lost in enormous shorts’. He has a knack for, even a tenderness towards, the trials of adolescence, the hopelessness of it. In ‘My Militant Tendency’:

While others dream of businessmen bleeding
In basements; I promise to abolish double-chemistry class?
The minute I become Commissar. In all of this
There is usually a leather jacket involved …

There are numerous poems about the poet’s father, the family rows, the bad atmosphere. Some of these are effective and moving, as in ‘Dad’:

            On yellow evenings
In a country that no longer exists,
           We ignore each other
Over deceased cups of coffee…

The power of this lies in suggestion, in the well-observed ordinary moment, which is Higgins’ real gift. Where he is less successful is in those poems that succumb to the temptation to wrap it all up, to drive home the point – say, about the bad relationship with his father. The wonderfully titled ‘The History of Sad’, for instance, promises much but seems to lack steam beyond the title. Though that could be part of the whole process of sadness.

Higgins has a real gift for titles: ‘The Man in the Horsham Computer Room’, ‘Conversation with a Former Self’, ‘Portrait of the Boss Shaking Hands With Himself’, ‘Foreboding’. The best of the poems are smart vignettes, character studies, accounts of the telling moment. This is very refreshing, but there is a tendency to rely on fact and exposition over poetic technique; maybe this is part of being little-guy friendly. Some of the line breaks seem arbitrary or awkward, and there is a prosy quality that prevents some of the poems from operating on a level much beyond their content.

The collection feels too long at 94 pages (81 pages of poems) – nearly double the length of some collections. Unsurprisingly, given this, there are weaker poems that distract from the undeniably stronger ones. The collection might have been sharper at 20 pages or so less.

Where Kevin Higgins’ poems give us the minute, humane particulars, David Grubb’s collection, It Comes With a Bit of a Song, operates from a sort of angelic distance. At first his poems appear somehow fresher than Higgins’: more attentive of form, with more wordplay; he plays more with the line and the sentence, and his poems have a pleasing look on the page. Like Higgins, he has a knack for the title: ‘The Glovemaker’s Son’, ‘Tiger in Daylight’, ‘Why Monks Should Not Hit Each Other’.  (There are also two letters, ‘Letter to Alice Sebold’ and ‘Letter to John Clare’.)

But the view from Grubb’s vantage point is not human in its particulars: he is more interested in the long range. Although he does name particulars, his poems rely heavily on the abstract, and even the particulars he lists – he is given to lists – seem chosen for their ability (‘when a man collapses at Grand Central Station/ or the large portrait of Elizabeth Taylor falls from the wall’) to stand in for any other particular. In the aforementioned, wonderfully-titled ‘The Glovemaker’s Son’ (ironically I liked this title because it had a pleasingly concrete sound to it, as if there was going to be an interesting son), there is no son and everything remains stubbornly plural. Stanza two, in full, runs:

Soliloquy; can you catch my meaning? This is not about what we
are but about what we might become, the way we travel and
inherit ideas and vocabularies, the sun blessing fields and
orchards and pathways so that you hear me across the years and
sense the urgency so that what I have to say breaks from the
poetry and becomes again and you are left wondering and
transcribing meaning, realities, truths.

This sort of contingency – this ‘we’, this never-defined ‘meaning’, ‘what I have to say’ consisting more and more only of what is said – which isn’t, in fact, much - quickly grows a bit flat. The phrase ‘meanings, realities, truths’ – with three stanzas yet to run – sounds too much like everything and nothing. The poem ends, ‘…the desire to be entwined in our lives, our voice, our oaths’.

In ‘Cento Angeli’ (angels make frequent appearances in this collection, watching us from on high, pluralising us),

The hundred angels declare dawn and eat fire for breakfast;
some spend the first hours delivering dead babies and baskets
filled with prayers; some listen to school children inventing
excuses; some wonder at the wisdom of young women’s legs.

So whatever we know about the angels, we know they aren’t young women; nor do they aspire to an empathy with the condition of young women. We know that what they are, overwhelmingly, is plural: here are a hundred of them – ‘available… to be abused by geniuses and jesters and Irish poets’, and they do all sorts of things, in one block of long lines, ending up ‘and within the parchment mind of Christ’.

The stronger poems in this collection are the least given to whimsy and generalisation. The short list poem ‘Why We Do’ hints at something specific but tantalisingly fails to name it. Others utilise the heavenly vantage point to better effect, such as the ‘Letter to Alice Sebold’, which speculates about what the dead remember about life in the world. What indeed?

But Grubb has a pleasing ear; his lines, though they stretch and meander to some length, are well-handled. They roll well in the mouth. Grubb’s is a quiet, meditative, spiritual sensibility, and these poems encompass gardening, the meaning of meaning and the process of creativity. An undeniable gift for imagery is everywhere in It Comes With a Bit of a Song – startling, effusive, various – though the sheer number of images might require a heavenly being to accommodate its multifariousness.