review of miceal kearney's 'inheritance' by alan garvey

7/31/2019 Review of Miceal Kearney's 'INHERITANCE' by Alan Garvey

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INHERITANCE by Micel Kearney

Review by Alan Garvey

Contributor to The Gloom Cupboard and more recently to Fullof Crow, Micel Kearney is a breath of fresh air to Irish poetry,as evidenced by his first collection, Inheritance. To anyonefamiliar with contemporary Irish literature it seems like wereplagued by books harking back to the golden past of a ruralsetting, they mourn and wake the passing of ways andgenerations where our ancestors would turn in their graves ifthey knew how the countryside was being defiled; or novelsand short stories set in Ireland before the 1970s, an Irelandmany of us never saw or would have cared to live in, that

claustrophobia and paranoia peculiar to insular midland towns.Inheritance shows that all is not lost; that there is a changingof hands, new turns on old practices and ways for the outsideworld to enter. Country lore has not vanished, particularly notwhen it can be transmitted by SMS or poetry, for that matter.

The ominous opening poem, The Calves Field, has anundertow of darkness and loss coupled with a more overtfamiliarity with death. There is an enviable frankness in TheKilling Fields and the Turlough, a poem about the range of

experiences to be had on a farm where Wonderland meetsGulag, of submerged terrors that fuel a childs imaginationand courage, where horror can spill over into fantasy andmagic before being humbled when brought into a harsh andunforgiving midsummer light.

The reader is introduced to a provincial aesthetes stomping-ground in My Milieu, where the poet inhabits solid air thatstops the clouds falling down /and the water falling up.Phantasmagorical occurrences are not out of place in this

collection but they remain rooted under the boot of hardlabour as everything is in a place where there is No time forpity, / jobs to finish in one of a number of poems featuringstillborn farm animals (And God Said). Much like Ted Hughes,Kearney is well-acquainted with the endless cycle of life anddeath. There is a confluence between his writing and farmwork that Some editors / dont find too amusing in NeverOff-Duty and in the likes of what happens in Delivered byJack. I like the fact that he seems nonplussed by thejuxtaposition of internet access from his mobile phone while

attending to ancient duties, it would seem like insouciancewere it not for a steady matter-of-factness with which he


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incorporates contemporary technology in his views of blood ona family farm.

In much of Inheritance technology does not encroach ontraditional ways as is seen in most portrayals by the canon,here it is not so much working in tandem or even confluentwith but operating at an easy parallel to traditional farm life its almost impossible to separate this tradition fromtechnology in Shepherd. In this quality, Kearney is somewhatunique among his peers. Perhaps a quote from M naSamhna can illustrate this point where old and new inhabit thesame space:

As I check my email from my phone,two daddy long legs mateon the discoloured floorboards no business of mineenter my password no business of theirs.

At other times there is a conflict between old and new, as inObsolete, a poem that begins with the clockin hen / [that]hatches eggs in the half-cut blue barrel, which used to terrify

the poet as a child with her feathers black as a moonlessnight, / hell-red comb: she is the one scared today for hers isan old fashion, / no longer popular. / Another nail in the coffin /where youll find the scythe / and plough horse. The titlepoem of Inheritance explores this tension, as it moves from adiscussion between his father and friend as they reminisceabout the past on the farm to the sharp point of the poetexamining the multiplicity of uses for a length of twine thatoften held up a pair of pants, laced working boots / and for nowhangs onions from the barn wall in contrast to the nylon nets

now used to wrap the bales which are not given a further useand cannot be passed on to another. The poets sense of thisconflict is not a dispassionate displacement of archaisms or araging Rimbaud-renunciation but a perception of what isunderstood as natural, where what is seen is accepted asbeing enough.

Many of the poems in Inheritance might be read as beingunnecessarily bleak, raw or messy in their distribution of vitalfluids, the readers senses may be disturbed but only

momentarily before regaining balance and a new dawnemerges, as in the lines Puzzles in my eyes / I am thankful /


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for my Christmas presents (Open Your Eyes). Sometimesthere is an overwhelming sense of futility branches reachout to grab the clouds / but are thwarted by the wind; which isbut one example of a pleasing touch that Kearney has to hand,a disciplined, almost stern haiku-like quality to his descriptionsof pathetic fallacy in which I discern echoes of Sen Dunne.That same deceptive simplicity is at work in Groundhog Day,in his attempt to depict an age-old problem that of writing inorder to faithfully represent experience and actuality.

It may be a peccadillo of mine but I quite enjoy poemspossessed of the antithetical dose to the simpering that manypoets present when faced with something small and fluffy; thecackle that can be heard when reading A Little Kitty is the

same to emerge from reading Ondaatjes Application for aDriving Licence. Moonlighting shows another side to thepoets humour where he displays a wry touch, a self-deprecating irony in lines where The wind steals my fullstops, making me want to read more about where hissentences escape / through briared, broken walls / into thenight, silent / bar the rustle of badgers / or the passingmotorcar, fine muscular rhythms. There are only a few minorblots on the landscape of Inheritance, such as The BeaufortScale and Grown No More, where the poems end too easily,

too abruptly for my liking not that I think the poems are badlywritten, just that they could (and I think should) be revisitedand pushed-out a little more in their meaning.

A more sombre, exposed note rings through the poems of thefinal third of the collection where The wind ruffles moultingtrees / and my blank leaves (That Time of Year), and a loneswan pirouettes half a Claddagh ring in Inkwell, brokenonly by a flash of unfettered innocence and joy where the poetdelights in seeing lambs tails waggle, / suckling in the sun

(Wait and See). The last poem of Inheritance, Should I FallBefore the Leaves is an exquisite parting benediction by wayof last request. Kearney is sensitive to loss and what cannever be regained theres tremendous pathos regarding hisand his siblings childhoods in the last stanza of Written atWork, the same childhood revisited in Dont Be HammeringNails into Trees!:

What did I knowas I made my tree house

of childhood hopes and dreamswith six inch nails.


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Through the yearsIve watchedthat tree gradually rotmurdered by me.

I believe a new collection by Micel Kearney is forthcoming,one I hope to have the pleasure of reading before very long.

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review of miceal kearney's 'inheritance' by alan garvey

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