Collected Poems by Dennis O'Driscoll

Abstract

Reviewed by: Collected Poems by Dennis O'Driscoll Joseph Heininger Collected Poems, by Dennis O'Driscoll, pp. 544. Manchester,: Carcanet, 2017. Distributed by Independent Publishers Group, Chicago. £19.99 The late Dennis O'Driscoll's poetry resonates with his undiminished physical and spiritual engagement with the world, his perceptions of the fraying contours and the anomie of contemporary lives, and most notably, his freedom from fashionable idioms and ideas, which made him a necessary presence in the world of poetry and beyond. A theme he sounded frequently in mid-career, as in Exemplary Damages (2002), is his sense of loss and bewilderment at the perceived withdrawal of the sacred from contemporary lives ("Our one true God has died, vanished under / a rainbow's arch, banished like a devil / scalded by holy water; but our lives remain / eternally precious in the eyes of man.") In O'Driscoll's unobtrusive free-verse idiom, the poignant laments that characterize the images and insights of the litany-poem "Missing God" feature unwished-for departures and irreparable losses. Here are representative stanzas from the middle of the poem: Miss Him when we exclaim His namespontaneously in awe or angeras a woman in a birth wardcries out to her long-dead mother. Miss Him when the linen-covereddining table holds warm bread rolls,shiny glasses of red wine. [End Page 158] Several later poems, such as "Petition" and "The Power and the Glory" together with the familiar, chaffing tone of "Update" elaborate these God-haunted themes. Philip Larkin is often proposed as a close artistic figure for O'Driscoll. But one might also nominate Hopkins, Eliot, and Auden, as well as such contemporary poets as Christian Wiman and Mark Jarman, who share O'Driscoll's spirit-touched sensibility and represent the imagery and ideas of belief and loss of belief in their poetry. When he published the fifty-stanza free verse sequence "The Bottom Line" in 1994, O'Driscoll anticipated our fantasies of pleasant, cost-free strolls along electronic avenues and the consequent mental freeing of the preoccupied citizens of our democracies. Instead, the poet knew well to represent the petty behavior, the bottom-line-driven ethos that causes the redundancy of many, including the once-dominant sales rep, and how all economic activity is orchestrated by charmless drivers of profit. "The Bottom Line" captures this downward pull into oblivion: The white-cuffed sales rep, guardingterritory, does not add up in the ageof central warehousing; the few we stillkeep on are doomed: jaunty, over-groomed men,sharing jokes and samples at the check-outs,waiting for a brisk assistant managerto deign to acknowledge their existence, Although the poem's enjambed lines offer a thread of connection by means of technique, it portrays the new dispensation in which the sales reps cannot enact the familiar pattern of "guarding / territory." Especially in the workplace poems, O'Driscoll described our anxious age and prophesied many of the fault lines of the screen-besotted, over-hurried era in which we live. Often, his poems attend to the pleasant rituals or the worrisome rhythms of dailiness, with their imperfect efforts and frustrated human hopes. In Quality Time, such poems as "You," "Reading the Signs," "Time Check," and "Talking Shop" announce themes and tropes he would revisit, such as the circumscribed world of a shopkeeper: "Finally, having wound the shutter down again, / the life he leads is his business exclusively. / Perpetual light shines on the manual cash box." The wordplay in the line "the life he leads is his business exclusively" allows us to see the irony and the dread in his maintaining such a closed-up stance toward life. In the religiously inflected poems, especially from Dear Life (2012) and Update (2014), O'Driscoll portrays the problems of individual and cultural belief, and loss of belief, in a transcendent God. He seeks expression and further experience of what Jurgen Habermas has called "An Awareness of What is Missing" in a spiritual life that now faces a mainly secular [End Page 159] and solipsistic age. The evidence of his poetry and the searching interviews with Seamus Heaney he collected in Stepping Stones (2008), show...