Five Short Reviews

Abstract

Chris Agee is a poet born and educated in the United States and trans planted to Ireland, where he lives and teaches in Belfast. Unlike some other Irish poets who have made the transatlantic crossing in that di rection?Brooklyn-born John Montague being the most notable among them?Agee focusses in collection on an all-encompassing empa thy with the natural world, of which he has a coherent and even clas sical vision. Although he notes in passing the imprints of human his tory and conflict in the natural surround?what poet could fail to do so in Ireland??it is the landscape itself with which he feels most at home. The first landscape is that of his native North America, specifi cally New England?one New World region whose pastoral terrain most closely resembles that of his adopted European isle?where the unretainable is nevertheless preserved, burnt in the brow of memory. And he dwells with affection on the green contours of the Irish coastlands, drawing on the Imagists, Japanese haiku, Hopkins,Yeats, and the spirits of the Celtic past for his inspiration. There are some lovely close inspections of North American flora and fauna?loons, Indian pipes, paper birches?all bound by the blood shot ground of our heritage. And there are sweeping evocations of the Old World younger than this in actual geological time: the evening peet-reek of Irish turf, of fallow deer (swift interlopers / on winter pasture), and the shifting colors of croftlands in the sea sonal cycles of the liturgical year. But the poetry doesn't quite tran scend its initial descriptive delights to reach for a deeper connection between the indwelling life of these continents and the human cul tures that overlay and inhabit them.