Book Review

An old West Irish response to the knock of an unexpected visitor—“Are ye of the living or of the dead?”—prefaces this collection and might be taken to refer to any number of characters gracing these pages; indeed, we are left wondering if some of them ever existed at all. A fastidious barman called Perfect Ed, for instance, may or may not be an invention, but there’s more than the ring of truth about him, as there is about each and every character carefully drawn here—a poet’s truth at least.

Either way, what we have is a richly imagined and lyrically presented record of the Irish American experience from the pen of someone who knows, who can reliably summon up both its reality and its spirit. You only have to allow the following to alight momentarily on your sceptical and soured consciousness to appreciate his gift:

the mule’s jaw lathered a salty foam, braying against

bit and harness, against the soil’s loosening grasp,

until the field sang to the blades or seeming-so;

Such vivid pictures don’t come ready-made off the shelf; they are born of experience and of that nameless organ implanted in those willing to look beyond the literal, and Rappleye employs both to wonderful effect. It’s an anachronistic image—of course it is—but then we are led through centuries of familial, religious, and social interactions, during the course of which we become acquainted with anyone from fishermen and millworkers to priests, private-eyes, and sleepy altar boys to Red Adair approaching a wellhead behind his asbestos shield.

Barley Child (a term, by the way, that once suggested illegitimacy and maybe even the scene of conception) shows the poet reflecting on official documents, gravestone epitaphs, faded photographs and the like, to conjure up a feeling for a certain breed, a class apart. Perhaps the poem “Beneath the Clock Tower, Main Gate,” a consideration of those who might have toiled in a cotton mill in Biddeford, Maine, will give you an idea of the poet’s personal take on a shared history, rather wonderfully re-imagined. It begins: “Through the shattered windows, / the cotton bays echo, dark as tubercular lungs” and sees the narrator scanning a photograph, trying to identify individuals and guessing who did what—who loaded the bales and the hopper, who reset the loom and:

Whose barefoot child wept quietly and retied

the broken threads? Who oiled, who swept,

Imagining himself at the gate, welcoming the employees about to begin their ten-hour shifts, he feels he should announce them in song as he checks off their names—Little Andre, Willie, is that Norah Burke? It could be—and clock in for them. It’s a harsh but tenderly conceived poem underscored by a muted rage.

In the same vein is a piece about Mercywood, a psychiatric facility run by the Sisters of Mercy until 1986. It tells of the poet Theodore Roethke, who was a resident there for a short period, teaching the narrator’s mother how best to look after the peonies in the home’s greenhouse. The parallels between their care and that of the patients dawns slowly, beautifully, as we read of untangling the roots of the dormant ones, tending to the easiest needing only sunlight, and understanding that winter must pass before they bloom. That “winter” is not shied away from though, as the mother, then a girl, is asked to pause at the iron gates to “mumble your beads,” and to “. . . weep for / the hair-raised, the electric, as they are rolled / back to their rooms.”

You will have gathered that this collection is no mere picaresque tramp through the deeds and misdeeds of colourful characters with a little gentle melancholia thrown in for taste. Rather, it’s a serious, detailed, and very readable representation of a culture and its people, telling of both the joys and—perhaps more realistically—the sadnesses therein. That the book is dedicated to “The Survivors and Their Children” is a strong indication that a maxim passed on to his son by a drunken father—“Life is hardtack and no lard”—was not far off the mark.

Childhood features a good deal here, with some fine descriptive passages illuminated by wonder but darkened, at times, by the presence of “Da,” a brooding presence throughout. An almost idyllic reminiscence of blackberry picking, for instance, concludes with the father taking the few nickels earned to buy a pack of beer; the same man who would, in a later poem describing the delight of a boy playing shuffle puck, “. . . smack me up the head / and curse a jumble box of curses . . .” for no apparent reason. On a lighter note, we’re told of a family funeral where the boy props up his Aunt Rose in her casket, inserting a cigarette between her cold fingers “and a bourbon tight in her grasp.” Uncle Jim laughs, aunts shudder, and the priest throws him out in the rain:

And from that day, the oddest of my dead

have fluttered through my dreams. Sweet nuthatches,

nodding, wheet-wheeting, so eager to explain.

These last three lines, appending an agreeably lyrical touch to a relatively straightforward narrative, being typical of the poet’s approach.

I’ve not enough space here to adequately communicate the range and skills of this fine poet, so I will finish with at least a snippet from a poem that demonstrates the collection’s originality and bravado. In it, some unnamed fellow, in a long, ironic denial of his complicity in the burning down of a Cotton House in 1915, remembers the terrible black shadows cast against the rafters and walls:

. . . like something from Plato’s Allegory,

a book I didn’t read—it cannae be proven

I can read . . .

Delicious. Rappleye’s fifth collection was a pleasure to both read and review. Most poetry books are around seventy pages, with introduction and notes, whereas Barley Child exceeds one hundred and twenty pages. My point is that there is barely enough room even then to contain the burgeoning flow of imagination, colour, and genuine fellow-feeling that makes this selection of verse so irresistible, so utterly convincing.