Labournight... It's the poems that come first...
Chronologically, and in terms of time spent creating them, a lifetime. 'The Snowchild' was written around 1985. These poems chart a course, a geographical and temporal journey, from Ireland to Japan. They constitute something like an autobiography of the poet. Below, 'commuter' captures the transformative nature of spending so much time in these metal boxes with wheels.
commuter
"Being on commuter trains is a large part of life in Japan, for me, at least. Many of my poems attempt to capture the atmosphere of being on them, and of flowing through stations, all of us strangers together, a bit like fish in a river." Martin Connolly
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Reviews
This review is by Gavin Bantock, an eminent British poet, long resident in Japan. He is the author of Just Think of It, Anvil Press Poetry, the award-winning Christos, and many other volumes.
MUSCULATURE AND MIND
labournight & other poems by Martin Connolly
Martin Connolly has an acute eye for observation, a canny ear for sound and a unique way with words in expressing what he sees, hears and feels about things in the world high and low. His poems cover a wide range of topics from absolute realism to quaint fantasy, as titles like Elegy for a Convenience Store and The Snowchild testify. Open his book at almost any page and you will find an unexpected gem of an image or a pithy turn of phrase. He has a distinct voice of his own in a poetic world of fascinating interweavings of English, Celtic and Japanese fibres.
The ending of his poem The Helicopters is a good example of the accuracy and originality of his imagery:
Normally, however, they’re
silent, evanescent things,
that dart and swim about far-off
like tadpoles,
on the greying backdrop of a zinc sky.
The main poem in the collection labournight is a study in protracted pain,
time was pain
expanding sharply
by degrees-
and vividly, at times almost too graphically, depicts the parallel agonies of both the mother-to-be
the wickerwork of muscles
was working through you
relentlessly
and the husband-in-waiting in and around the delivery room of a Japanese hospital. The poet’s handling of minute details and sounds of words adds to the intensity of the poem. For example, he takes the Japanese word jintsu, literally ‘labour-pain’ (jintsu no heya being a kind of pre-delivery room in the hospital), and comments on the very sound of that word:
we were alone
in the jintsu no heya -
with its sharp nasal pinch
in the middle, jintsu
conveyed more pain
than ‘contractions’
Martin Connolly is a musician and his verse often reflects this. When after ten hours of labour the baby is still not yet born –
appropriately
around the graveyard hour
of four
the ghost of Tom Joad
appeared, and Springsteen
sang our disappointment
for us
As a poet myself, I am not too fond of using very short lines as Connolly does most of the time, though these do, in labournight for example, help to carry along the poem at a rapid, breathless pace that suits the content. Some of the short lines in other poems, however, do not seem to justify themselves poetically. Towards the end of the book, there are a few poems with much longer lines, and in one of these, the curse, we get a kind of ironically toned-down incantatory verse reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg‘s Howl:
at which point elements kicked in and took me by the metaphoric arm suggesting
I might possibly have overstepped the mark and trodden on a tenet of some global faith
that thing by which we gauge our civilisation with its Pepsi Cola ads and crucifixes
Connolly’s use of punctuation, especially the hyphen/dash, is slightly eccentric, which is a little distracting at times. He tells me he doesn’t bother much about such things, but I feel his poems would have a stronger impact professionally with greater care in this department.
But Connolly’s verse is full of muscular energy and benefits greatly from being read aloud, as the poet, so he tells me, intended it should be. And if you are looking for some poetry that is strikingly ‘different’ from much of what is being written today, then do get hold of this book and plumb its treasures.
Gavin Bantock
July, 2016
MUSCULATURE AND MIND
labournight & other poems by Martin Connolly
Martin Connolly has an acute eye for observation, a canny ear for sound and a unique way with words in expressing what he sees, hears and feels about things in the world high and low. His poems cover a wide range of topics from absolute realism to quaint fantasy, as titles like Elegy for a Convenience Store and The Snowchild testify. Open his book at almost any page and you will find an unexpected gem of an image or a pithy turn of phrase. He has a distinct voice of his own in a poetic world of fascinating interweavings of English, Celtic and Japanese fibres.
The ending of his poem The Helicopters is a good example of the accuracy and originality of his imagery:
Normally, however, they’re
silent, evanescent things,
that dart and swim about far-off
like tadpoles,
on the greying backdrop of a zinc sky.
The main poem in the collection labournight is a study in protracted pain,
time was pain
expanding sharply
by degrees-
and vividly, at times almost too graphically, depicts the parallel agonies of both the mother-to-be
the wickerwork of muscles
was working through you
relentlessly
and the husband-in-waiting in and around the delivery room of a Japanese hospital. The poet’s handling of minute details and sounds of words adds to the intensity of the poem. For example, he takes the Japanese word jintsu, literally ‘labour-pain’ (jintsu no heya being a kind of pre-delivery room in the hospital), and comments on the very sound of that word:
we were alone
in the jintsu no heya -
with its sharp nasal pinch
in the middle, jintsu
conveyed more pain
than ‘contractions’
Martin Connolly is a musician and his verse often reflects this. When after ten hours of labour the baby is still not yet born –
appropriately
around the graveyard hour
of four
the ghost of Tom Joad
appeared, and Springsteen
sang our disappointment
for us
As a poet myself, I am not too fond of using very short lines as Connolly does most of the time, though these do, in labournight for example, help to carry along the poem at a rapid, breathless pace that suits the content. Some of the short lines in other poems, however, do not seem to justify themselves poetically. Towards the end of the book, there are a few poems with much longer lines, and in one of these, the curse, we get a kind of ironically toned-down incantatory verse reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg‘s Howl:
at which point elements kicked in and took me by the metaphoric arm suggesting
I might possibly have overstepped the mark and trodden on a tenet of some global faith
that thing by which we gauge our civilisation with its Pepsi Cola ads and crucifixes
Connolly’s use of punctuation, especially the hyphen/dash, is slightly eccentric, which is a little distracting at times. He tells me he doesn’t bother much about such things, but I feel his poems would have a stronger impact professionally with greater care in this department.
But Connolly’s verse is full of muscular energy and benefits greatly from being read aloud, as the poet, so he tells me, intended it should be. And if you are looking for some poetry that is strikingly ‘different’ from much of what is being written today, then do get hold of this book and plumb its treasures.
Gavin Bantock
July, 2016
This review is by Lorna Shaughnessy, a prominent and acclaimed Irish poet, author of Anchored and Torch the Brown River, both Salmon Press Poetry.
Labournight and other poems, Martin Connolly’s first collection, takes the reader on a series of geographic, emotional and sensory journeys from ‘Helicopters’ in North Belfast to the intercultural reflections inspired by ‘Eating an Apple on a Commuter Train in Japan’, the poet’s new home. In the collection’s centrepiece, the long poem ‘Labournight’, “taut lines” are not only a feature of the mother’s face but of the poem itself: gripping, real, it rollercoasters through the shifting rhythms and moods of a long labour from the expectant father’s perspective. This is honest poetry, self-mocking rather than self-absorbed; it captures moments of absurdity and self-consciousness, exhaustion, fear and above all, intimacy. In many poems the world is rediscovered, as is language, aided by the company of toddler sons. But the reality of ‘routine in among the wonder’ is here too; the ‘choreography’ of the commuter, ‘scrummaging for a seat’. Observations of the everyday are acutely captured in language that is fresh and flexible, as poems move fluently between the particular and Connolly’s philosophical probing of ‘the giant constructs of community’.
Labournight and other poems, Martin Connolly’s first collection, takes the reader on a series of geographic, emotional and sensory journeys from ‘Helicopters’ in North Belfast to the intercultural reflections inspired by ‘Eating an Apple on a Commuter Train in Japan’, the poet’s new home. In the collection’s centrepiece, the long poem ‘Labournight’, “taut lines” are not only a feature of the mother’s face but of the poem itself: gripping, real, it rollercoasters through the shifting rhythms and moods of a long labour from the expectant father’s perspective. This is honest poetry, self-mocking rather than self-absorbed; it captures moments of absurdity and self-consciousness, exhaustion, fear and above all, intimacy. In many poems the world is rediscovered, as is language, aided by the company of toddler sons. But the reality of ‘routine in among the wonder’ is here too; the ‘choreography’ of the commuter, ‘scrummaging for a seat’. Observations of the everyday are acutely captured in language that is fresh and flexible, as poems move fluently between the particular and Connolly’s philosophical probing of ‘the giant constructs of community’.
The review below appeared in #51 issue of The Journal, which is a publication dedicated to contemporary poetry.
Written by the editor, Sam Smith. Access the latest issue of The Journal here.
Written by the editor, Sam Smith. Access the latest issue of The Journal here.
