David Morley has had more than his fair share of prizes recently; this year the Ted Hughes Award for New Poetry for his Selected Poems. This beautifully presented pamphlet continues the writing Morley has done using vocabulary from Romani, for which Morley has made a project of bringing Romani back into the mainstream of poetry. That said, Morley uses the nouns from the language so that the syntax and movement of the writing is resolutely standard. The nouns from Romany that Morley uses create a naming in the poetry, and the effect of that is to pull the reader into the solidity of the Romani experience. The processes of that experience are contained within Morley’s tensed, descriptive style, as in the following: ‘…pudding-men scuttle// lofting their laden trays above steaming manure heaps./ Loaves bustle in brimming baskets.’ ‘Gentiles’. In that sense, Morley uses a traditional music of assonance and alliteration.
That music portrays most successfully the process of the experience; to use Morley’s own word, the bustle of Romani life in this short sequence which describes the preparations and funeral of Wisdom Smith. Interspersed between the poems which describe that bustle are lists of the caravans and the people in them who follow the ‘burial train’. In the ‘5th caravan’ are inter alia ‘Edward and Cinderella of the Dearloves/Harefoot and Zhanna of the Keenans//Pharaoh and Poratha of the Heaths/Adamant and Eros of the Jobs// Righteous Rose Nipkin of the Christmases/ and of the Shepsters no word’. It makes you wonder where Tolkien got all his names from. The list of first names is repeated in the penultimate ‘poem’ which also ends, ‘and of The Prince of Gypsies? no word’.
The final poem of the sequence is a very powerful evocation of Wisdom Smith attending the breech birth of a foal. Thus in the death of Smith is the memory of a natural life he enabled. Present at the birth is the poet John Clare, who is present in the first poem, and of whose relationship with Wisdom Smith, Morley has written about in his book The Gypsy and the Poet. This pamphlet is a deft and moving coda to that previous book.
Cathy Galvin also uses vocabulary from a non-English source; this time the slightly more accessible Irish Gaelic. So this book contains a short glossary, too. Galvin’s music is of a clipped, even curt, kind, and uses short, declarative sentences to considerable effect. Her poems work by accumulating those short sentences with the details they contain and placing those details in flickering realisations. An example of this comes from the second section of a poem called ‘Walls’, ‘He’s not in view but I can hear a breath/ – the well-made spade and phrase./My made things broke long ago./ They had little purchase on this world./ The Creed, letters I do not read./ Frail are the things that fall away./ Leaving us bone.’ There is a narrative moving these sentence-length, end-stopped lines, but it’s underneath the surface. And the effect is to slow the reader down so that they are forced to take in those details patiently and thoughtfully. The details are of lives lead on the edges of the island of Ireland throughout the twentieth century, and often focus on the difficulties of women’s lives through this period. Thus, this short pamphlet of poems is a powerful and intimate meditation on the position of women in Irish society, with a range of riches which reward re-reading.