Doug Roy, Cat in the Garden, Cut Paper
Dublin 12
The swans decamp the Grand Canal. Without
those cross palimpsests, we find the water
brown and deathly as stale tea. Nowhere’s
safe to bide this spring’s collapsing redoubt,
soft with scandal, unsure as any Crumlin
semi-detached two-bedroom with a ten-year
variable rate. No word in our ear
elucidates the maundered filth the maudlin
current spits and dribbles, some lunatic’s
lurid but amnesiac decade. Rocks
in our pockets, we fear that old hysteric
aisling’s blathered odium like the pox
or loan default. It urges noon-day panics,
bids us throw our lodgements in the locks.
________________
Manny Blacksher
Review by Michael J. Galko
A strong tip of the Irish cap to Manny Blacksher for this extraordinarily accomplished and dense sonnet of modern (and maybe not so modern) Dublin. Mr. Blacksher begins in classic sonnet form with a line of perfect iambic pentameter but the meter soon gets a bit murky and muddled, like the water of the grand canal he invites us to envisage. At one level this poem resonated so much for me due to a visit to Dublin (my first) a few years ago with my then college-age daughter. Having read so many of the great Irish writers and poets (Joyce, Yeats, Heaney, Trevor, Edna O’Brien) I was struck by how the whole city itself is in some way an endless tangled palimpsest (second line– the wakes that the swans form on the canal) of its past literary history. I was also struck by the city’s relatively new post-Euro modernity and affluence, also a topic of this poem at one level. In the poem’s first several lines we learn that ‘nowhere is safe’ this spring ‘soft with scandal’ (the Irish real-estate banking crisis of 2009?), redoubts are collapsing, and even the supposedly secure investment of housing in the Dublin suburb of Crumlin is (pun seemingly very much intended)- crumbling… From its middle lines the sonnet effectively sprinkles financial language “ten-year variable rate”, “loan default”, “noon-day panics” with a perhaps more ancient speaker, possibly even one warning us below hearing (‘no word in our ear’) that also traces the current of the canal ‘the maundered filth the current spits and dribbles’ and warns of some coming calamity- ‘we fear that old hysteric aisling’s blathered odium like the pox or loan default’. This more ancient dream vision, it seems, would have us throw our new worthless housing investments (those located in Dublin postal district 12) straight into one of the 12 locks along Dublin’s Grand Canal. Well done, Mr. Blacksher, a pleasure to read and puzzle through. For even more fun, try tracing the obvious and less obvious rhyming schemes embedded herein.
Review by Massimiliano Nastri
The music of it, swans de-camp the Grand Canàl, palimpsest – spring’s collapses, two-bedroom variable rate, maundered – maudlin, lurid amnesiac. Odium. The images follow suit and are picked like grapes. The usage of metaphor as a social commentary (again, the two-bedroom), with the not so distant tone, not acidic, certainly not dyspeptic but neither pastorally elegiac. Like a Juvenal without bile.
It moved me who, at the time of the 2008-9 crunch, lived in Dublin (uneven zip code, so not that posh part, but knew enough about those canals) and remember the vans moving furniture on late Fridays.