READING A POEM A DAY 12 23.2.2017

1887

AE Housman

From Clee to heaven the beacon burns,

The shires have seen it plain,

From north and south the sign returns

And beacons burn again.

Look left, look right, the hills are bright,

The dales are light between,

Because 'tis fifty years to-night

That God has saved the Queen.

Now, when the flame they watch not towers

About the soil they trod,

Lads, we'll remember friends of ours

Who shared the work with God.

To skies that knit their heartstrings right,

To fields that bred them brave,

The saviours come not home to-night:

Themselves they could not save.

It dawns in Asia, tombstones show

And Shropshire names are read;

And the Nile spills his overflow

Beside the Severn's dead.

We pledge in peace by farm and town

The Queen they served in war,

And fire the beacons up and down

The land they perished for.

"God Save the Queen" we living sing,

From height to height 'tis heard;

And with the rest your voices ring,

Lads of the Fifty-third.

Oh, God will save her, fear you not:

Be you the men you've been,

Get you the sons your fathers got,

And God will Save the Queen.

The poet writes this patriotic lay, this elegy for the war dead and, unbeknownst to him perhaps, the poet writes a searing anti-war, anti-monarchy, anti-God assertion for the lads of Shropshire, that county of England cleft to the breast of Wales, a beautiful, hilly, rural place, of strapping fellows, who on each side of 1887 are immolated in imperial wars, far from the shires, dales, beacons, work, fields and soil of their home-place.

Where is this empire, then? In North Africa, on the banks of the Nile? In Asia? What land took their lives? What Shropshire is this?

It dawns in Asia, tombstones show

And Shropshire names are read;

And the Nile spills his overflow

Beside the Severn's dead.

As ever, poems of the imperial wars make no mention of the local, the Asian or North African dead, many of whose descendants are now making their way to Shropshire, in coffin boats crossing the Mediterranean.

Can you perish for a land? Can God save the Queen? Only by turning his back on the

Lads of the Fifty-third

and all the other regiments, in all the imperial armies of today and of the days behind us. For

The saviours came not home tonight.

Houseman's poem may be a victim of the law of unintended consequences. No doubt he meant to praise the sacrifice, for sacrifice was, and is, the corrupt currency imperial armies use to drive lads – men and women- to their immolation, before 1887 and, with even more brutal mechanised force, in 1914.

In eight four line verses, readily sung to the classic abab rhyming scheme - hear a sung version on Chris Wood's album So Much To Defend - to arrive at the pay-off, where the sacrifice of the death is salvaged by the offer, no, the injunction, the imperial command that the survivors return home to beget more lads, women and men, to be immolated.

Be you the men you've been,

Get you the sons your fathers got

Is this a paean to fealty? To patriotism and allegiance? Is it a call to perpetual sacrifice in the service of empire, be it Victoria's or Star Trek's?

Or is it an anti-war lament, ironically singing that God may save the Queen and the lads, women and men, as they, then

…. pledge in peace by farm and town

to

… remember friends of ours

and continue the toil and joy

About the soil they trod

as they relish the living of it? 

Let God alone save the queens, kings, oligarchs and presidents, amidst their thieving, deadly trumpery.

http://genius.com/A-e-housman-1887-annotated

https://www.facebook.com/Chris-Wood-277202965744418/

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WATCHING MANCHESTER BY THE SEA

Watching the film Manchester By The Sea is like watching paint dry at times and then you realise the cinematic paint has dried and the picture it has formed is a masterpiece of story, character, location and emotion.

We are north of Boston, on the Massachusetts coast, where English names have long replaced the native American. Here is Essex, Gloucester, Beverly and Manchester-by-the-Sea, a tidy estuary town, surviving on seasonal resort activity, marine engineering, some fishing and the church, school and public administrative necessities of small town America. We come into the lives of the Chandler family: two brothers, their two wives and one of their sons. A web of relationships forms: father-son, brothers, husbands-wives, friends and neighbours. The key one is uncle-nephew.

At the core of the film is the visualisation of the old Stoic truism about life: stuff happens and then you die. Or, in this case, you live.

The matter becomes 'how do you live?'. The penultimate scene has the uncle, played in a blindingly marvellous performance by Casey Affleck and the nephew, aged sixteen and growing up fast, walking up a hill, bouncing a ball between them. It escapes them and the uncle, Lee Chandler, says 'let it go', but the boy picks it up once more, so that the bouncing and the climbing continue, in a modern day representation of the Sisyphus myth. As film metaphors go, this is hard to beat. It is not a rock the mere humans toil to push uphill, it is not a rock that permanently falls back, so that they must start again. It is a bouncy, rubber ball that escapes them. And then the young pick it up again.

There is so much to admire and enjoy in this film. The performances are terrific. The scene where Lee Chandler chances to meet - it is a small town, after all - his estranged wife, Randi, played expertly by Michelle Williams and they endure an aching, faltering conversation of broken gestures, appeals, half sentences and dodged eye-contact is a searing depiction of the limits of human empathy, in stark contrast to earlier scenes of blue-collar, boorish bliss the couple experienced.

This not Newport of High Society or the Cape Cod of the Kennedy's. This is blue-collar America, with Old Glory on the lawns of the clapboard houses, inhabited by old stock Anglo-Protestants and later Catholic immigrants. The young Chandler nephew, Paddy, asserts, towards the end of the film, that he is not going to college and he is not moving to Boston with his uncle. He likes his hometown. The final scene shows him and Uncle Lee fishing from the back of the boat they both love. They save the heart of the boat by putting in a new engine, financed by selling the prize guns held by Paddy's father, who's own heart let him down. That's a neat political point, one of a number, gently placed throughout the film.

And yet it is not all gentleness, no life is, certainly not the life Lee Chandler and his wider family experience. There is grief, rage and anger. We first meet Lee working as a janitor/handyman in apartment buildings in Boston, with demanding and sometimes irascible apartment owners, for whom he repeatedly performs menial tasks. He is the surly loner, who mumbles and scowls. He is the one person you would steer well clear off in a pub. Ironically, in that winter period of the film, the male sport of choice is ice-hockey. Paddy plays. Lee watches. And the players thump and wallop each other in ritualised acts of violence, that are, at one and the same time, a public venting of male violence and a gross display of male anger.

Nonetheless there is plenty of gentle humour, in particular in the efforts of Paddy, given a thrilling performance by Lucas Hedges, and other young people to grow up, literally, in the midst of the widespread youth experience of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. Paddy says I got two girlfriends and I'm in a band and, while it's a witty line from a sixteen year old, the cinema-goer is left with a sense of 'here we go again'.

Could we have less of the sea-, town-, weather- and landscapes? Yes. Could the film be shorter? Yes. Could the time-line of winter to spring, hardness to life, be less obvious? Yes. Could the set-up, in Boston, before the move to Manchester-by-the-Sea, be a little brisker? Yes. Could the use of flash-back to tell the story be clearer? Yes, a little, though the method is generally successful, apart from one scene where the cinema-goer felt the action dipped into 'ghost' territory and confused Time briefly.

Overall, this is a masterful telling of commonplace stories and a masterful trawl through the contingency and persistence of human life and relationships, where grief and the facing of it in lived experiences forge the triumph that produces not neat resolutions but the wondrous raggedness of lived art. When Lee Chandler says I can't beat it. I can't beat it. I'm sorry, the cinema-goer is with him, and continues to be with him, long after the closing credits have faded and the screen and the world have faded to black.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4034228/

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READING A POEM A DAY 11 8.2.2017

SATCHMO

Melvin B. Tolson

King Oliver of New Orleans

has kicked the bucket, but he left behind

old Satchmo with his red-hot horn

to syncopate the heart and mind.

The honky-tonks in Storyville

have turned to ashes, have turned to dust,

but old Satchmo is still around

like Uncle Sam's IN GOD WE TRUST.

Where, oh, where is Bessie Smith,

with her heart as big as the blues of truth?

Where, oh, where is Mister Jelly Roll,

with his Cadillac and diamond tooth?

Where, oh, where is Papa Handy

With his blue notes a-dragging from bar to bar?

Where, oh where is bulletproof Leadbelly

with his tall tales and 12-string guitar?

Old Hip Cats,

when you sang and played the blues

the night Satchmo was born,

did you know hypodermic needles in Rome

couldn't hoodoo him away from his horn?

Wyatt Earp's legend, John Henry's, too,

is a dare and a bet to old Satchmo

when his groovy blues put headlines in the news

from the Gold Coast to cold Moscow.

Old Satchmo's

gravelly voice and tapping foot and crazy notes

set my soul on fire.

If I climbed

the seventy-seven steps of the Seventh

Heaven, Satchmo's high C would carry me higher!

Are you hip to this, Harlem? Are you hip?

On Judgement Day, Gabriel will say

after he blows his horn:

"I'd be the greatest trumpeter in the Universe

if old Satchmo had never been born!"

With sporadic rhymes and half-rhymes, in four stanzas that run to 8, 9 and 11 lines, both short and long, Melvin B. Tolson syncopates his way through the early history of 20^th Century jazz, name checking the early blues and jazz stars and coming to rest on Satchmo's High C, carrying the poet and the reader to the musical heaven of jazz. Close your eyes and hear the warmest, neatest treatment of New Orlean's jazz you're ever likely to hear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7S7gSZ0YRo

Bing Crosby sings “well, listen to, well, you know who?” and of course it's Satchmo, virtuousing out of the morass of the colour mix in mid-twentieth century America, with the white man leading and telling us what jazz music is while the black musicians play behind him and Satchmo himself takes a scat routine, achingly feminine and clownish. Be careful not to compare it to the monkey scene from Jungle Book, when the orang-utan shamelessly parodies the great maestro, Louis Armstrong, and asks to be made fully human. Tolson might ask if that means the ape wants to be 'white'?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JDzlhW3XTM

Such parodies appear long after

King Oliver of New Orleans

has kicked the bucket, but he left behind

old Satchmo with his red-hot horn

to syncopate the heart and mind.

The red-hot horn that Tolson celebrates grew out of the honky-tonks now turned to dust and played crazy notes fit to set a poet's soul on fire.

Melvin B. Tolson is the famous African-American poet, teacher, academic and labour organiser, celebrated in Denzel Washington and Opray Winfrey's fine film The Great Debaters,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN2AGZThL-8

Tolson's poetry very often champions his sense of who he is and how his experience as an American of African descent charges him with an almost religious fervour for learning and justice. He urges Harlem, the locale of Africa in America to be hip to Satchmo's notes, carrying him higher, high enough to challenge the angels, even Gabriel himself, who admits he's second best when it comes to blowing that hot-horn, second best to a mere human, Satchmo.

The poem is a homage and a warning, in particular to the dangers of drugs he says were avoided by Satchmo

did you know hypodermic needles in Rome

couldn't hoodoo him away from his horn?

But the euphoria of Seventh Heaven awaits you if you are hip to this groovy blues, hip to this

gravelly voice and tapping foot and crazy notes

The patriotic note at the end of the first stanza

old Satchmo is still around

like Uncle Sam's IN GOD WE TRUST.

wonders if the Seventh Heaven Tolson is striving for is America, and if it has, like Bessie Smith a heart

as big as the blues of truth?

Tolson's poems are edited and collected by Raymond Nelson and Rita Dove in a University of Virginia Press publication. Recommended.

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BLOG POST SPECIAL: OAK AND STONE

BLOGPOST SPECIAL: an extract from a work in progress.
OAK AND STONE       in draft, 23.1.2017. 
     

37. TIMELESS HERITAGE AND DIGITAL HUB

You know the river is not only history. It is also current events. And it is future speculations. You stand beside it and, looking upstream, you are back in time. Looking downstream you are forward in time. But you never stand still. Your history is your current event. It is your future happening. It is all time.

The adman sells and tells it with one breadth. With one sweeping image of a twin-sparred Peace Bridge that chicanes across your river, as a glory of movement and architecture. Visitors come and photograph the bridge and themselves in an orgy of selfism. Here you see them, brochured by the adman. They ride on bicycles and wheelchairs; they walk on foot, singly and in pairs, in a digital unreality rendered in splendid colour. The adman’s layout is sublime and ridiculous in good measures. The figures are automatons, avatars, icons, cursors blinking on a graphic designer's screen of ideas and appropriations, until they are stilled into place, a fake place, by the detached click of a wireless mouse.

You see the lego woman in the wheelchair; the playmobil man in the tench coat; the meccano shopper, angled to the river-bank in a purposeless pose, determined by the designer's need not to have every figure facing either forward or backwards. The unreality disturbs you. How can your river be trumpeted if the notes are so bum?

The adman's vision is not yours. The vision of low wages, low cost, low expectations and low aspirations is not yours. You do not want to paper over the cracks, digitally enhance the image or sex up the dossier. You want to see, touch, hear, smell and taste the world, the river and its flow under all the bridges of chicanery, which wobble as you traverse them, for being river-based, the foundations are insecure and they are vulnerable to the winds of Time passing through them, past and future, creating the perpetual present you inhabit.

Oak or stone.

This is not a hub you are standing in. This is a quest. Your life is a quest, a narrative of endless heritage. Downstream and upstream, yes, who knows? You are questing your way into it. Your only yearnings are that it be real, not virtual; present, not at a remove; in your face and under your skin, not mediated by screens and digital clouds.

The figures on the bridge appal you. None of them could be you. Or anyone who could actually be. The effort to puff the river and the city demeans the city. It demeans the river. It demeans you. The city is not a thriving hub. It is a vibrant, living organism of vital and innate material, breathing and breathless beings, architecture, botany, gaseous mixes, leaky hydraulic machines, mental and physical stirrings. It is not hub. It is hubbub.

How do you live in such a place? Where the adman oversells, where the gap between actuality and aspiration is wider than the river itself, where you don't even know what you want, because you can't fully, properly frame the questions and so you buffet along, askance to the graphic designer's screen, in a state of maverick meandering, along banks, over bridges, up and down streets, catching glimpses of water through gap-sites and over roof-tops, where pigeons commune and plot their eschatology of the future.

You put the brochure from you. The digitally-doctored image offends and the final offence is the fear that the stick figure pulling the small suit-case could be a simulacrum of yourself, on your way to the time to come, all suited and desert-booted, a dapper cap on your head, a man making for a train perhaps, or a lift with a colleague, beginning a journey into the arms of a lover and the traumas that loving brings, sweet traumas that convulse a future into actuality and determine your own eschatology.

CAN THEATRE CONTRIBUTE TO A PEACE PROCESS?

This is an historic text, a speech from 2004, given at The Edinburgh Fringe. The plays mentioned, and others later in the series, are available in Plays in a Peace Process by Dave Duggan (Guildhall Press, 2008).

© DAVE DUGGAN 8.11.04 1635 words

This article by Dave Duggan is extracted from a talk he gave at The Edinburgh Fringe in August 2004.

Dave is a writer, director and co-artistic director of Sole Purpose Productions. Guildhall Press has recently published his novel, The Greening of Larry Mahon.

The texts of The Peace Process Trilogy can be found in Dave Duggan’s Shorts for Stage and Screen (Lagan Press, 2003)

CAN THEATRE CONTRIBUTE TO A PEACE PROCESS?

The short answer is a resounding ‘yes’. The longer answer will look at four plays I wrote and directed, and Sole Purpose Productions produced, between 1996 and the present day. But be assured I will not be making any grand claims about the role of theatre in a peace process. I will situate it within the social, civic, economic and artistic activities that struggle to continue during a conflict.

Because the main resource I bring to bear in my work is imagination and because theatre is a visual medium, I ask you to visualise. To picture. I ask you to imagine a small church hall at the edge of the village of Kesh on the Fermanagh-Donegal border. The local community association has invited Sole Purpose Productions to give a performance of my play The Shopper and The Boy. It is a glorious June evening. We can hear larks singing high in the summer air. A machine is cutting grass for silage two fields away. Preparations for the performance are made, but the local hosts are worried. Earlier that day, the remains of an RUC officer shot dead in Lurgan were returned to his family home near the village. There is a quietness about the people. Some think it would be a bad idea to go ahead with the play. Some think no one will turn up. Some say we should go ahead, that the play, which dramatises the difficult issue of marching, needs to be seen. I wait with the actors, saying we’ll perform or not as the community association decides. Gradually a large audience starts to gather. From the village, the surrounding area and across the border in Donegal. There are brief nods of recognition, some easy greetings, polite acknowledgements, a delicate tension. The crowd is muted, diffident, but ready to see the play. The community association decides to proceed. The play begins. The set is in place. The actors appear and march with a trunk around the space. The Boy steps forward and declaims ‘No surrender’. The Shopper steps forward and declaims ‘Tiochfaidh ár lá’. The audience sits forward and engages.

I suggest that this work has contributed at least the following five things to the peace process:

1. Space to consider difficult issues

2. New language to reframe debates

3. Collective experiences to support private and public processes

4. Healing to help salve real hurts

and

5. Entertainment to hearten people.

The Shopper and the Boy was first performed in June 1996, just ahead of the marching season. In the play, hot issues are faced in real time. An audience sees real people close up, facing, with resolve and imagination, the painful challenges brought up by marches at Drumcree and elsewhere. Poetic, intelligent language in the mouths of ordinary people offers possibilities. The Shopper and the Boy express their contending desires as manifestations of nascent negotiations.

Negotiations need space and theatre has given a public this space. Shown instances of the space being used. Shown negotiations occurring on the basis of respect.

I ask you once again to picture. To visualise once more. I ask you to imagine a working class housing estate in Newtownards, a town just east of Belfast, with a largely unionist population. Sole Purpose Productions are in a community centre with my play Without the Walls. This is in the form of a Greek tragedy, drawing on the Antigone story, which uses rhyme, rhythm and masks to dramatise the question of how a society moving out of conflict might police itself. An audience is engaged by an act of debate, education and entertainment and when the tragedy is delivered, two women sitting near me have tears running down their cheeks. Moments of catharsis in theatre prepare us for moments of resolve in the world. The women strengthen themselves to face the changes that a new policing order will bring.

Without the Walls was first produced in 1998 as an artistic contribution to public discussions about policing. Theatre introduced new language into difficult debates and contributed to the peace process. The complex relationship that working class unionists have with ‘our’ police is challenged and the terrifying yet liberating possibilities of change echo round the community centre and beyond.

By the year 2000 the peace process was well underway, while the political process moved and stalled at different points. The peace process has been going on for as long as the violence has been manifest. People in different ways have been seeking to change things by non-violent means, trying to keep avenues of dialogue open, striving to maintain contacts, advancing actions for the securing of human rights and dignity. And by the end of the nineties the phrase ‘moving on’ was being used by politicians and other public figures. I wondered how individuals, deeply affected by the conflict, through loss or imprisonment, might actually address the need to move on.

I ask you to imagine a hushed audience in the studio space of The Marketplace Theatre in the city of Armagh. Sole Purpose Productions has brought two actors, a small set and my version of the meeting between a bomber and a victim in the play Waiting…. The gravity of this meeting has stilled the audience. The two characters struggle to articulate their experiences.

Theatre has given that audience a collective experience that will support the private and public processes that must happen when individuals and societies do indeed move on in a meaningful way. For that audience, and for us all, the challenge remains to live as fully as possible in the present, with the past, and for the future. Being with characters as they wrestle with the reality of moving on in a society coming out of conflict provides a collective experience that strengthens us all and contributes to the peace process.

One of the significant complications in the peace process in Northern Ireland is the fact that the state is a protagonist and a perpetrator of violence. The Saville Inquiry was set up to look into the events of Bloody Sunday in 1972 when 14 people were killed by state forces on the streets of Derry Londonderry. The way the Saville Inquiry worked had a profound impact on me. I found myself sitting in the public gallery, transfixed by the witnesses and their stories, the dry language of the legal teams, the formal discourse of the judges and the layout of the room. It was self-evidently theatre to me and I felt the impulse to poeticise the activity of the Inquiry, to elevate the language of the testimonies and the questioning so that something of the greater human experience might be made public.

I wrote Scenes from an Inquiry with the support and participation of The Bloody Sunday families. Young members of some of the families were cast in the roles for the production and in January and February 2002 it was performed in The Playhouse in Derry Londonderry as part of the 30^th anniversary events. I later did a radio drama adaptation at the request of RTÉ, through which the public poetry of the imagined witnesses reached a wider audience. It was the power of poetry I was seeking. The universal poetic voice that cries out in the face of awful violence, that salves and heals in the face of the utter hopelessness of death and loss.

In this way a piece of theatre offered healing of great pain and acted as a balm to wounded hearts and minds. It assisted in the breaking of taboos by offering some people a different view of the world. A unionist member of The Policing Board attended a performance in The Playhouse and said he enjoyed it and found it thought provoking.

Family members spoke of the truth of it. That’s the ironic thing. A work of fiction and imagination evokes a sense of truth. Something of the power of the unashamed subjectivity of theatre is evident here. The way theatre deals with feelings and experiences and, in this case, poeticises them, so that it makes a contribution to the peace process as an agent of truth seeking and healing.

With all the plays the final contribution to the peace process is that the plays are entertaining. Going to see one is a good night out, in a wide-ranging sense of that phrase. And with violence still a fact of life on the streets, entertainment is a vital contribution theatre makes to the peace process.

The plays I have referred to here all work as art in the first instance. They are not acts of politics or social work in the direct sense of those words. They are instances of the application of imagination to public events, attempts to find beauty and order amid the chaos in order to present them to audiences who will make up their own minds about them.

Peace can only be built if we give attention to our irrationality, give attention to the deepest, often most troubling, urges and impulses that make us human. That is a call to theatre. In so far as politics engages with power, art and, in particular theatre, engages with pleasure, so that while facts may be disputed, dramatic fictions can be debated, explored and savoured; used to bring truth to bear and thus contribute to a peace process.

© DAVE DUGGAN

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READING A POEM A DAY 10 9.1.2017

A Book

Emily Dickinson

There is no frigate like a book

To take us lands away,

Nor any coursers like a page

Of prancing poetry.

This traverse may the poorest take

Without oppress of toll;

How frugal is the chariot

That bears a human soul!

Impressively rigorous, as ever, Emily Dickinson choses an escort vessel with navy associations on her poetic journey to distant lands. In eight short lines, galumphing along with eight then six strokes, she runs as swift as the prancing horse of galloping alliteration.

Nor any coursers like a page

Of prancing poetry.

She asserts that this journey to distant lands - This traverse – is available to anyone, even the poor, because it costs nothing. She may be interested to know that for a hardback edition of her collected poems, the reader will suffer an

oppress of toll

of thirty US dollars, with paperback editions from one to ten US dollars on Amazon.com, in her home country, the United States of America.

Perhaps she is making a plea for libraries and if so, all writers and readers could support that, these being days when libraries are under threat, especially in wealthy countries.

Her final transport offers her frugal delights as it bears her soul in a chariot, possibly pulled by the coursers she invoked earlier.

'Frugal' is good. It echoes 'frigate'. Good also is 'prancing'. The horses jump from the page.

This is a punchy, driven poem, where active alliteration and clever near-rhymes

away/poetry toll/soul

and a set of vehicles

frigate/coursers/chariot

speed us on a soulful journey. Without leaving the comfort of our chairs.

This is ideal traverse for a reclusive like Emily Dickinson, crossing the world with her books, while staying at home at the same time.

The poem is a 'transport of delight', coursing into the reader's veins. All aboard!

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-book

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READING ALL WE SHALL KNOW

In your hand, this book – is it a novella? A short novel? - is a confidently beautiful object. Hardback, holding 190 pages, set in 11/15point Electra on soft white paper, offering good contrast for the text, with plenty of white space on the page, cushioned by a clean design, including an elegant font, a fading blue leaf-motif with embossed author name and title on the front cover, accolades by luminaries of the Irish literary world for this and previous work by Donal Ryan on the back cover, ALL WE SHALL KNOW by Donal Ryan is another sure-fire literary hit, sure to be mentioned in the long and the short of all the lists for prizes, as much of his previous work has been. A section of it is available as a pdf. file on the BBC radio site, where it was an 'open book'. Doubleday/Transworld/Penguin/Random House, the complex corporate entity that brings the book before us, give us strong production values and make a fine job of getting ALL WE SHALL KNOW to the reading public.

The story is timed to a pregnancy, running from week fourteen to week forty with a postscript, called post partum. It is mainly told in the voice of Melody Shee, who lapsed from a journalism career that promised much into a downbeat scatter though substitute and one-on-one teaching. Being a journalist means Melody Shee has a strong command of English and the writing benefits from her professional word hoard, though at times, this reader hears the writer's voice too clearly, for instance when one of Melody's teachers is described as 'priapic' for horny, or when the narrator names her husband's penis as his 'john thomas'. When she says that there is 'some irreparable fault in me. There's something broken inside my head that stops me from being normal', the reader wonders at her capacity for such self-analysis. It reads like psychobabble. Try this humdinger of a sentence, a description of a Traveller child, and ask yourself if it's the narrator's not the writer's voice you're getting. “He had the didactic, machine-gun voice of a barroom braggart and the insouciant swagger of a seasoned villain”. Perhaps this is the narrator, in one of a number of the varied registers she uses. Such a gross dismissal of a child means it's no surprise that the narrator can have sex with a seventeen year old Traveller she is teaching (caring for?).

The reading pleasure for this reader increased when the voice changed to that of Mary Crothery, the young Traveller woman who tells the story of her failed marriage, again broken on the rack of conception and child-bearing. We hear her voice, sounding her story.

Every character is broken in the story. The Travellers on the halting site including Martin Toppy the teenager the narrator abuses into a sexual congress that leads to pregnancy. Her father, lonely and lost at home. Her husband Pat who appears to be able to have sex with prostitutes in the city but not with his wife. Pat and Melody's relationship is fetid, though it is never exactly clear why that should be the case. Her husband's mother is straight out of Oirish Central Casting.

The key relationship the narrator has, apart from the self-absorbed relationship with herself, is with a former school-mate, Breedie Flynn. From early on the reader senses Breedie is coming to a bad end, partly because it is flagged up on the book's fly-leaf cover, but also in the manner in which she is presented as odd and an outcast early on, bullied by class-mates and abandoned and denied by her one friend, Melody. The reader is reminded of his own father's remark, while watching tv Westerns, about the cowboy in the white hat – he won't last long. And sure enough, come the first showdown, the cowboy in the white hat, long-foreshadowed for a short life, bites the dust. In this book, it is presumed suicide that does for Breedie early on, though Melody Shee's complicity in the death of her friend is a key driver of the story.

The story's action proceeds in bite-sized chunks of narration and reflection, expertly organised and sequenced to bring the reader along. The reader enters a well-formed world, which, though very small, feels adequate to the matters being addressed. It is the stuff of an extended short story. Set in a community where the ancient Irish game of hurling is important, where her father's voice lilts a form of Hiberno-English and given that Donal Ryan lives outside Limerick city, it suggests we are in a semi-rural area near that city, in the border country of counties Tipperary, Limerick and north Cork. Yet the reader feels he is in a literary Nordic land, cold as Wallander's stare. There is a permafrost feel to the book, though the reader is never clear what seasons we're living through.

At the heart of the matter are madness and transgression. The narrator's mother is mad. The narrator herself is mad. And they join a long-line of contemporary Irish women driven mad simply by being who they are. And of course, they are lustful, in, it appears, unhealthy manners.

It is a brave move by Donal Ryan to write in women's voices and this reader suggests, the work is only partially successful. Perhaps he is too close to the narrator Melody Shee. He is a neat feint away from Mary Crothery, so her voice works better.

Essentially, this is a further instance of highly literate, contemporary confessional writing from semi-rural Ireland; inordinate madness, antic activity and violence among and around Travellers, enough babies to fill a creche, outrageous language and terrifyingly cold relationships. Are Ireland's writers and readers so suffused with self-hatred that these are the matters that draws them? Are London publishers so in thrall to such gothic manifestations of modern Ireland that beautiful prose, masking the heightened horrors of poverty, stunted relationships and personal mis-development, is the lucrative ore they mine from Ireland's best writers?

Some one has to die, as the story plays through its run of violence and madness. There is always sacrifice; blood spilled for the good of further living, yet no sanity is achieved. By the end, Melody Shee invokes 'love of the perfect kind, the kind that exists above all earthly things', in a form of religious super-humanism.

The pregnancy neatly runs forty weeks. For all the raging and ranting the work feels manicured. Perhaps this is the achievement Donal Ryan seeks. No doubt there will be more good work, but this reader would like to see it looser and hear the voices stepping closer to characters than to writers. A challenge, always. It's not that you know the ending. It's just that the ending has the neatness of fable, rather than the raggedness of lived art. That such work can be considered redemptive makes it a telling parable of our times, times of alienation, aloneness, self-absorption, violence and sketchy hope.

All We Shall Know; Donal Ryan, Doubleday/Transworld, London, 2016

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