The rugby scrum as a metaphor for life Crash Centre,
by David McLoghlin – (Salmon Poetry, €12.00 / £10.00; contact info@salmonpoetry.com)
Poet and Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh fellow, David McLoghlin returned to Ireland in 2020 after ten years in Brooklyn. He had taught at NYU and at the Hunts Point Alliance for Children in the south Bronx. Now in his early fifties, he is probably one of the last of that crew of literary exiles that were so much part of the Irish literary scene in the Eighties and Nineties.
He had a good reason for wanting to get away: the trauma of his adolescence needed a very great distance to settle. That trauma is subtly and brilliant captured in this very sophisticated new collection, his third after the impressive Waiting for Saint Brendan and Santiago Sketches.
As the Cork poet Jennifer Horgan has observed, he is a male poet: “brave enough to write the truth of his body and what has been done to it.” What had been done, at an exclusive boarding-school, was a catalogue of sexual grooming and abuse.
This theme is now a bitterly familiar one in the Irish published world, but here in his new collection, McLoghlin, with his complex education, emotional maturity and worldliness, creates a powerful and sublimely effective construct in art:
‘…your surplice rushing behind me,
we stood in the Reception area –
you directly beneath the arch
that marked enclosure,
your feet just behind the line.
I stood in profane space, coy,
Thinking myself Rimbaud.’
(«After the Room»)
This is not merely passive suffering; this is suffering mediated through the near divine grace of rigorous thought. The sheer force of McLoghlin’s language, his imagination’s radically steep incline in the face of awful experience, is what makes his poetry exceptional and redemptive.
This boy-poet was a sentient innocent, if such a creature can exist outside of the terza rima of Dante Alighieri. The quality of the writing in these poems is marvellous: the density of Hostage Walk and Brucellosis, the severe descriptive discipline of “Three Person Sword” or Bones’ Evidence; and the use of irony, its sinister power:
‘But no one mentioned the one who was contra naturum,
or compared him to any of our own.
He was quiet and obese,
Shrieked at mice in the scriptorium –
White as beluga, or narwhal, he died
From licking poison: a page turner.’
(«The Senior Film»)
Switches of key, quick changes of emotional register, is a huge part of McLoghlin’s aesthetic. The title poem, the Pushcart Prize-nominated Crash Centre, is a complex beauty, raising both schools rugby and literary effort to the level of JPR Williams crashing through all resistance in a Lions’ shirt.
The poem refers back to the cover picture from the Lions tour of South Africa in 1974 and dovetails physical experiences of greatness with the physical efforts of the poet before he left the school team in fifth year:
‘My job was; even if you are tackled, taken out –
if you can’t break through, create space
for someone else, for the winger
or pass it back inside to Jan,
never give a hospital pass
but be the continuity, the place
where a negative inheritance
stops..’
The poem is a brilliant and rare sports poem, but, more crucially, it is a sustained and brilliant metaphor for all kinds of efforts at survival. It is a poem about going on, about the power of poetry to “Straighten the line” of remembrance: ‘You’re what they call a crash centre,” my father said.’
This is a poetry powering forward without a gum shield, vulnerable and alert, and almost all-knowing. ‘An army of little men will spring out of the ground,’ he writes in the poem ‘Helpers’; and in this new collection McLoghlin has created a work unquestionably triumphant with poetic victories.