Eight years after the appearance of Tom French’s award-winning first collection The Fire Step confirms the promise and achievement of his debut. His ‘gift for creating stunning elegiac moments — and the overall effect of measured and often beautiful responses to the inevitable’ (Nua) extends to a number of poems which celebrate his children in subtle and artful tones and rhythms.
Other poems attend to everyday facts of ordinary lives — a family moving house, attending a midday recital, the consequences of a wet summer, and a rail commuter’s journey home. As he traces his bloodlines he embraces various generations, while the book encompasses also a race meet on a strand at low tide, a eulogy on the demise of a letterpress printing works, and the rich imaginings of its longer poems.
The Fire Step is a book of requiems and salutations. From already auspicious beginnings Tom French arrives at an impressively accomplished, emotionally charged second stage.
Even now, as we rise to check on the children
where they sleep within earshot of the river,
two midwives are rising in darkness to dress
for all weathers . . .
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Tom French does not hold an MFA in creative writing nor does he teach creative writing in a university. He writes neither experimental, nor strictly formal nor LGBT poetry. What he does write is lyric poetry in its simplest, purist and most engaging form. The Fire Step, French’s second collection with The Gallery Press, makes it clear that in the eight years that separate Touching the Bones and this new collection, French has continued to record his delicate perceptions of family, friends and surroundings. He has also intensified his remarkable use of the simple in order to produce the memorable. The thirty-five poems here, many of which first appeared in little magazines in Ireland or abroad, range from long sequences – “Real Estate,” “In the Night Garden,” “Sundays at Noon”, “A Flurry” “Apparel”, and “In Memory of My Father”, – to several four – or six-line vignettes. French has been “accused” of writing formal poetry, given that he employs stanzas and lines of roughly equal length, but this practice varies from poem to poem and appropriately captures the speaker’s voice in a variety of contexts. ‘Angel’, the first poem of the sequence “A Flurry,” takes the shape of the mysteriously blemished snow angel the speaker contemplates.
The jaunty rhythms of the opening poem “Table of Ages” stand as an invitation to what is to come: furtive glances, mysteries, remembrance, all of them tempered by French’s perplexed and unfailingly distanced regard. Tom French loves words and puts them to good use as in the bare four-line poem “Moss” where the simplicity of his words and subtle repetition incarnate the abjection of war.
The limbs of the injured might have passed,
after the night sisters returned from the woods
with baskets of moss to dress their wounds,
for the limbs of beech and sycamore and ash.
The five-poem sequence “Real Estate” details the emotion of a speaker on the cusp of a new life. In a style reminiscent of Denise Levertov, the oddments of a family in transit, a newly installed earth rod, a bed sheet doubling as a drop cloth and “An oval of fresh paint on the hall wall” confront the constancy of stones and beams, the unspoken promise of a new home. In the longest of the sequences, “In the Night Garden”, past and present, dream and reality, myth and history, personal and public, suffering and survival spring from the soil. This occurs with quiet ceremony, but the final poem, “January 23rd, 2009”, brings the series to an end with bemusement: Every receptacle was brimming in Rahoon cemetery; after the downpour, fresh water for the journey.
The contemporary and the historic bump elbows in these poems, surprisingly but not inappropriately. The farcical arrest of “Policewomen Arresting Death in a Field of Genetically Modified Wheat” leads smoothly into exploits of a horseman-buffoon in “Ascendancy,” and the printing machines of “Gogarty’s Printers, Kilmainhamwood”, “destined / for museums and pristine still” assume their double role.
The later poems introduce a graver tone. The elegy, “In Memory of My Father,” combines five apparently disparate poems as if to testify to the ineffable mystery of the man’s existence. This was man who had mastered the intricacies of black ice but bungled his cameo film appearance by not managing “to act / natural.” This was a man who bewildered his son to the end and whose adamant but irrational frugality, would seal his inglorious fate.
The final poem, “Woodpigeon” traces the speaker’s path along the circuitous road toward aborted creation and “at last, to rest”. We are grateful for such simplicity.
— Taffy Martin, Études irlandaises 35-1 (2010)
Tom French, the Kilkenny-born poet, has a new collection out with The Gallery Press. French works in Co. Meath library service and his new collection, The Fire Step follows his 2001 prize-winning collection, Touching The Bones.
From the outset, this is not an easy book and in oblique ways, words do not offer themselves readily as laments, memories or matter-of-fact commentary, on wet summers, dead family, mundane journeys and new babies and new homes. Many of the shorter poems settle in words, rather than detonate with meaning. Some may be too oblique for their own good or a readers sense of achievement or satisfaction. An empty house does not have a conventional echo, but a set of un-erased phone messages awaiting a new owner.
Then in Moving Out, you get the slap of recognition – On Our last night we hear what we heard on our first / the echo that lives here, voices coming back to us. Or in Namesake, the father’s brother succumbed to a brain haemorrhage / among the tulip drills or drills of borage.
The sting of loneliness is evident in the closing lines of Two Stout – So I finished the drinks. / Neither of us could think of anything to say. That detonation of death is almost tucked away in a poem. Fruit – A boy with a tumour, the size of an orange / behind his eye, gripping Buzz Lightyear.
My favourite is The Life Of Man, with its wonderful last evocative line – Yet what is before and after, none knows.
— Liam Murphy, The Munster Express
Book Information
Year Published: 2009
Details: 64pp
ISBN PBK: 978 1 85235 477 0
ISBN HBK: 978 1 85235 478 7
ISBN ebook: 978 1 85235 579 1
Cover: Wooden footprints in Quinghai © Reinhard Krause/Reuters
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