A REVIEW OF RUS IN URBE FROM DOWN UNDER

 

 

Rus in Urbe by James Lawless (a Dubliner who now divides his time between Kildare and Cork) consists of poems in two languages: English and Irish. Lawless is best known through his prose, having published three novels and a study of modem poetry. These are poems which are sometimes personal, sometimes a narrative of other lives or situations: poetry of recollection. The Latin of the title is made explicit in the two sections of the book: the first part, Rus, is an evocation of a rural world; the second part, In Urbe, deals with the urban.

Lawless has a lyric gift: too often, however, he fails to fully develop it. Many of the poems end in mundane reflection, when greater intensity of thought would have extended and enriched the image:
a place where birds
circle about brazenly
knowing that man is trapped
by his own fear. (Early Light)


This lapse of imagination is a denial of poetic possibility—of poetry itself, particularly when a lyric begins with promise:
I open the gate
which was locked for winter:
now I can go in and out
of my spring days… (At Last the Rain has Stopped)

 

Lawless is not well served by a tendency towards the literally prosaic and an occasional slackness of rhythm, undesirable in the compressed form of the lyric; but this unevenness, while regrettable, confirms at least that he has the capacity (not always used) for concision and tautness of phrase. He is at his best when sparest:

Ivy dying on a pier,
stone crumbling;

the skeleton of a boat
sinking into sand;

A poem which ends with

a child digging a hole,
taking away something
deeper than himself. (Subtraction)

 

Four of the poems are in Irish (with accompanying versions in English), and are sufficiently assured in style (despite a handful of typos) to make one hope that Lawless will publish a collection in that language. The Irish language originals have an authority and music which their English versions lack:

Is mar sin a ghreamaíonn siad le chéile,
sásta leis an leathéan céanna
ag triall i dtreo na síoraIochta,
mar tá an t-uisce acu

chun a smaointea choimeád glan

agus cosa do-fheicthe ag tiornáint a gcroIthe. (Monagamas) 

Colin Ryan                               University of Melbourne


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Author: James Lawless

Irish novelist, poet and short story writer.

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