DARK AND LIGHT VERSE

These collected poems speak of suffering and loss.

The seven sections of this volume offer 55 poems, some of which have been previously published. A brooding, ironic mood characterizes many pieces, beginning with the opening poem, “At the Public Library.” The first lines present the hopeful image of a “boy in glasses, with that look of light” choosing a cheerful children’s book about a girl who bonds with a rescued dolphin. The speaker watches “as light grew brighter in your dolphin eyes.” Despite the repeated word “light” and the boy’s interest in a gentle story, the speaker sees foreshadowed doom. The final lines end up in a very different place from the beginning ones, concluding that loss of uncomplicated hope and compassion is a fate worse than death: “You kept the book. . . . You will not keep the look. / Die young, my boy. Die young before you lose it.” Throughout the collection, Ireland employs traditional techniques—in this case, rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter—which give a restrained, refined stateliness to his lines that recalls Robert Frost. The poem makes an impact, but the conclusion doesn’t feel fully earned. The speaker takes as a given that, if innocence must be lost, no good or any kind of redemption is to be found in experience. Yet it’s only the poet’s experience that allows him to evaluate the scene and make it art. Similarly gloomy is, for example, “Two Men in Love,” which begins with the couple standing on a cliff. One says “The world is beautiful,” with the other replying “But also cruel.” So, to preserve this perfect moment and “crown” their love, the two jump to their deaths—only to be disunited: “Their bodies were far apart, their faces pained / And bloody, turned away from one another.’” An old man comments: “Well, I guess it’s best for all.”

In such poems, cruelty is made to sound inevitable; the poet’s technique of beginning with a hopeful image that becomes dark is so frequently used as to become predictable. This includes the title poem, where a ray of sun that hopes to bring “something beautiful” instead illuminates the destroyed, rubble-buried life of a Syrian boy. Some pieces, too, twist the heartstrings too obviously, as in several hard-to-read pieces about a mutilated puppy. But at their best, these poems offer atmospheric images that gain effect from Ireland’s mastery of technique. “Elkhorn,” for example, about a silver-mining ghost town, once lively with “whores” and miners, is now tenanted by the animals that gave the place its name. In the elegantly phrased final stanza, the speaker reflects that “who builds a town on silver builds on sand.” Beautifully aphoristic, the line deftly uses alliteration to yoke the hard metal and yielding sand. The town’s busy life, its modernity, and even its sordidness gain spooky resonance as the speaker wonders: “Was there a corner in the namer’s brain / That saw the horned and bright-eyed elk long past / The noise-filled Hall, the brothels, and the train?” The elegiac tone is complicated by the beautiful elk, as one loss becomes another’s gain.

Well-crafted, sometimes overly mordant poems with memorable, striking images.