Live Encounters Poetry & Writing February 2025
Anton Floyd – A review of
John Liddy & Jim Burke’s “Slipstreaming (In the West Of Ireland)”
Revival Press, 2024
Book available at: https://limerickwriterscentre.com/product/in-1972-driven-by-a-desire-to-break-free-from-constraints-and-delve-into-their-poetic-selves-the-authors-jim-burke-and-john-liddy-set-out-from-limerick-on-their-bicycles-venturing-through-the-won/
To contact the authors for interviews, readings, and other events:
burkejames@eircom.net and liddy.john@gmail.com
Slipstreaming (In the West of Ireland ) is a collection about encounters. It is an attempt to revisit the experience in the early 1970s that the poets had in their youth cycling along the western seaboard. This was the period when they were getting the Stony Thursday Book off the ground. They kept an alternating log of the trip but the notebook has long since been lost. The book is an imaginative recreation of that time. It is recollection modified by hindsight. The poems record and explore a joint impulse to move beyond their own given realities. They write poems about their conversations and their friendship, the people they meet and the places where they encounter them. The landscape, seascapes and the geologies of Clare, Galway and Connemara feature as you would expect. Rather than being a surface travelogue the two poets each dig deep into their experiences seeking a way of talking about the impact on them of the unyielding facts of the land, the waters and the rock. In the process there emerges a sense of an impending threat to time-honoured ways of life. There are poems of social commentary. Some are set in hostelries or on the way to or from them. In talking about these things in a clear-sighted language that avoids nostalgia, they chronicle how their poetry evolved in them – how the outward journeying was in effect a search for an authentic voice, as John puts it in Tryptych, the search for a song to sing and again more explicitly in the poem, Searchlight, he writes:
…Our tent about to take flight
for one of the twelve Bens,
until a rainbow conjured itself
and through its arclight
We passed, sailing the highroad
in search of our crock of words,
a futile pursuit worth the effort
for what the slant bestowed.
In similar vein Jim, takes up the idea in his poem, Halcyon. Here he writes it slant, an approach Emily Dickinson would approve of:
…Here, on the outskirts of oblivion we watched frogs
jumping into a pond, Basho had done this centuries ago
on his travels to a Far Province, and somewhere
up around the bend the sea waited for us. We could taste
the salt in the wind. Maybe tomorrow, or the next day,
we’d reach the sea and we’d jump in filling the sound.
In ancient Greek, Thálatta! Thalatta! (The sea! The sea!) was the cry of joy when in 401 BCE, the roaming 10,000 Greeks saw the Black Sea after a failed march against the Persian Empire. It was for them a sign that home was not far away. Mine may be a fanciful reading but I read the poem as a conflation of their quest to discover a sense of belonging in the wordscape.
The OED definition of the word Slipstream states it as an assisting force regarded as drawing something along behind something else. The somethings in this case are the friends/cyclists/poets on their ordinary bikes. It is such an appropriate title for the collection as it suggests not only the creative interplay between the two wayfarers but describes also the alternating arrangement of groups of poems by each poet. This patterning also reflects how poems talk to each thematically and draw the collection onwards into the landscape and inwards into their individual psyches. I would strongly urge readers to engage with the poems in this way to discover how this patterning develops in subtle and satisfying ways.
One such example of this interplay can be found between John’s poem, Freewheelin’ and Jim’s, The Rocky Place. A reading of the two poems in juxtaposition shows how involved the poets are in a poetry dialogue. Both poems demonstrate an eye for the physical detail of the terrain; the appreciation of the transient moment; the sense each poet has of his comrade-traveller; their being together and separate as well as the uncertainties of what the future holds for them. For John this concluding idea finds expression in the imagery of the last of the fire and darkness closing in while for Jim it is in the narrowing sightlines he has of John getting/narrower and narrower, bend by bend.
The idea in Freewheelin’ of reaching a port of call resonates with Jim’s poem Halcyon cited earlier. Note, too, how in the penultimate and prescient lines in Jim’s The Rocky Place, I snatch glimpses of you getting/ narrower and narrower, bend by bend, relate to John’s poem Against the Odds in which he acknowledges how A developing bond in and out of school…became…the work at becoming ourselves… when we discovered difference…and tells how they drifted apart for a time…Yet, through it all, the word kept us/In touch…
In his preface John talks of how the project is an attempt to rewrite a lost journal:
In July of 1972 we embarked on a cycling trip…with a writing journal filled with swapped entries, sometimes poems, sometimes prose. Somewhere, somehow, over time we mislaid the journal…During many conversations we reflected on the lost journal… and finally we decided to probe the past and revisit the spirit of our…odyssey.
A near miraculous achievement of these two poets is that the collection manages a temporal bifurcation. In looking back over a vista of 50 years, they manage with remarkable immediacy to evoke their younger selves. And in doing so they have made poems that carry the weight of mature reflection and the versatility of a lifetime’s practice.
In Jim’s case, the opening sequence of haiku, fixes his experiences of nature with a taut economy of expression. It is writing that stays with you. It roots the experience in his language and makes Jim Burke a poet deeply aware of inscape. Here’s one to savour:
pale bog moon
orbiting
the hare’s eye
The illustration of the Hare by Vivienne Bogan on page 16 is the perfect complement for the haiku that marries the bog moon to the hare’s eye.
The collection shows how a poet offers individual and deep perspectives of people living in the environment – living on, through and up against its geology and history. They take the most ordinary-seeming lives and make them extraordinary in such a way that every reader can learn to look at his or her own life and place in the world and see it freshly and more vividly.
Take as an instance John’s poem, Inside the Barren Rock; note the magic scene-making of the first stanza as well as the music of the unobtrusive rhyme scheme:
From a precise angle in a particular light
At a certain time of day, we saw seven
White horses ride out of the cave, set
Into the rockface, and to our delight
We made camp in a strange field
Soft as eiderdown, denuded of stone
By generations of hands, to make of it
A grassy bed for something healed.
And at the foot of a slope was a lake
Surrounded by rushes, a fortress
For swans and mallards who dallied
At the mouth of a stream that snaked
Down to the sea which we followed
And swam in as if it might suddenly
Disappear…
The poem doesn’t stay here though as John in a masterful, I might say Yeatsian stroke, moves to the coeval troubles in the North, and we become aware how this land has been politically and violently contested:
…To wonder in this idyll how many flaps
Of a blackbird’s wing it takes to survey
The work of a boundary commission
Its wings splattered by innocent blood,
A Bogside Massacre in its crazed eyes,
To contemplate such savagery in ‘72
Was to weep for the creviced orchid
And even though Jim acknowledges that they were Here on the outskirts of oblivion, he equally was all too aware of the cultural and historical hinterland – the political and social complexities that is its legacy. We see this in his poem Landscape at Closing Time, (complemented so well by Charles Harper’s print, Window). Here’s Jim’s poem:
And memory survives,
amused how out of the blue
the fear an tí closed up early
one afternoon, to let you and I
off to the stone-heaped cliffs,
guillemots, herring-gulls,
and the drooping flowers that
swayed in the slightest breeze,
there we sat reading,
mine, an old story
someone flew too close to the sun.
I got up and stepped closer
to the edge as if I might see
the tumbled bones of history below.
Here Jim combines an eye like Kavanagh for place with Yeats’ penchant for citing classical myth. In this instance Jim transfers the Greek myth of Icarus into his immediate reality. The final three lines are so good I have to read them again:
I got up and stepped closer
to the edge as if I might see
the tumbled bones of history below.
In his narrative piece, Another World, John shows the interconnected lives of the inhabitants, the animals, the daily work, the intrigue, the psychological and spiritual dramas in a part of provincial Ireland in the early 1970s. It is a way of life we feel won’t last what with encroaching modernity and tourism; yet there isn’t a note of nostalgia in the mood of the short narrative rather there is respect and a recognition of a deep humanity that is very moving.
As Norman Nicholson the wonderful Cumbrian poet puts it, it is in our intense concern with what is close to us, that we most resemble the people of other countries and other times. John develops this in his poem, On the Way that comes appropriately at the end of the collection. The poem carries us to empty Tianjin where he is lost in the sultry glow of its lantern light…along Greyhound interstates of emotion… and the Sông Vân River to the Bich Dông Pagoda in Vietnam. In the final stanza, he states the central concern of the poet – the pursuit of self…stating it is the longest journey of all:
Jim, too, comes to the same Delphic understanding in his poem, The Allurement:
The island hasn’t moved
only grey stones darkened
under the white stars.
In the wash rattling
the shingly beach
only rock music.
When the day is gone
one must be ok
within oneself,
go deeper
into what this place
lacks.
Oftentimes in life we may easily become dulled and denatured – it is by the poet’s eye and thought that our experiences can be transformed and understood. The process of becoming re-aware of the familiar, paying it deep attention and thus discovering and sharing its value, is, I suggest, at the heart of good writing which prefers to avoid the grand gestures of romanticism. It is the poetry of the extraordinary in the ordinary. Our relationship to nature may be subject to change but its allure remains always dear, always ‘selfed’.
In speaking about avoiding gestures of romantism, Jim is equally adept as John in creating narrative. The short prose-poem, Daddy, although not autobiographical, fits into the collection as a record of how confined the family can be by the patriarchal habits in the Ireland of that time.
the children inside the house listening, waiting, while a black cat darted for cover under the overgrown hedge. Daddy’s long straight nose could sniff the hall for a whiff of something to eat, his loudmouth bound to shatter any peace.
This would spur any sensitive soul and budding poet to search for a more fulfilling existence.
Jim’s The Red Barn, too, is a prose-poem tour-de-force. If you’re looking for an Irish version of Gothic Americana, you need look no further. The narrative inspiration at its core is the tragic murder and subsequent hauntings in Suffolk, England, of Maria Marten by her young lover William Corder, a story told in traditional ballads and broadsides (check out Shirley Collins and the Albion Band’s version Murder of Maria Marten), but it is the atmospheric storytelling of the Tom Waits’ song, Murder in the Red Barn (from his album, Bone Machine) that Jim draws his inspiration to make an equally haunting and surreal poem with apocalyptic qualities. There’s not enough time here to go into its marvels, besides I don’t wish to spoil your reading pleasure, suffice to say that through the technique of sequential layering, the images build to create a powerful feeling of foreboding and foreshadowing. What it leaves me with is the sense that the countryside has always been the progenitor of captivating storytelling and precisely, that is what this book is about.
There is an interesting interplay in the collection between the visual image and the written word. Not just in the similes and metaphors both poets use, but also in the many wonderfully graphic illustrations that punctuate the collection. Additionally, there are a number of ekphrastic poems that take their inspiration directly from paintings or sculpture pieces – Jim’s, A Bronze Famine Cart by John Behan; Homage to Jack B. Yeats and, The Future Pulses in the Stone’s Heart (after a stone carving in Furbo); while there’s John’s poem, from Three Paintings by John Shinnors. It would be no exaggeration to say that many of these poems would serve admirably as companion pieces to Paul Henry paintings. In fact, John explicitly refers to this in his poem, Mirage:
Like turf smoke, straw, a scene painted
by Paul Henry, you and I going over
the hill to leave it all behind for others
to harvest what we reaped.
The harvest for John Liddy, and perhaps the most important crop, of this project for him, is his relationship to Irish. The three-part poem Reconstructed Dialogue with a Language is his manifesto expressed in the persona of the language itself. The first poem is part lament, part challenge, part defiance. The opening stanza sets the tone:
Don’t be deluded. I am not dead.
Unlike many a sister root, survival
is my strength, but even should I tread
extinction, I will linger, forever to smell
in the nostril; its stain on the ground
a permanent reminder of betrayal.
Part Two of the poem is a listing of the flame carriers of Irish and the manner of how the language and its traditions have survived through the works of great writers, even in English! After citing important works and the authors meaningful to John, the poem ends:
Hartnett’s ‘celebrated Anglo-Irish stew’,
Ní Dhomhnaill’s Cuimhne an Uisce
done in Muldoon’s inimitable hue.
Oh, what are you to make of it, a’ tall,
a’ tall? – the probing and sprouting
keeping me alive for the long haul.
Part Three is an optimistic paean to the language that ends with these lines:
…so that words
renewed might strike an inclusive
chord, take flight with songbirds.
If this poem serves as a survey and overview of the state of the Irish language, the bilingual poem, Ar Mo Theanga/ On my Tongue is John’s love song to the language, to his rediscovery of it as one with the fabric of the land itself and its people. In a way, I see the survival of the language as emblematic of the survival of poetry itself against all odds.
The cover image by Jim’s talented daughter Aisling Burke O’Connor is untitled but I understand it is the view from the Bridges of Ross near Loop Head. It is no romantic take of the land and seacape. The fence-post is so weathered by the Atlantic that it could be cut from the limestone pavement of the Burren. The wind in the long grasses, the barren cliff-face, the rolling waves, the summery sky all combine to create a powerful mood to guide the reader into the collection, locating it firmly along the western seaboard.
Place, memory, time and humility before it all is made palpable throughout the collection and we are deftly reminded of this in the Epilogue, Wheels for Eyes by John:
Rarin’ for the road
like cattle left out after
wintering in the shed,
the kaleidoscope slows
to a stop but the wheel
spins without us.
Indeed, this collection, quoting Joyce, ably demonstrates that memory is imagination.
© Anton Floyd
John Liddy was born in Ireland. Between Boundaries (Nora McNamara/Limerick Leader (1974) and Slipstreaming in the West of Ireland, co-authored with Jim Burke, (Revival Press, (2024) he has published thirteen Poetry books, a collection of stories for children Cuentos Cortos en Ingles: Los Sonidos de los Vocales (Bruno, 2011), edited with Dominic Taylor 1916-2016 An Anthology of Reactions and Let Us Rise 1919-2019 An Anthology Commemorating The Limerick Soviet 1919. Liddy has also translated poems to and from English, Irish, Spanish and edited a special edition of Vietnamese poets for The Café Review. Two in One, a collection of short stories, co-authored with his brother Liam, was recently published by Revival Press. He is currently working on a collection of poems True to Form and editing a special issue of Irish language poets to appear with poets from Macao, China for The Hong Kong Review, of which he is a board member.
Jim Burke, is co-founder with John Liddy of The Stony Thursday Book. His haiku feature in ‘Between the Leaves’ Arlen House (2016). ‘Quartet’ with Mary Scheurer, Peter Wise and Carolyn Zukowski (2019) ‘Montage’ Literary Bohemian Press (2021) Slipstreaming in the West of Ireland, poems with John Liddy, Revival Press (2024).
Anton Floyd was born in Cairo, Egypt, a Levantine mix of Irish, Maltese, English and French Lebanese. Raised in Cyprus, he lived through the struggle for independence and the island remains close to his heart. Educated in Ireland, he studied English at Trinity College, Dublin and University College Cork. He has lived and worked in the Eastern Mediterranean. Now retired from teaching, he lives in West Cork. Poems published and forthcoming in Ireland and elsewhere. Poetry films selected for the Cadence Poetry Film Festival (Seattle, 2023) and the Bloomsday Film Festival (James Joyce Centre 2023), another, Woman Life Freedom, dedicated to the women of Iran, was commissioned by IUAES. Several times prize-winner of the Irish Haiku Society International Competitions; runner-up in Snapshot Press Haiku Calendar Competition. Awarded the DS Arts Foundation Prize for Poetry (Scotland 2019). Poetry collections, Falling into Place (Revival Press, 2018) and Depositions (Doire Press, 2022); a special, illustrated edition of Depositions translated into Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, and Scots with an introduction by Professor Emeritus Seosamh Watson (Gloír, 2024). New collections On the Edge of Invisibility and Singed to Blue are in preparation. Newly appointed UNESCO – RILA affiliate artist at the University of Glasgow. He is an Associate at the Centre for Poetry Innovation at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.