REVIEW OF TOM FRENCH, THE LAST STRAW

This review first appeared in New Hibernia Review, Volume 22, Number 3 (Autumn 2018), 147-49.

A lyric poet by nature, Tom French concluded his fourth volume of poems, The Way to Work (Gallery Books, 2016), on an anomalous note—with a coda (his term) titled “1916” in which, provoked by the centenary celebrations of the Easter Rising, he reflects on “the gulf between the beautiful ideals read out to a handful / of rubberneckers and what has become of those ideals.” Notwithstanding the bit of international notice it gained for him in the form of an appearance on the radio program Open Source with Christopher Lydon, that poem is a pretty blunt reminder of a distinction once made by Robert Frost: “Poetry is about the grief, politics about the grievances.”

In The Last Straw (Gallery Books, 2018), French returns to his more natural pitch and register, characterized by an exactness of both word and phrase:

Everything that can be is disconnected.

        Our fire dies.  The starlings, nested

in the eaves, have settled.  We have cut

        the house adrift to sleep . . .

 He also returns to a form that he clearly feels at home in—the sonnet, mostly unrhymed and mostly deploying flexible lines that work variations on the conventional iambic pentameter pulse of that form.  Indeed, 50 of the 89 poems in The Last Straw are fourteen-liners, that formal structure (often three quatrains and a couplet but sometimes either two quatrains and two tercets or four tercets and a couplet) underscoring the rhetorical movement within any given poem.  The ending of “Tigh an Táilliúra, Carraroe” yields a typically pleasing example of French’s talent for “turning” a sonnet.  Describing in the two quatrains that open the poem how a customer in a pub suddenly “stands and dances to a jig on the radio,” French uses the final six lines to lead the reader to reflect, as he does himself, on the implications of what he witnessed:

That was thirty years ago.  I have seen

       men in the throes of dancing since,

but none like that man that morning,

who stays with me not because he was blind

       but because he did the only thing he could

when the tune came on.  He stood.  He danced.

That poem is one of a sequence, titled “After Hours,” set in pubs around Ireland.  The Last Straw includes four other sequences. In the seven poems comprising “Costa Blanca” the poet reflects both

gratefully and guiltily on the luxury of a family holiday in Spain during the current European immigrant crisis.  The fifteen poems that make up “Bank” afford a rich historical record of working a turf bank.  “Heywood” comprises seven poems recalling the poet’s education at the hands (at times literally) of the masters and the teachers at the Salesian College in Ballinakil, County Laois.  Focusing on the timepieces of two British soldiers during the Great War of 1914-18 (one of them the poet Edward Thomas), “Two Watches” engages with a subject and a theme that eventually emerge as central to the volume as a whole—in the famous words of British soldier-poet Wilfred Owen: “My subject is War, and the pity of War.  The Poetry is in the pity.”

In fact, some of French’s most compelling standalone poems appear to be inspired by the spirit of Irish soldier Francis Ledwidge that lives on in that star-crossed poet’s native County Meath, where French works as an Executive Librarian specializing in Local Studies. These include the truly wonderful blank-verse sonnet “Tattie Hokers,” which draws on the story of a battalion of the Seaforth Highlanders, a Canadian regiment, pausing on the march between Amiens and Albert in October of 1916 to help a French farmer pick potatoes: “They can’t resist / stacking rifles and throwing off backpacks // to postpone death . . .”  Imagining how “Mucking in here makes it peace time briefly,” French captures the pity of war indeed in his closing tercet:

The scent of potatoes brings back the bothy,

       straw mattresses arrayed on seed boxes,

the cow house swept out for men to lie down. 

 Another, “Unidentified Farriers, Western Front,” is obviously prompted by a photograph:

They have taken time out from the slaughter

       to enjoy the banter and be photographed

by a cameraman who steps from under

       a black cloth and carries their souls away.

In this decade of centennial commemorations in Ireland, French is a rarity among contemporary poets in his commitment to validating and valuing the upwards of 300,000 Irish-born soldiers, long marginalized by politics, time and history, who served in the British Expeditionary Force during the Great War.

One of French’s great strengths as a lyric poet is his capacity to find the makings of a poem in diverse, and sometimes obscure, corners.  These include his own personal experience as in a poem like “Kilcreene,” which records an intimate moment with an aging relative undergoing treatment at the Lourdes Orthopaedic Hospital in Kilkenny. Describing how he helped the old man undress and then watched him resign himself to bed, French writes:

                   I know now this is how a god lies down.

I kiss his stubbled cheek, his handsome face,

       and bear, in shopping bags, his clothes away.

Another is “Sisyphus in Cricklewood,” which tells of an Irish émigré to London who has worked “painting the one bridge for years”:

He’d been fresh off the boat when he began.

       An old hand showed him the ropes early on

and left him to it when he’d got the hang.

       Now he does it most days with his eyes closed.

Each new year he sets out for the far bank

       and, each new year, for the far bank again. 

Another is “Church of the Resurrection, Ballinfoyle,” an intriguingly respectful—even reverent—poem in essentially post-Catholic Ireland.  Inscribing “the priest and the sister above on the altar / who would pass for a couple of ancient lovers / passing the bread and wine to one another,” French grants them a grace and a dignity inflected with not even an iota of irony:

He loves her.  She knows where everything goes.

       Now they bow to the miracle of each other,

to the tabernacle which is their kitchen cupboard.

The recipient of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2001, the Dermot Healey Award in 2015, and the O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry in 2016, Tom French is a lyric poet of the first order. His poems are richly realized and a true pleasure to read.