Angel Hour, by Ciaran O'Driscoll, reviewed by Gillian Southgate

Ciaran O’Driscoll’s new collection of poetry, ‘Angel Hour’, documents the process of searching for the right words to write; this is a commonplace enough observation to make, since any good poet is embarked on that journey. But here we have the struggle persistently revealed to us, while life, everyday life with all its dramas and frustrations, goes on. ‘And the TV took it on to report the daily numbers of the stricken and the slain/and told us to wash our hands or we’d become statistics’ he says of the Covid pandemic. That remorseless reporting  enhanced ‘my noxious dreams my cancelled travel plans my fears my paranoias envies and oddities’. But when he contemplates the figure of a pot-bellied Buddha in his garden, with a perpetual cosmic laugh ‘that brings everything scuttling back into place’, it makes him understand how the chiaroscuro aspects of existence must be  balanced if quiet of mind, and freedom to let go and ‘see the light’ are to be achieved.

 In ‘Tunnels’ he says the essence of achieving equilibrium is ‘to break out to the sunlit world at the far end of despair.’ The sunlit world is elusive, but can be approached by paying homage to other poets and meeting the challenges they face in trying to express an idea, an emotion. Robert Frost’s powerful poem ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ has a stillness and simplicity that makes the reader feel nature writing has rarely been so distilled, and so plain. O’Driscoll examines the making of a poem so unassuming and so artless, and does it in Frost’s, and his own voices, (‘I didn’t stay with lovely, dark and deep’ ), making the reader share in the complexity of the creative process.

Often, as he has told us, the words the poet is striving for will not come. In ‘Uncreative Pages’ he plays a melodeon to aid or distract him from the elusive ‘shimmering sentence’ he is seeking. Once, he comes close to understanding how it might be mined, in the title poem ‘Angel Hour’, when on holiday, he falls into a light sleep, and a crack of thunder reveals to him a ranked file of angels standing ‘on a road of golden clouds that climbed into the sky.’ Reminiscent of the words of William Blake, they show in metaphor the process of imaginative creation, as well as that other, spiritual world transcending our corporeal desire for wine and ‘appetite’. He glimpses and comprehends how fasting opened visions for saints and martyrs of the church, revealing to them the glories of life beyond the body. When the life of the mind climbs like angels standing on golden clouds, the ‘basis of the poet’s being’ is liberated into creative action, and a ‘visceral shiver of delight’, (From ‘Dead Recital’) confirms the truth of the resulting poetry.

‘My Builder’s Opinion of Light’  is a brilliant (I’m using the word advisedly) exercise in extended metaphor, and works on every level.  The builder is both muse and imagination itself. In order to liberate the mind into creative thought, to find exactly what one is searching to say, the moment when light can be caught is critical, but constantly elusive. But it is necessary to have faith in the process: ‘Be of unspeakable cheer, all that’s serene will come from nowhere,’ the builder/creative mind advises. The poet is transmogrified into a kind of celestial farmer: ‘I see you in star-studded wellingtons, robed in a mantle of the zodiac’, but also as a harvester of ideas, words, the shapes of words, the music of words.

Being a poet is a lonely business, yet it is a business the poet has no choice but to bring alive. The natural world is an actor in this drama of creativity, and many of these poems are suffused with images of light and dark. The political, indifferent world functions both as a source of inspiration and a straitjacket for it: ‘the air ‘went the way of water, health, a place called home’. Despair is always hovering on the edge of the poet’s consciousness, and sun is sought to relieve the mood, even as he acknowledges he is ‘more of a moon man, me’. Maybe so, but there is no more honest poet than Mr. O’Driscoll. Accomplished, bringing integrity to his craft, he is a blessed inhabitant of the fortunate isles of imagination. For all who need poems in order to live, this anthology will bear reading and re-reading.

Angel Hour, SurVision Books, Dublin, August 2021. 90 pp, £10.39 at Amazon.