Words, music and vocals Keith Burke, single release date: September 9th

This week I had the privilege of hearing a single from Keith Burke’s new album, his fourth since he emerged onto the music scene with his 2004 album, The Dancer Who Stole Your Shoes, a Hot Press ‘pick of the fortnight’. Burke, who hails from Skerries in North County Dublin, is one of Ireland’s most versatile musicians, having released three previous albums and toured the third, Those Boys, on three continents during 2016.

This new album, produced by Anthony Gibney, has fourteen songs, all words and music penned by singer-songwriter Burke himself. It had a complicated, prolonged, genesis. Production began in Milan in 2019 and was scheduled for completion in Dublin in 2020 but got derailed for two-and-a-half-years because of you-know-what.  Work was finally completed in Dublin and Kildare earlier this year and this single will be released on September 9^th.

From the opening bars, I’ll Begin this Letter With Your Name invites us into an emotional landscape that is both familiar and mysterious, an enticing paradox evoked in both the words and the music. The smoky harmonica and bluesy, Dylan-esque vibe of the introduction sets a tone that is melancholy yet somehow uplifting, as the rhythm and instrumentals veer between acoustic intimacy and a gathering intensity. The beautifully wrought lyrics muse on past mistakes, missed opportunities, yearnings for what might have been, all to be summed up in this letter. Is it a letter of apology, regret, hope or all of the above? The mystery is satisfyingly allusive, as the instrumentals fade to an acoustic, folky mood that reveal the mellow tones of Burke’s voice, just a man with a guitar like the singer-songwriters of old, until the hint of bass and the drums thrum their insistent heartbeat and the surprise crescendo allows an effortless display of Burke’s impressive vocal range, drums, bass, piano returning to sustain the heart pulse of the song. I’ll Begin This Letter With Your Name ends on a tone of restrained yearning backed with a complex yet gentle instrumental that finally yields to the strains of that gorgeous, moody harmonica. This is an elegy to love, or loves, gone wrong, the whys and hows we do not know, for there is a mystery at its heart, as there is in all the best love songs. Listen to it.

Liz McSkeane

September 9^th, 2022

 

I’ll Begin This Letter With Your Name

Words and music: Keith Burke

Vocals, guitar, harmonica: Keith Burke

Bass: Dave Mooney

Drums: Paul Byrne

Organs: Scott Flannigan

Piano: Salvatore Urbano

Produced by Anthony Gibney

Mastered by Simon Francis

Kate Camp (2017) “The Internet of Things,” Wellington: Victoria University Press, ISBN 9781776561063

Kate Camp is an award-winning New Zealand poet whose fifth collection, “The Internet of things” is an arresting fusion of the everyday and the numinous. The title is mischievous, for the internet we encounter in Camp’s realm is not the world wide web of search engines and social media, but the interconnections of memories, desires and regret, murmured to the reader as though speaking quietly to an intimate friend. And the ‘things’ are not the high-tech appliances that will soon fill our smart homes – robots to clean the windows, fridges to monitor our diet. Rather, they are the artefacts of a simpler time and place, evoked in the cover photograph of John Lennon’s family kitchen, stacked with old oven and enamel pots and pans of a familiar, comforting past.

 

The title poem sets the scene with its evocation of a beloved time that is gone: “working ports/rust and containers/ the way unwieldy ships move across the water.” This opening sonnet glides effortlessly through a remembered visit to the family home of the Beatles, in particular John Lennon’s aunt Mimi, “that difficult woman/unfolding her camp bed in the dining room.” There are yearnings here and regret at the tendency of humans “always to wish for the wrong thing.” We are stumbling through a fairy tale, not quite blindly but perhaps mesmerised, as in the later poems, resigned to the boredom of bad choices made, when “You fall into disaster with the dull familiarity of the snake.” The collection at the outset creates a sense of predictability, where making “bad choices” is not only inevitable but “exceptionally boring.”

 

One aspect of Kate Camp’s gift is to make the familiar strange, melding the mundane and the mythic.  A gathering of friends, ephemeral yet caught in memory, recalls the trick a friend played at the end of a game of badminton with four shuttlecocks “all at once/they flew from the racquet as magician’s doves/to the net where they hung, white in the dusk;” A poached egg at breakfast “for disappointed hopes and poached eggs/go hand in hand;” and yes, a new-fangled item, an electric car which startles the reader as much as it seems to bemuse the writer, along with the “surprisingly large swans.” And the joy of recognition in a Rembrandt “And there they are!” is not for the sublime alchemy of the masters “cross-hatched lines /of shade” or the “world of depth/of leaves and branches” that they evoke but for “The slippers of St. Jerome/like those white towelling freebies from a hotel.” In the poet’s idiosyncratic vision, the most eye-catching feature of the saint’s companion lion is his “two or three sweet whiskers.” Though in the next poem, which ventures an interpretation of the same painting, she wonders “what would stop him turning from his post/and taking Jerome in his mouth like a joint of meat…” The everyday, the familiar, may be comfortable and comforting, but it still has the power to devour you.

 

The sense of resignation that opens the book does not last. Instead, it gives way to wry musings on the uncertainties that lurk under the surface of the web of what-might-have-beens: “This would be cherry blossom time/if there were any cherry trees here/if there were any blossoms.” And the internet we readers know, the one we use to do searches and shopping, is not completely absent. It is “out there somewhere/full of abandoned carts.” A glorious image of forsaken supermarket trolleys, clattering around in cyberspace.

 

In the final poem, Antimony, the predictable and the uncertain are fused: the poet is a woman on the prow of a ship, finally rooted in the “reckoning point” of an eternal present, where she sees “everything in front of me/and everything behind me,” an  eternal present. It is a satisfying ending to the ebb and flow of memory and feeling. The tension of this simultaneous backward and forward movement is conveyed in the poet’s subtle craft: lines long and stately, interspersed with staccato phrases and rhythm; assonance, rhyme and half-rhyme an invisible scaffold, holding the spider’s web of this internet of things together in quiet, slow-burning harmony.  

 

Eamonn Lynskey (2017) It’s Time  ISBN 978-1-910669-86-0 published by Salmon Poetry, Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare. 

The title of Eamonn Lynskey’s third collection – It’s Time, from Salmon Poetry – hints at the many layers of meaning woven into this ambitious and disconcerting book. Fifty-two delicately-wrought yet muscular poems confront themes that are personal and political, an unflinching meditation on some of the challenges of contemporary life and the many, many mistakes of history repeating itself. Lynskeys ’s vision has an ethnographic quality that imbues simple objects – a stone-age knife,  objects in museum, the lustre of talismans, giving a window on to the lives of people of other times, never forgetting their everyday uses

In one sense, the phrase “It’s Time,” is commonplace, almost a cliché,  reminding us that of how little there is of it to accomplish our life’s work, whatever that may be. In the beautiful elegy “A Connaught Man’s Ramble”, the poet urges us to take stock of

          “…the narrow span

          between the spark and its extinguishing.”

But this collection offers more than a meditation – it is also a call to action in that ‘it’s time’ we did something about this, ‘this’ as environmental degradation in “Down to Africa” and “Lament,” the latter a panygeric to the lost and disappearing life of the Great Barrier Reef; or ‘this’ the horror of conflict and wars, past and present, the execution of Anne Bolyen, a Neolithic warrior probably dead in battle, the bodies of the disappeared, buried just a few decades ago, victims of the warring factions of our own times, or found in our own  the shade of mortality, obliquely – that “Thief” in the night is not just coming for your valuables…

 

More than anything, It’s Time urges us to remember the individual humanity of nameless thousands, buried in unmarked graves, remembered here (“Lists”) in the poignant detail of their daily lives.

 “They caught him on his morning round

delivering bread and left him bleeding…”

Some of the brutality is visceral, handed down through generations and questions which of us would manage to keep our hands clean, given the right circumstances “Listening to my Elders.” The “Warriors” of pre-history, the “Neandertals” pre-homo sapiens the imagined interior lives of Neandertals, the Other

                                                    “loved their kids,

and hoped for happiness. And then we came along.”

Not so different from us except, it is hinted in being less bloodthirsty and therefore now extinct. There is an unspoken question, might it be too late after all “The Canals on Mars”

                              “Might have had another chance to prove

                              we could be human and humane for once.”

But as a counterbalance which insists, with Beckett, the determination to go on,  family, the birth of a child, survival as a patient emerges from the anaesthetic to realise

          “…the universe continues to pursue

          Its great Agenda, all creation moving…”

 There is wonder in the fact of the “Concerning the Concept of the Unoverse as an Accident Waiting to Happen” – seriously, what are the chances? There is nature on a spring day in the suburbs, poetry wrought from dead leaves and wheelie where the title poem dazzles

“There’s something sharp

about the sunlight blinds the eye this morning”

A small grammatical quirk that may bring some readers up short, the omission of the relative pronoun, this takes a bit of getting used to but once accustomed to it, gives a stately tone to the skilfully paced rhythm that entwines with imagery to create skilful poetic coherence. And hovering over it all, the shadow of mortality – that “Thief” in the night isn’t after your valuables…                      

 

 

Lynskey is at his best when vignettes of shared humanity are sketched, framed by a photograph or a window on to…allows readers the space and freedom to make connections, draw their own conclusions. Most of the time.  Very occasionally the poem succumbs to the temptation to draw conclusions on our behalf – This Photograph, My Song is Simple, overexplain meaning, slip into didacticism.

But these lapses are few. It is a book that disconcerts, not least in tenderness not only for our neighbour, but for the Other, such as

          “two English boys who disembark

To angry streets at Eastertime”

 

It’s Time like the photographer Catching a moment in time – the photographer on O’Connell St in 1960s snapped passers-by

imbued with great passion and compassion that smoulders, slow-burning, in the mind of the reader long after the “Final Notice” has been given.