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.