The Burning Bush 2, issue six, February 2014
She remembers the tide still came in and went out though the men in grey suits were at the airport of the capitol. She remembers forced and muted conversation in the bar as if a final or a trawler had been lost. They poured like any other night, the wine, the beer. She remembers that no rum could get them locked. It brings to mind the work of Kevin Higgins, who is also able to render contemporary politics in poetry in such a way as to avoid banality. Harry Clifton’s blurb for the book claims that ‘Billy Ramsell is one of the younger poets who has most fruitfully brought into Ireland the best influences of a British generation including Don Paterson, Michael Donaghy and Ian Duhig. . .’, and this is probably true. But he is just as much in the mode of Irish contemporaries like the aforementioned Higgins. In his cosmopolitanism, Ramsell also has much in common with Alan Jude Moore. In the cyborgian, almost sci-fi aspects of this book (further iterated in poems like ‘For the Bodiless’, ‘Still’, ‘Reel’ and ‘Code’), he could easily sit alongside Patrick Chapman. Ramsell himself name-checks Trevor Joyce and Ciaran Carson in his acknowledgments, along with Ilya Kaminsky. Cross-pollination is always a good thing, and poetry knows no borders. But at the same time, Irish poets need not feel that they must only look abroad for models of innovation. Indeed, Ramsell now provides one version of it himself.
Michael S. Begnal’s latest collection is Future Blues (Salmon Poetry, 2012). His blog is here.
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