Fifty Years: Poems 1957-2007
Reviewed by Jennifer Matthews

This September Knute Skinner was the guest poet at O'Bheal, Cork's open-mic night. He seemed at ease with the crowd and his poems shared intimacies in a rather avuncular way. The audience was kept laughing throughout the night with works like 'Urine: A Poem of Praise' and 'Blackheads'. However, the highlight was hearing him read one of his finest pieces, 'The Old Man' for its quiet but weighty imagery which shows Skinner at his best. 'His business the low door,/ your past in his presence,/ he composes your life'.

His most recent collection, Fifty Years, gives a generous sample of his work, along with a somewhat academic introduction by Brian Arkins of University College, Galway, which insists on the author's place in the Irish canon alongside the likes of Eavan Boland and Michael Hartnett. The book is organised in four sections: Early Poems, Later Poems, Fictions, and Recent and New Poems.

Skinner's writing has a conversational tone, with clear and accessible word choices. His lines are precise, often using controlled metre and rhyme. These elements are found in his poem 'Fall 1965' which places events of intense global upheaval within the context of harvest season. He considers Voltaire's dictum, 'We must cultivate our own garden', as a modern reality, but without pomp or convoluted philosophising:

Dig potatoes
While I can.
Raise that pile of
Stones again.
Thus dispose of
Each short day
While the world
Wears away.

Many of his poems centre around the spirituality to be found in nature. Readers meet a white cow goddess and earthworms as companions in life and death. The elements, too, point to something larger. In 'Water and Rock', '...all slips away,/ and all stays at ease,/ Water. Rock. Spray. / I am each of these.' Man holds his place in nature, but doesn't dominate.

Many of the poems are narrative and centre around the lives of his wife, neighbours and dogs. The reader soon becomes familiar with all these characters and with his home of Killaspuglonane. While his work is humane and humorous, you feel a little sorry for those whose embarrassing moments have made publication, as in 'Dinner with Monica' when one of the hosts is heard emitting the 'unmistakeable sputter/ of a pent- up fart.' This isn't cruelty—only observation of the divine in the daily, and the beauty in the profane. His mischievous eye never takes the ordinary for granted.

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