Fifty Years: Poems 1957-2007
Reviewed by Wayne Burrows

Originally a native of St Louis, Missouri, Knute Skinner has been living and working in the Irish Republic since 1964, and although not among the household names of contemporary Irish writing, as this substantial gathering of his work since the fifties demonstrates, his output has been consistently interesting and accomplished. As regular readers of the Irish and UK small presses will be aware, the signature of Skinner's poetry is an off-handed lightness of touch, approaching big themes through casually observed everyday incidents and details. In 'The Figure By His Side', a man thinks he glimpses an unsettling, ghostly presence in the corner of his eye ("the words springing to mind -/grey, grim, gaunt, grotesque ...") then ponders the absent shadow through a view of himself, "aged and ageless with one foot out of the grave", concluding that whatever it might have been, "it stayed in his mind...twisting twinges of botheration/into serious knots". The poems continually perform this trick of sneaking up on an intimation of transcendence or mortality from an odd angle, glancing at romanticism in anticipation of "more light in the house" and "a new view of Michael Healy's meadow/with its wavelike rise to the skyline" in 'Our Crab Apple Tree', or dread through the presence of an ominous letter on a mantelpiece that "looked larger each time I glanced up from the table/where Grandfather poured tea with a resolute hand" in 'Stale Biscuits'. While these later poems perfect the method, the retrospective offered by this volume suggests that - even in the more formal early poems - Skinner's sensibility has been working this seam from the start, offering a poem of praise to 'Urine' or wondering whether 'Blackheads' were "there all the time,/gathering, deepening/waiting for the touch of' my fingers". He offers prayers for his garden's peas and cabbages to grow unmolested by "hungry crow/or caterpillar", compares his home's unreliable water-spring to "life itself, sweet, chancy and transient", and notes, after a rainstorm in 'The Cold Irish Earth', that while his coat "hangs drying now/by the kitchen range...down at Healy's cross/the Killaspuglonane graveyard/is wet to the bone". The way Skinner's puns and ease with everyday language work to plumb surprising depths reminds me of the superficially similar approaches of James Wright or Paul Muldoon's The Prince Of The Quotidian, though Skinner's approach to the everyday conceals its underlying romanticism and linguistic playfulness far more completely than such poets as these generally do. Even so, there's a kind of Buddhist sensibility at work occasionally, as in 'Fun With Earthworms And Crab Grass' or 'Sand And Water', and it's often left productively difficult for the reader to tell exactly how seriously Skinner's writing takes the human condition it describes. He's at his most richly humane when beginning 'Milk And Cookies' with the image: "Yawning, I shut the book and got off the bed.//Well, that's life, I suppose/Never a dull moment". Towards the end of the volume, he also offers a series of 'Four Poems For Edna' that affectionately compare his beloved to "a pub where the dark red wood/glistens behind the bar", and later observes her emerging from a fever, "sitting up in bed,/the thermometer out of her mouth", Edna herself marking her sweaty bedclothes with the words "I think I could win a wet T-shirt contest". So far, so prosaic. Yet by allowing Edna's self-deprecation to trigger a wave of spousal desire (Skinner offers his own vote, "moving closer, admiring her nipples while inhaling the residue of Vicks on her chest") the poem performs a surprising turn, allowing illness to be transformed from ordinary tenderness to eroticism and love. In work like this - and there is a good deal of it in these pages - Fifty Years reveals itself to be as fine and engaging a testament to the complicated nature of simple pleasures as any in contemporary poetry.

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