Martin Mooney - The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen

Martin Mooney, The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen (Lagan Press)

It might have been said that a poet doesn’t arrive at maturity until the age of 40. And elsewhere, if not in exactly the same places, that some start to run out of ideas or begin to repeat themselves not long after they go beyond 50. But even given those strict parameters, Martin Mooney was born in 1964, doesn’t have any excuse and doesn’t need any.
For me, his best poems were among the relatively early work that I first knew him by but here he provides new pieces that are at least their equal and in a place or two have gone beyond that, which is of course what one hopes to see and is then grateful for.
The Humours of Ballycran kicks off with verve and panache like a band hitting the right note from the very beginning of a live show. Although it is in the end a poem about age and perhaps the passing of better days, it is done with exuberance, quickness of thought and a re-working of cliché and old saws. It establishes several of the themes that are going to recur in the following pages.
Later, Hokusai is imagined in old age still striving for finer art and mourning the loss of his younger self but it is in Avercamp: Skaters on the Ijsselmeer that Mooney gives us a new masterpiece. While mainly obsessed with the artist’s passing and the contingency of his existence, it is also aware of the limits of his brilliant but narrow oeuvre,

knowing full well that life in all its shades
of love and truth and worship will go on
without you to record it.
However well a fire station is designed, it won’t prevent house fires but that is no obstacle to the jaded wisdom of The Architecture of Fire Stations, one of several poems in which Mooney handles form and rhythm to great effect. Similarly, Cure is that rare thing, a successful villanelle and Rendition brings together a number of Mooney themes- the radical politics, thoughts of mortality, Belfast and, new in this volume, sexual jealousy- in only seven concentrated but lucid lines. Which is one way that poetry can be more than prose but often isn’t in the hands of some poets.
Throughout the book we are aware of continuity in lives and communities, a stalwart and committed attitude in a world that is transient for the individuals in it who are subject to change, age, misunderstood passions and ultimately their own passing.
But Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, after a Hokusai picture, is the best new poem I’ve read in a long time. In years. Its slimy eroticism is powerful and tangible, associating the disgust of jealousy with the feel of octopus and wet groping. The clean release when the fisherman

retires to his boat for a month of net-
mending, keel-scraping, caulking and sake.
is welcome, refreshing and lovely to share with him. As is the tremendous metaphor of the stunted ‘refusal of the cherry to blossom’ as a comparison with the ‘fish-porn predictability of her lust’. (Female sexuality is as ever a problem, I’m afraid). But if that wasn’t enough already, the ending on,

I’ve said I’m sorry and I’m sorry.
is an adamant but desperate attempt to lock down feelings that doesn’t sound as if it’s going to be adequate to get over them.
Martin did say on his website about the making of the book that this was one of those cliched moments when the thing seemed to do the heavy lifting by itself.
And when a poem does arrive quite so fully formed, the poet can only be grateful and try not to fret that it doesn’t happen more often.
It is a sonnet, with its own fittingly distorted, un-Shakesperean and non-Petrarchan, rhyme scheme and packed with such well-made phrases in its compact flow that I hope it wins more accolades than those that this little website is bound to offer it.
‘Well-made’ is one of the stand-by, benchmark epithets that I’ll attach to many of the things I like best if it seems appropriate, given my restricted repertoire of endorsements. It applies to much of this book, which is a fine thing, with all of Mooney’s natural, unflashy erudition and the perfect pitch of distance and detachment (I've seen it called 'decorum' somewhere) that his language achieves between text and meaning, like the superb ‘furious’ decorating in The Ballad of Moscow Joe before the inversion of the usual Country & Western song themes. I can almost see how C&W melancholy fits with the cultural references of working class Northern Ireland, or anywhere else. It is funny, and it’s okay as long as we understand that life isn’t perfect and you can never really have it all.
Excellent book.