ARC POETRY MAGAZINE: Canada’s National Poetry Magazine. Winter, 2009

Colin Carberry. Ceasefire in Purgatory. Toronto: Luna Publications, 2007.

Reviewed by Shane Neilson

Colin Carberry is an Irish-Canadian poet who has published two previous books of poetry, and is very much what could be called a “liner”: he writes lyrically, with a sense of pith, and his mission is to get a quote to stick on you. Take the closing couplet of “Island Sonnets iii”: “O Lord, from this passion grant me pardon, / now, in the hour of the hanging question.” It is how we have all felt: in need of invocation. It is what all sonnet conclusions should be: grand summations. Carberry manages to summon the overwhelming and the seeking in one memorable utterance. The line is of a piece with Carberry’s other compulsively quotable stuff, as well as an example of one of Carberry’s main themes: the mutability of knowing, the stagger-steps approaching knowingness, a mistrust of certainty. As another of Carberry’s poems puts it, in a single line, “As knowledge deepens, so sorrows increase.” But not all is right with the book; when Carberry tries to liven things up colloquially, the rhetorical pressure is let out. This poet is best in the heightened, alabastered Yeats vein, with bereft, wise lines. If he were a prose writer, I’d say he has trouble with dialogue. He’s best left to private thought, private composition, and one might think, due to the difficulty of translating dialogue and anecdote into his poems, that he would find translation difficult. Not so; Borges and Sabines make the journey, and the trick lies really in this: Carberry is best in tight, boxed-in forms, in forms that are word trickery, word puzzles, Anglo-Saxon in their inflection, with a smidgeon of anaphoric spice. His poetry slackens when the form slackens. But when the form is tight? Not many poets can top the dance and pure play that is “Rain”: “Mortar-grey clouds drip; roused no-warning winds / whip grit, wrappers, hair, ash, pop bottles, leaves / every which way. Our parched forked cactus leaps, / a green flash, out of its grimed dust-coat; claps / a shout erupts…” This is a poet in a lively high esprit. Finally, Carberry’s use of love cannot go unmentioned; it is the chief engine of his poetry, but it is not love in the traditional sense, not unrequited or for some blessed person—though there is that too—but rather it is love as the underpinning of every object the poet grasps. Carberry is a poet of emotional exuberance, but haltered, in restraint; this verse is almost always pertinent and pressing the reader close, as if there is some kind of secret to tell. It is perhaps inevitable that there are sentimental moments as a consequence: “The Stallion” discusses a spirited horse that is finally ridden by Carberry, and closes with “I saw, in that bloodshot eye, I had killed / everything in him that I most loved.” But who can blame mere indulgence? There is a grand tradition of love poetry, in decline nowadays, and Carberry has fruitfully taken up the cause.