Foreword to The Crossing (Bearing Press, 1998), a limited-edition chapbook (41 pages)

By Dr. Richard Greene, poet, reviewer, author of Graham Greene: A life in Letters

Colin Carberry is a rare combination of things: he is a young poet at once authentically personal, technically adroit, and politically urgent. At 25, he has divided his life between Canada and Ireland, and his poetry reflects a deep awareness of nationality and community. His range is cosmopolitan while his observations are particular and sustained.

In some of his poems he takes the reader into the countryside of the Republic and, in a manner reminiscent of Seamus Heaney, explores the relationship between landscape and identity. In “The Knower of the Field” he describes a grandfather “straining still upon his spade / in a graced light…” and goes on to celebrate a life that is certain of its traditions:

O observer of weather, steadfast one,

knower of nest airs and snipe song and fox,

fare wild where you will, my glad green one

in your field without crescents or clocks.

The poet, however, is not a part of his grandfather’s world; he stumbles over the customary greetings, and remains bound to a world that changes, that is governed by clocks.

Carberry’s island is not a gentle place. He is acutely aware of the plight of the Catholic minority in the North, and of the menace that has inhabited the streets of Belfast. “A Yarn” takes the reader where no television camera could go, The Felons’ Club in West Belfast, where IRA veterans take their pints. On the Lower Falls Road, British soldiers patrol and their vehicles hiss in the lane-ways. Carberry’s persona, certainly a nationalist, delights in the camaraderie of football stories and drinking songs, but sees beneath it the terrifying culture of the hard men: “Deoc and dorais. Saorise! One for the ditch. / Singing like just-lapsed angels, each to each.”

Like many of the best Irish poets, Carberry is attuned to the politics of memory. “The Crossing” examines how Canada has forgotten some of its own history of oppression. This poem opens with a quotation from Susanna Moodie mocking the ambitions of the immigrant Irish, and goes on to describe the terrors of Grosse-Île, a quarantine station in the St. Lawerence for those who after 1832 fled typhoid and famine in Ireland, only to perish like cattle in the New World. He sees in the 15,000 graves at Grosse-Île a casual and unregarded genocide, a racist crime of historic proportions.

In other poems, Carberry writes about the Caribbean, and renders delicately and respectfully aspects the culture of Rastafarianism, as embodied, for example, in Errol Jacobs, the prophetic fisherman of “Sufferah”:

All day he has trolled the calm seas’ blue glare

for his daily bread in a burnt-out bark,

returning by the labour of his oar.

Now, the oil-lamps blaze in the lilting shack,

as you climb the briared, inclining steep,

lit by incandescent fireflies at dusk:

‘Is I-and-I de noun, Is JAH de verb.’

Impenetrable calm of holy herb.

There is in Carberry’s use of language a degree of concentration that allows him to write with ease and grace within the exacting demands of the sonnet form. I admire very much the texture of his lines, which articulate in an almost physical way the passion he brings to poetry. This first collection of his work accomplishes much and leaves us with the promise of even finer things to come.