Brief Review of Ceasefire in Purgatory, by Kildare Dobbs

“History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” James Joyce wrote, and the years since he died have been even more nightmarish, especially in his native Ireland. In a later generation Colin Carberry wrestles with similar demons, not only at home in Ireland but in the wide world. His poetry with its dark and bright imagery expresses a vision of that struggle in a distinctive voice, Irish in its eloquent music, yet with echoes of Canada, Mexico, and Rastafari Babylon. The settings may be purgatorial yet they’re redeemed by the energy and order of the verse. The imaginative force is heightened by its containment within metrical verse, including sonnets and terza rima. Redemption, the longed-for ceasefire, is achieved by hope and love.

The vision is present in the smallest poems, for example:

A fish flares at dusk,

silver scales

in the heron’s ears.

When I read that, the whole lake is present in thickening light to my mind. And in “Knower of the Field” a similar immediacy brings rural Ireland before my eyes.

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.

These poems are profound and moving, the real thing, poetry such as we seldom find, both lucid and mysterious.