Poetry review: Dark Matter by Mike McNamara

Jon Gower

In the middle of Louis MacNiece’s poem “Snow” there’s a famous stanza that suggests:

World is crazier and more of it than we think,

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

The drunkenness of things being various.

That variety, that plurality is present in spades in Mike McNamara’s sixth collection, Dark Matter. A poem such as “No Belle Epoque” which offers a perspective on the past and a ‘tortuous life twisting unseen between the lines of an errant poet’s verse’ where:

All things are considered;

murdered Marlowe, Marie biscuits,

an elusive merciful goddess,

buttercups that grow beneath the apple tree

a crow’s nest in the holly tree,

Privileges and liberties.

It comes as no surprise therefore to read the head nod in the title of one poem, “Relict Of (After Louis MacNiece)” or to note glances in the direction of a ghostly phalanx of other poets who are hinted at or directly referenced, from John Donne through Paul Celan to W.B.Yeats.

There are lots of musical references too, comnecting Mary Hopkin with Chuck Berry, Ray Charles with the Drifters. Indeed McNamara manages to supplant what had been my favourite pop-related rhymes up until now, the Ramones chiming ‘got to tell ‘em’ with ‘cerebellum’ in  the song “Teenage Lobotomy.”

He does it with some madcap rhyming in which Fats Domino rhymes with Nant-y-glo and Cicero, to name just a few in a very jaunty list.It’s not often that poetry makes you laugh out loud but such zestful playful rhyming and chiming does just that.

The collection ranges as widely geographically as it does culturally, so that we have wine drinkers outside the Co-op in Llandeilo sharing pages with Oregon’s Crater Lake and the empowerment Temple in Baltimore and the baked earth of Death Valley contrasting with the greenery of the Glens of Antrim.

It’s a peregrinating collection, restlessly on the move, like a hummingbird unable to settle for more than a mo.

As the title suggests you may not arrive at the meaning all that easily in Dark Matter – there is much that is obfuscatory, surreal and diffused but you’ll soon get a sense of what matters to the poet. Time does, for sure, and its inexorable progress, its absent lovers and departed friends. I was reminded of John Tripp’s poem

In McNamara’s verse things are younger and older or different when viewed thirty years ago as opposed to the long lens of sixty years.

Time ticks through the poetry lines like ticker-tape, We have references to biorhythms and the Biblical three score years and ten presaging the way ‘The sound of Mount Krakatoa erupting/circled the world 7 times.’

There are direct references to time too, such as the title of the poem ‘There Was a Time’ and chronological precisions such as “4.55 on the clock” while time itself is described as ‘nearly perpetual motion.’ The poetry measures other dimensions too, some of them universal or concerned with multiverses:

Let us be friends now, you and I

In the circle without circles

And this realm within multiverse realms.

This has obvious echoes of T.S.Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” which starts:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table.

So today’s poet connects with one from the past. Time again connecting. Still ticking on.

Dark Matter by Mike McNamara is published by Ali Press in New Mexico, U.S.A . and is available here.