The Irish poet Nick Laird said in an interview that the ability “to look at something again, to open up a space of second thoughts” is especially important in Northern Ireland, “where all of your instincts have been trained by politicians and churches to go in a particular direction”. This need to get beyond tribal divisions is hinted at in the title of Laird’s first collection, To a Fault (2005), in which “Poetry” appeared. As well, says Laird, as suggesting “a defect … an unsound or damaged place”, the phrase also has “an echo of the toast about it, the glass raised to dislocations”. To these meanings might be added the sectarian fault lines that split the country in two and also perhaps the fact – explored here – that the poet needs to be observant, detached, dispassionate “to a fault”: a TLS review of Laird’s second collection, On Purpose (2007), suggested that “a damaging Northern Irish upbringing” might somehow be behind what it saw as “the poems’ refusal to communicate”.
Yet “Poetry”, first published in the TLS in 2005, suggests that to political wariness might be added the unsparing self-scrutiny of the poet, outside the world he inhabits. His objectivity seems to be unnerving even for him. Watching the engagement of others as – tellingly – they pray in church, he half-implies that it is not just his attempt to turn this into poetry but also their attempt to live up to their finer feelings that is only partially successful. The “great … bird” of innocence, or understanding, is crippled by both the history of violence and the way it complicates any attempt to think about it. All the “moon-eyed” poet can do is watch his parents “through his own reflection” as they, too, struggle with something “trying to take flight”.
Poetry
It’s a bit like looking through the big window
on the top deck of the number 47.
I’m watching you, and her, and all of them,
but through my own reflection.
Or opening my eyes when everyone’s praying.
The wave machine of my father’s breathing,
my mother’s limestone-fingered steeple,
my sister’s tiny fidgets, and me, moon-eyed, unforgetting.
And then the oak doors flapping slowly open to let us out,
like some great injured bird trying to take flight.
NICK LAIRD (2005)