Jane Routh reviews No Man’s Land by David Nash (Daedalus Press, 2024)
David Nash is a new poet to me – perhaps unsurprisingly, as the cover of his book says he “lives between Co. Cork and Chile” and the poems in this, his first collection, were written “returning for the first time in more than a decade”. Between the covers are four dozen poems as lively and various as any I’ve read in a good while.
No Man’s Land opens with ‘Nettle’, an engaging poem about his grandfather (with lines so long you barely register its rhymes), which begins: “I’d like to bring my grandfather back to life just to get him stoned, the good kind, the thirst and laughter kind. He had, I think, kind laughter.” There’s a purpose behind this re-incarnation prank: “I need to know some things.” He does recount one conversation he would like to have had with his grandfather but what he has to find out for himself, and what No Man’s Land offers us, are local traditions and stories, family memories (and some of his own), details of the local flora, bird life and sea life. The forms he uses – and invents – are as various as his subject matter.
What holds this refreshing and surprising collection together is its fast-moving conversational voice, its wit, good humour and playfulness – both with form and with language. ‘Not’ is a sonnet about blackthorn and its many superstitions:
Another culture might not have paid mind, but mine
caught on, or got caught, and made the following of the blackthorn:
inventories of luck and unluck, line after line
of instruction and warning, knowledge not to know, but to perform
But it shifts its ground at the sonnet’s turn, when the tree answers back: “What, might ask the blackthorn, has all this crap to do with me?”, coming up with the memorable phrase “land-love is a one-way street” before the final line bows out with the flourish of a pun on “not” and “knot”.
In complete contrast of form and length, the book’s striking centrepiece is ‘Flights’, an eight-page prose poem, which begins in a more distanced tone discussing its own Tolstoyan epigraph (“Happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”), which Nash writes he is taking “to have been written about me […] “and all the birds of my life, and more specifically again about the manner in which they have flown out of it”.
The first of these bird flights which follow (complete with another rigmarole about his uncle Phil), is the snipe: “latte-coloured cannnonbirds” which “bolted over the water to the opposite shore, already safe before I could remember what to call them.” Many bird departures follow – pigeons, terns, shearwaters – each one coming with its own surprise, sometimes even with Tolstoy again: “what would he make of me, for example, motionless before this picture-lamp of a laptop, this window with no world behind it, staring into it or out of it at a video of an owl that now gawks back”. Other departures are even given us complete in one-liners: “How does a swallow go? By coming, in the first place.” (This, I think, is the only poem in which David Nash mentions Chile: “Then the condor slides behind a mountain, like a card into an envelope, and mails itself into memory.”)
The forms he uses – and invents – are as various as his subject matter
These are brilliant evocations of bird flights. Nowhere does the poem mention statistics, species extinctions, habitat degradation and so on, though it leaves you with all these images of departure and loss. Yet even this poem diverts into one hilarious section (which he sets in parentheses): “(My father has found out what I am writing and asked me to include his two beloved chickens, Maura (the dowdier of the two) and Celeste (whose black, shellac-effect feathers make her look as if she has constantly just stepped out of the shower). They are horrid. […])”. And the departure made by these two hens? A “scuttling away” which leaves him “reeling in relief”.
David Nash’s wit often surfaces where you’d least expect. Putting an obituary notice on to a website in ‘rip.ie’ (yes, that is a poem title) produces a 14-liner of gentle humour that really did have me laugh aloud at the final two, which (spoiler alert) play with whether you hear the word ‘read’ as past or present tense:
The site says Condolences become Read Only after a month,
but by then the word will have got out, as words tend to.
Language is also its own subject matter, as in ‘The Geata Dearg’ (‘Red Gate’ – fear not, there are notes at the back for any Irish words you might not recognise.) “A hundred yards would be about from here to the Geata Dearg”, a saying of his father’s, “is a means of exaggerating the nearness or farness / of a thing”, and even though David Nash can’t say why it’s called red, it’s a word he’s said “more often than most of my English.” The poem concludes with a line of packed autobiography: “I came out of this world, not into it.” And ‘Warry Loomph’ is a poem which makes me think playing with language must be in his family. From the ‘Notes’ I can tell you “Warry Loomph is the Yabi word for lonesome. Yabi is a language my father and aunt made up.” In the poem,
The next to last
speaker dies, and the language dies
[…]
the folderol of
talk, will not long
outlast the tongue talking it,
once let go.
There are ‘Blueballs’ for bluebells in a transatlantic phone call. And look at this for a title: ‘All Square at Half-Time in the Mid-Cork Junior A Football Quarter Final between Canovee and Grenagh, Inniscarra GAA grounds, 21st of August 2022’, which gives him his first lines:
Something like the title of a poem
that rivals in itself the poem’s length, I want them
to keep going, take heart in their parity,
and draw forever. It’s unbearable, all this hope
I admire the way David Nash handles the first person throughout the book. There are plenty of first-person pronouns but all the same, I don’t know who he is because he is an astute observer, looking outwards, not inwards, rarely foregrounding himself. In ‘Hy Brasil’ (“an apocryphal island that appears on some medieval maps off the west coast of Ireland”, according to the ‘Notes’) he imagines a life there without anything at all, needing nothing: “let it be empty”. This seems to come from an unspoken dark undertow in the book: “empty / or completely full, just so long as / I’m not always finding these spaces inside myself.” It’s glimpsed, too, in ‘Observations in the field of Elders’, a poem ostensibly about elderflower gin (and language), which ends:
I have the time it takes to drink it
before the jumper, returned,
smells only of me once more.
The more I read No Man’s Land, the richer its mix. And I haven’t even mentioned ‘The Plastic Bag Full of Plastic Bags under the Sink’ or ‘Why You Should Really Think About Rewilding’. But I have just looked at the Irish Times online, to find David Nash won The Seamus Heaney Prize for Best First Collection in June this year. Good – though with writing as accomplished as this, it doesn’t need to be in a ‘first collection’ category at all.
Jane Routh has published four poetry collections and a prose book, Falling into Place (about rural north Lancashire) with Smith|Doorstop. Circumnavigation (2002) was shortlisted for the Forward prize for Best First Collection, Teach Yourself Mapmaking (2006) was a Poetry Book Society recommendation and she has won the Cardiff International and the Strokestown International Poetry Competitions.Her latest book is Listening to the Night (Smith|Doorstop, 2018) and a pamphlet, After, was published by Wayleave Press in 2021.
