Going by Water (review)

Michael Coady is master of a remarkable range of crafts: poetry, photography, and the recording of the spoken dialogue and the human voice (not to mention the performance of music, an artistic passion that permeates his work). He brings all of these talents to bear in Going by Water, the third of Coady's books—following on All Souls (1997) and One Another (2003)—in which the whole consort of poems, prose, and photographs dances together to advance the largest human themes in one small community, Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, the town in which was born and where he has lived all his life.

There are lovely sonnets, such as "Stormy Weather," which recalls his parents' honeymoon, saved by the hatful of silver earned in an impromptu musical turn in the bar of their Killarney hotel: "That given time was never quite undone / by all the weather of the years to come." In the sonnet "Three Down," Coady's intimacy with loss and grief wells up when word of a death comes from overseas while away from home, "and now it's down to words across salt waves / until I have to plead, in truth, There's someone / knocking on the door and I must go." But not all is solemn: "June Impromptu" finds the speaker adrift on the Suir, "sitting in with a local ensemble / of sky and valley, river, cot and paddle / making up a rhapsody of now."

Other poems are made of chiseled, brief quatrains, as were the earliest medieval lyrics in Irish. In "Finding a Name," for example, a persistent, nameless streamlet frames a child who, though named, was gone in a day:

By noon the nameAbigail had been givenwith candle and water and word,and by nightfall

as darkness deepenedthe turn of the flowunder leaves of the aldershe'd left her last

breath on the air,light as a wisp of downfrom the breastof a wren or a dove.

Transience—whether of a child's life or of fleeting human connection—is another of Coady's preoccupations. The theme is on display in the seven deft exchanges of "The Inside-out Beckett Umbrella," which records quick encounters on the streets of Carrick-on-Suir that underscore the connection between two such different minds. Both writers, Beckett and Coady alike, find the balance of humor in dire circumstances of bad luck, crossed love, illness, or senility.

There is great humor in Going by Water, often keyed to music. Here is the "Main street ironmonger, "who is "so tenderly / and savagely enraptured / by the holy ghost of lust" that he belts out "Wonderful, Wonderful Day" from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers for all the street to hear. Here, too, is the "All-Ireland Slow Air Champion" who "destroyed" her husband "night and day / with her laments." Coady's gift for rendering conversation is much in evidence in the prose sections interleaved throughout the book. The hilarious, vivid drinker in "The Friday Rounds," croons "Help Me Make it Through the Night" at the top of his lungs at last call: "Natasha! Take the ribbon from your hair. Jameson twelve year old, and skip that stuff that sank the Titanic. Shake it loose and let it fall. Lay it soft against my skin. Like them feckin' shadows on the hoorin' wall." In the prose piece, "Sheela na Gig," the startling, predacious proprietor of The Hen and Chickens Pub dances with her broomstick to a wind-up gramophone creaking out a Viennese waltz, then excuses herself to the upstairs jakes—from which emerges a most un-Handel-like blast of water music and a none-too-subtle invitation shouted down at her two patrons: "Excuse me! . . . Excuse me! Could either one of you two gentlemen kindly assist in zipping a lady up?"

The flowing river provides the controlling metaphor of the book. In "Another River," the third of the five parts of Going by Water, the...