Angels and Harvesters by James Harpur (review)

Reading James Harpur’s Angels and Harvesters is like enjoying a diptych that portrays descent and ascent. On one wing, the fall: leaves, lives, thoughts (arriving “From God knows where”), angels, snow—all relieved by the ascent in the diptych’s other wing, the book’s second half, by revelations that enable us to continue our extraordinarily common lives. The senses reign, marking Harpur’s experiences which indicate not directions to life but revelations in darkness and falling. The collection opens with Harpur’s translation of Rilke’s “Autumn” (“Herbst”), a poem that laces images of falling with belief, invoking “ One . . . who keeps this falling / From falling farther. . . .” The second poem, “Reflections” reinforces that belief and ends with St. Bede’s prayer, “We fall from glory to this life of darkness. . . . Lord, help us find the straining hole of light. . . .” The collection’s fourth poem lightens the theme with the poet’s tongue in cheek, “I want to fall to somewhere else, like Alice.”

Harpur sets one of his strongest poems, “The Leper’s Squint,” in Limerick’s St. Mary’s Church. On “A day the colour of old chewing gum,” he imagines the lepers “lining up outside / Poking in fingers, like strange gastropods, / Impatient to receive the Lord’s body / For how long did the visitants retain / the hope that bread transformed to Christ would shine / Inside their flesh, and heal, before hope died / Expelling them unchanged to death in life?”

In an imaginative leap in “On First Seeing the Book of Kells,” Harpur enacts descent itself as dream. “I’m looking at a dream / Cut out from someone’s sleep and pressed / On vellum like a transfer; / Or a swathe of skin assaulted by / A mad tattooist, or a blueprint / Of creation by the Demiurge, / The planets spinning in his eyes.” There is a paradox in this falling, rich with thoughts and images: “The less I stare, the more I see” and a way of finding truth: “the truth I hope to find / Cannot be found by searching/But only stumbled on by accident / Or granted freely, if at all.” This is not the first time Harpur—who is undoubtedly one of contemporary Ireland’s poets most attuned to the sacred—has been fascinated by this paradox. His previous book, The Dark Age (2009) builds on a quotation from Dionysius the Areopagite that speaks of coming “into this darkness . . . without seeing . . . to see.”

In Angels and Harvesters Harpur probes Irish landscape and history, its heroes, its violence, and its oddments such as the Radio Caroline pirate stations of the 1960s. In “Gougane Barra,” he shows us a rural antiquity in a crow nesting in an oven: “I open up the stove to clear the grate / And flash! as if a coal has come to life / A crow flies out.” Companion sonnets dignify the memory of a boy’s school days. Snow falls over rivers, hills, streets, bays, and towns, and ends being replaced by light. “Christmas Snow” is one of Harpur’s loveliest descriptive poems in this collection.

Off guard, Harpur can come close at times to sentimentality, as when surf whispers the word “Christmas.” This is outweighed however, by tour de force poems like “Monte Cassino in Kerry,” an autobiographical poem inspired by a painting by Harpur’s father in which his father’s “traumas drop away / As unemotive paintings of his past / Or rickety stage sets in a play / In which he happened to be cast.” In studying the painting and writing the poem, the son comes to understand his father’s character, “with all its imprinted death and grief / Relevant no longer. . . . And draws my mother in that field / And shows the two of them enrapt / Communing with their canvasses, / With grass and sky, the briny air—.”

Part Two of Angels and Harvesters promises ascent after descent. Harpur uses form and rhyme unobtrusively, to the point where they are almost imperceptible during silent reading. He...