The Fox, the Whale and the Wardrobe by Dónall Dempsey. Dempsey & Windle (Guildford 2023) Pbk. 119 pages. £10.99.
This collection, Dónall Dempsey’s sixth, is dedicated to ‘my Uncle Mikey, the treasure trove of my childhood’ and, indeed, Irish childhood is a magical resource for the poet’s whimsical delight in language, people and performance. The title poem exemplifies the range of reference and emotion which can be achieved in simple narrative forms drawing on richly textured objects and events, narratives which evoke literary analogues, in this case C.S. Lewis, whilst asking fundamental metaphysical questions. The poem is addressed to his child sister, dead in a tragic accident, from which the poet hides in a wardrobe which is both literal, with his auntie’s fox stole and whale bone corset ‘smelly evilly of pink plastic’, and metaphorically a retreat from life where he can ‘Gather the darkness/about me/Dissolve into/the nothingness/I have/become’.
This childhood loss haunts him and gathers memories of all ‘darkness’, against which the 67 year old man he has become seeks to comfort and make amends to the nine year old he was. An aspect of the ‘amends’ is the poet’s ability to write the past, evoking its formative power with joy and ensuring it endures as what, in the final poem, he calls ‘Ever ever land’. All happiness may exist in ‘little snippets of time/and space’, as he puts it in the penultimate poem and even if the protagonists remain only in black and white photographs, ‘I/& the moment/keep happening/in the attic of my head’.
Grief, then, is juxtaposed with celebration of life, love and moments of joy. Dempsey is not a believer in the comforts of religion: ‘the bell tolls/putting everything back in place/for those with faith/me, I /think the wind and crows/speak the truth’ but that is not a cause for despondency: there may be no God but ‘just/the sweet rain blesses me/with its good self’ and a robin ‘unaware/that he’s my prayer’. Above all, people like his father are ‘the only religion/I could believe in’. ‘I pray to him’, the poet says in ‘Go Gentle’. At the other end of life is the three year old child Tilly, a source of joy and wisdom. In ‘Coming back to the world’, for instance, she wakes up sobbing that she fell asleep and potentially missed out on something happening. Comforted that the world, too, fell asleep, she snuffles ‘Good/I hate to miss/anything the world does’. This could be said of Dempsey himself, with his tactile poetry warm, as in the lovely ‘Le mie mani’, with hands, kisses, textures, affection.
There is much conversation in these poems. Voice is given to molecules, goldfish, birds and even a ball. In ‘Tales told by birds’ hatchlings are told stories of how they are the only survivors, as if humans ‘had never been invented’. Sometimes inanimate objects are whimsically brought to life, like the ‘Fallen angel on the graveyard shift’ who gathers snowballs and which the poet persuades: ‘Go on throw it’ and ‘…she lets him have it’. In ‘Don’t forget to write’ the poet enters a dialogue with his own poem: ‘Make me proud’, he whispers as it leaves his mouth. Even in print, the poet is in dialogue with the reader. Instead of footnotes we have italicised asides like the introductions one might get in a live reading event. There are classic literary undertones everywhere in this book, nudges towards Eliot, Whitman and Yeats, amongst many, and more extensive engagements with Shakespeare, Joyce and Dickens, yet the levity of the showman and shades of the stand-up comic are always evident. Dempsey is distinctive in print in his short, unpunctuated lines and brief stanzas, and in person, in his dapper style and audience connection. As a school teacher he must have been memorable. On Twitter he is prodigious, inventive and refreshing.
This reviewer must declare an interest, as someone supported by Dónall the publisher and his wife Janice, also celebrated in the book. Nevertheless, the range of feeling, the vitality, and love of life are clear to all. Dempsey concludes in ‘The Nothingness’, reflecting on his birth in 1956, ‘would I do it/again, given half a chance/you can bet my life/I would’. Would a reader want to hear more from this poet? I bet they would.