Review of Mike McNamara's "Loose Canon"

  24, 06, 20

 Review of Loose Canon by Mike McNamara

 McNamara is a poet, songwriter, singer and leader of Big Mac’s Wholly Soul Band, now becalmed under lockdown but still, one hopes, ready to re-launch itself when the tide comes in again. Meanwhile, he has been writing and collating his poems, and the latest, and longest, of three recent collections is now published under the semantically layered title of “Loose Canon”. The others are “This Transmission” and “ Dialling a Starless Past”. 

Loose Canon has been described in a review as being Art Nouveau and New Goth, but many commentators, including myself, would say that the author has a style, or perhaps fractured style, that is all his own. That being the case, the straightest way to do justice to his latest published work, it seems to me, is to treat of a selection from it, each chosen item, I trust, yielding insight into not only the poetry but also the poet. He is, after all, a presence in much that he writes, in particular in the company he keeps with the struggle between many of the lines to find expression for what cannot be said—for one strives, or McNamara does, to find a truth that in the same way cannot be lived. And this, as we shall see, is part of his appeal to fractured us. 

Beginning with the second poem, UNBINDING, here are the second and third stanzas:

In the name of the father, son, dark Shiva’s mother
sister, wife, killer of the paraclete’s brother
impala, impaler, imposter, implier,
an antlered and mythic, monolithic liar.

 (“There’s a wonderful truth,” the kind teacher said, so enheartening that no one should fear it, then he shared it, but I was distracted in pondering something in passing and missed for all time that one chance to hear it.) 

This is McNamara all over, which I say because I like the way that “McNamara all over” scans, and I like the alliterative thud of word upon word in the first quoted stanza, and then the contrasting second with its lightness of depth. And the humour, perhaps, of absentmindedly missing a pearl of wisdom, and the possibility, floating but not settling, that perhaps the missed pearl was really just paste. We already know, after all, that the ultimate answer is 42. Since, that said, this is poetry, other readings of it may suggest themselves, 2 particularly if the poem as a whole is considered, the point being that it cannot unmove you, as McNamara would say, for to read it is to follow the beacon that it represents. But how, that said, is this possible? It is not as if the other four stanzas reveal the links, otherwise missed, between the two quoted ones. If detailed exegesis is what one expects perhaps an explanation of what the poem signifies, or what the first two lines of the quoted passage actually mean, then it seems to me that one should resist that undertow, which perhaps traces back to classroom poetry analysis and literature studies. That was misguided me when I first read McNamara, but now I wait until the rise and fall of the words, when eventually I yield to them, face me east or west, aligned with the sun, and then I go with the flow. The question of how the poem works its magic remains, but as for its resolution I can only say that the poem affects me, my mental compass picking up on its destinations, even if never arrived at, and also that it turns my head and faces me down, the floor of the sea far below, and the shapes made by the words, indistinct as they are, seem to conduce not to understanding but to awareness of its limits. This brings us to another poem. SOMEONE SINGING Someone singing in a house nearby without thought of fame or gain, a clear and natural contralto, and in the kitchen, once again I hear, a young woman, my mother humming, and my wife’s sweet lullaby to our babies a lifetime ago, soft as the springtime rain. This is very much in classic mode in its evocation of the sadness of time, a theme that we can all identify with, the lines tapping deep into a past that echoes back, as if from a distant drum. And yet, the poet’s rendering of that theme, and the reading and writing of the words, is richer and resonates more strongly than in the case of any nostalgic journey we might actually make. Even if in pensive mood we stop whatever we are doing or switch to automatic, all the better to lean back into the past, it is always in the here and now that the memories come flooding to the brim, and always our fear of falling that inhibits us. But with a poem, or the simple ebb and flow of this one, the poet’s words transcend the time and place, or rise above them into, in some sense, a timeless realm. It is as if McNamara’s own circle of 3 love and loss, in all its particularity, removes from ours the biographical detail, and expands it into the equator of a world of representation. Finally, a darker and more enigmatic piece. RAISON D’ÊTRE Just hours and days to kill, to fill this emptiness within before the end. Where has that carefree girl gone and where is the door I cannot find that frees me from this haunting room? Spare me the bread and circuses Of the starved and bored, every pointless action and reaction an empty masquerade And you know why I am here. Seeking a reason for being, swinging a dim lantern above the dark, deep chasm. Our own Stunde Null begins and ends here. And has. Always Enigmatic, and yet, even without deciphering it we are moved, as if by a surge of the sea. But we are waving, not drowning, though in some sense taken below the surface of things. Certainly, the images have their effect, in particular the swinging a dim lantern above the dark, deep chasm. This turns us in a circle, perhaps the great circle of the equator again, and, too, that of a maelstrom that also exerts its pull in the body of the work. McNamara has the power to move us, caught up as we all are in the greater swirl of things; but always, too, he takes us to the still centre, where we, like him, cannot find what it is, or what it means, if anything, or whether perhaps we missed it, our thoughts ebbing the wrong way when the secret to the tides came in. What counts, if all else is unattainable, or even if there is nothing, 4 anywhere, or not even that, is that McNamara in many places in this anthology, and in many ways, enables that still centre, a timeless moment when facing east or west. And there, in that still plane of sublime uncaring, we cease to worry about the sun—whether it is rising or setting. Thus it is that ends are joined and beginnings firm a queue, and now it is we who are becalmed, no longer plotting a course or peering into the chasm beneath us. In the dark night on a flat sea we are facing up; and the moon, too, has completed its phases and is full. And we immerse ourselves in its calm serenity, a Sea of Tranquillity, and the question of the secret of the tides floats free, the poet releasing us from it.