Company by Tom French (review)

Reviewed by: Company by Tom French Tom Mullins (bio) Tom French, Company (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2022), 92 pages. This is Tom French's seventh book of verse, and while it continues with the themes and contexts relating to his own acute sense of history and its significance which are a mainstay of his poetry, there are new perspectives emerging which indicate another kind of exploration relating to himself and his role as a poet. So, in 'The Poddle' he asserts a Heaneyesque comment: 'The depths of what we do not know I love' (p. 28). Perhaps, like Heaney, French is beginning to 'rhyme to see myself/To set the darkness echoing.' This puts one in mind of Yeats' comment about the life journey of a poet: the first half of his life is spent in a quarrel with the world while the second half of his life is spent in a quarrel with himself. It would appear that Tom French is on this threshold in his new volume. In a short reflective lyric, 'Stream That Flows Uphill' (p. 70), he asserts: Water will do what water has to do.Even if it is just this once, standin what's beyond being felt and feel, in arch and ball and heel, the courseof fobhair,1 and know in your bonesthere is nothing that is not uphill from here. In this volume, intense lyrics on personal topics such as this are interspersed with narratives on a wide range of social issues which engage his scrutiny. Tom French has absorbed and refashioned in his own way many of the characteristic poetic motifs and cultural patterns that informed and inspired the previous generation of Irish poets. Kavanagh looms large in the celebration of the local landscapes and the recall of lost lives; Heaney with his backward look into family and local traditions is pervasive; and perhaps Eavan Boland's attitude to history, the need to write for the real and not the myth, can be traced here as well. All these perspectives are present in the rich tapestry that French reflects and refracts in his own unique style. French has always taken inspiration from his sense of community and relationships, be it with family, neighbourhood or nation. He is motivated by a striking sense of empathy for the lives of people, past and present; he seeks to understand those lives and records their challenges, achievements, and in many instances their 'lives of quiet desperation', à la Corkery or Thoreau. [End Page 137] This is most powerfully and dramatically captured in a previous volume, Touching the Bones, in a poem entitled 'Pity the bastards', which portrays the lives of two brothers in rural Ireland, echoing Kavanagh's portrayal of Maguire in The Great Hunger. The epigraph of Company is a simple moving phrase: 'for my care'. There is a continual affirmation of the local and the personal over the grandiose, and so French affirms Kavanagh's dogma about the sources of poetry: 'Gods make their own importance.' From the beginning French's verse manifests a muscularity in tone and a lively verbal music, which gives it its distinctive voice and forthright sense of being in the here and now. There is an immediacy achieved by his sense of the dramatic manifested throughout but particularly in his ability to write ear-catching opening lines such as: Our mother purchased half an animalto keep us fed in the time of her confinement … –'Meat' (p. 49) It had to have something to do with the storymy one uncle not given to fantasy told … –'The Other Side of the House' (p. 36) The biggest wonder is I'm here at all … –'The Seven Wonders Bar, Fore' (p. 21) Tone here is all important in presenting the reader with an invitation to press on to know more about the intriguing context suggested in such terms. It is like being asked to participate in a conversation with the poet. French tells a good story, with an easy-going narrative tone that draws the reader into the tensions and personal issues that gave rise to the poems initially. Of these, 'The Other Side of the House' is the...