| Poetry Ireland Review (Spring 2000) Review by Conor O'Callaghan of Adrian Rice's The Mason's Tongue Ulster Protestantism is the central obsession of The Mason's Tongue, Adrian Rice's first collection. Poem after poem broods on the Ulster Protestant identity in general, and on the poet's place within that unique tradition. There is definitely the tang of Tom Paulin's "gritty Prod baroque" about many of these poems. Like Paulin, Rice's relationship with his origins is not uncomplicated. At his best, he manages to hit a note, which is sceptical without being apologetic, celebratory without being dewy-eyed. Rice is realistic about the sectarian divide and the acts of succession through which it is perpetuated, as in 'Gable End' and 'Handing Over the Reins', the latter being one of the book's real highlights. Unusually for a first collection the "I" gives way to a masculine third person as successive poems invoke an archetypal Protestant hardman as the embodiment of its themes. Perhaps the most memorable of these is 'The Dummy Fluter', the mute mascot of the marching band who is Somebody's son or Somebody's brother; Or a bit of a bastard who hammers the beer. But when all's said and done, more often than not, This master of no tune is basically HARD: Hard on his Ma, hard on his Da, Hard on his brothers and sisters and girl; Hard on his teachers, hard on the preachers, And hard on your face should you cross him at all. That metaphor of muteness, or its variations, recurs in The Mason's Tongue. From the title poem on, the book is peppered with severed or dysfunctional mouths and ears. I especially liked 'Silent Argument', which is about the leap of faith in getting a haircut from a deaf barber and which is dedicated to Ian Duhig. Indeed, there are occasional hints of Duhig's abstruse vocabulary (smurr, barnet, spraightled, flaffing). The most original moment of the whole collection happens in 'Sorrow-Songs', three sonnets in memory of an elderly neighbour. In these, Rice finds a subject and tone, which bind all those themes into a lyricism, which is at once affectionate and yet alive to the double-edge of mutually inclusive lives. Many less convincing moments occur when Rice strains to say something "significant" without sustaining concrete images in which his ideas might exceed their initial meaning. 'The Artist on the Eve of a Breakthrough' is interestingly reflexive, but ultimately lacks any dramatic tension or resolution. In places there are overt bows to Paul Muldoon, most obviously in 'Little Pig', which takes at face value that grandmaster's early assertion that an Irish poet wasn't worthy of the name until he/she had written a poem about a pig being killed. 'The Big Picture' reads too much like yet another poet mimicking Muldoon mimicking Chandler, without adding anything new to that particular sub-genre. At his best, however, Adrian Rice is an intelligent and talented poet whose work will be worth following in the future. |
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