Fred Johnston's Review of The Mason's Tongue

Books Ireland May 2000
Retaining our souls: Fred Johnston

The Mason's Tongue.
Adrian Rice.
Abbey Press.
63 pp Stg �8.95 pb
1-901617-15-7.

Adrian Rice's The Mason's Tongue is published by Rice's own outfit, Newry's Abbey Press. Now I have serious misgivings around poets and other Irish writers - God knows, we have plenty of them - who are their own editors and publishers and therefore in my view occupy a position of distinct advantage over those others less fortunate who depend on editors and objective criticism. This is self-publishing given a dubious gloss. And consequently it raises critical questions. There are, for example, poet-publishers who bring out their own 'selected' and 'collected' works with unabashed disdain for what critics and reviewers think and get away with it mainly because, in an intimate literary Ireland, the critics and reviewers shy away from anything that might risk their own careers as poets and writers. For shame, I say. File such work under 'self-published' and have done with it.

Rice's collection is further marred by a jacket blurb, unsigned, which describes him as 'a distinctive new voice in Irish poetry'.

Having said that, I must say that Rice's voice is most welcome. It is a Protestant poetic voice, for one thing, and to my mind we lack these voices, after Hewitt, to an extent, the residue of Neo-Biblical through resides in the poetry, in the chorus of the title-poem:

      Go tell all the brethren
      There is no rest where I have gone,
      No answer comes from Jah-Bul-On �

Elsewhere, Rice reflects on some interesting and pseudo-mythical social undercurrents:

      The Protestant heart is a zoo of lust;
      Its lascivious craving for conquest
      Is often appeased on the
      Catholic rump.
      Your grandmother couldn't
      manage her heat
      When Brown came conniving
      and sniffing
     (Snout at the slats of the gate)
      She welcomed him over the wall �
      -'The Gift'

'Serpents in the Heart' is relevant in its theme of St Patrick and lost of misshapen faith in Ulster and all that, but ultimately descends into a peculiar kind of mawkishness. 'Biblical Teaching on the Devil' on the page opposite is neater, tighter, more revealing of a culture about which few Catholics actually know a great deal, yet couched in a poetically uncertain, rather lazily-concluded style:

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