Ruth Padel's Review Continued of Adrian Rice's Impediments

So these poems are profoundly political. An outsider can only register the skin of them and guess at what's within. "Prize Day" is the first poem (I should think), to tackle implications of rift and snobbery in Sunday School society. There are kids who don't make it to Sunday School. Other factors than piety make "the first" first. Ground before the Cross may be level, but some have it more level than others:

     On Sunday School Sunday
     Only the firsts,

     With groomed teeth,
     Percolate into the aisles

     With any conviction -
     The first being first,

     Not second �

That poem says there is a hidden hierarchy, a "holy laddering" within its community, which the overt democracy denies. "The Dummy Fluter" acknowledges more openly, and woundedly, in marching rhythm, the way "the band" - or the community - gives room to people who care for violence rather than creed; who are there for their hardness, not their music:

     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.

So these poems question central aspects of their community. But their language seems to me to be a statement of allegiance to it. This is a book in plain language about plain people. It shares their suspicion of excessive speech - of ornamentation, rhetoric, floweriness of feeling or surface. Rice doesn't run away from his community: he is lodged deep within it. Halfway through the book, "The Gift" has a go at Catholics too. It may be stereotypical to accuse Catholics of superstition -

    Signing the cross with a wedding ring
    To wither a sty and banish a wart -

but when a woman marries a Catholic, the "gift" she gets is having to shut up for the rest of her life:

                                    Mother Nature has
    Blessed her with a gift she mightn't be aware of:
    A feminine thing that husbands esteem -
    Like the precious gift of � listening.

To me as an outsider reader, Impediments seems, sadly and genuinely, to soul search on behalf of its community and therefore do it honour.

Ruth Padel's Review of Adrian Rice's Impediments Continuted

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