| The Irish Times Saturday, April 22nd 2000 Books Section Poetry Bemused dismay at plainspoken values By Patrick Crotty A first full collection, The Mason's Tongue sports a handsome Colin Middleton reproduction on its front cover and a spray of artfully qualified endorsements from established poets such as Seamus Heaney and Ruth Padel on its back. The poems have an unfashionable, unabashed directness of procedure appropriate to the plainspoken values of the northern Presbyterian tradition they interrogate. Most of them are set in Islandmagee in County Antrim, in a dreamtime of religious and political dissent. Adrian Rice is fascinated and repelled by the certainties of his native tradition, whether manifested in the Witch Trials of the early 18th century or the Orange marches of his own day. In "The Musicians' Union" and "The Dummy Fluter" he bears clear-eyed, uncondescending witness to what Orangeism looks like to a thoughtful member of the community which nourishes it. This ground has been traversed in poetry before, by Tom Paulin, but Rice's approach is both more intimate and more down-to-earth: his bemused dismay could hardly be further from Paulin's snarling academic ironies. The most vivid poems in the book excavate local lore. Particularly memorable are the title poem and the haunting, adroitly turned "The Drowning". Perhaps what is most valuable in Rice's writing is its generosity, its openheartedness to the poet's own community and also to other, readerly communities whose value systems may be very different. Some slippages of tone notwithstanding, this is an interesting, distinctive volume by a new, if not a young poet (Rice is 42). Patrick Crotty is Head of English at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra |
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