Review
Perplexed Skin (Arlen House)
Fleshed Out
It’s worth sticking with this, seemingly lightweight, collection to the end, says Ailbhe Darcy.
If one is to believe the blurbs on the backs of poetry books, début collections are almost always ‘long-awaited’. (Unless they’re by a 17 year old, in which case they’re ‘surprisingly mature’.)
It’s delightful to imagine the queues of would-be readers waiting excitedly while the poet painstakingly hones his internal rhymes and shaves off his surplus commas. In fact, it’s fair to say that Patrick Cotter has indeed been hanging around on the scene for a while, publishing in journals and anthologies, sending out chapbooks and collections of translations, teasing us with the promise of a collection proper.
After all that, the first dozen poems of Perplexed Skin are at first flush disappointingly lightweight, collected together. Heavy on flirtations with insubstantial girl-characters and heavier still on mildly irritating (because seeming-gratuitous) references to Rilke, Strindberg and all the lads, Cotter sticks to an insistence on the ‘thing-in-itself’ that harks back to Copernicus and Kepler. He seems to agree with John Banville: “Art is very simple, it’s just an affirmation of what is here, of what we have, what we are. It’s not transcendental at all.”
And yet, later in the collection, a tide turns and the poems seem to become at once more down to earth and more aspiring to transcend. By the time of the last, fine sequence ‘The Garden’, we are in the grip of something truly special, and:
In the end his eyes would be the dandelion’s bright corona, his ear the foxglove’s tubular petal. (‘In the End’)
