At times, this collection of poetry is, as its title suggests, a storm of words, but more often it provides us with the gentle rain of poignancy and the warm breezes of nostalgia.
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Byrne, a publisher by profession, has been persuaded by friends and admirers to go into print. This is not before time, for his is a voice that deserves to be heard, it is the authentic voice of modern Ireland with its Irish/English syntax and pronunciation, falling in tone and subject matter somewhere between that misty, mythological country inhabited by the early Yeats and the harder realism of Heaney’s world. It expresses the rough, bare landscape of the Burren interfused with the problems of modern city life in a country that has only just, triumphantly, emerged as a force to be reckoned with in the twentieth century.
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There is a wry, bitter and timeless kind of humour in Unemployed Work and the joy of word play in Slippery Slope, despite the desperate nature of the situations, Broken Stones, in its quiet way, relives the poverty and futility suffered by the people who once inhabited his land. But that is not all. He has the keen eyes of the naturalist too, and poems like Wild Swans, Time for Otters and Water Ghosts demonstrate a delight in the natural world that is the product of years of living and working close to the creatures he describes.
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In addition, there are family memories and portraits that will resonate in the minds and hearts of most readers; and gentle love poems that skip neatly out of reach of sentimentality with just the right amount of realism and toughness.
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And all is done with a language that is simple and accessible, so simple that it hides the kind of emotional complexity that is well worth the trouble of unearthing.
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