REVIEW: The Jig of Life: Sipping Martinis under Mount Leinster by Derek Coyle

Poetry. 155 pgs. Magnus Grehn Forlag. 2024.

County Carlow is the second smallest county in Ireland, rural and inconspicuous, certainly not the place you would expect to find a kitchen where Walt Whitman listens to Beethoven “belting out ‘The Wild Rover’/on an elegant Irish fiddle,” while, in the garden, Oscar Wilde “tries to beguile F. Scott Fitzgerald with his chat.” Madonna and Janis Joplin are at this party, too, while, on another night, the speaker tries to coax Emily Dickinson out from under his kitchen table where she is hiding because John Milton accused her of insincerity.

Elsewhere, a pigeon surfs “on a shooting star/in a pair of pink Bermuda shorts,” and a poodle sits in an armchair “chatting away on his phone to Roger,/the Alsatian down the road, about a potential trip to Istanbul.” Birds sing Tchaikovsky. Mozart is dressed as a court jester. A Spaghetti Western is filming nearby, and Caesar dreams of daffodils and dances the fandango. Strange and enchanting, this is the world created by Derek Coyle in his new collection, Sipping Martinis under Mount Leinster.

Recalling the abstract and surreal imagery of Bob Dylan (listen to Blonde on Blonde or Blood on the Tracks), many of these poems also retain echoes of the poetry of John Ashbery, an influence acknowledged in the title of Coyle’s first book, Reading John Ashbery in Costa Coffee, Carlow. But it would be unfair to say that these poems are imitative of either; instead, Coyle has adopted the ambiguity of their work, the opacity and the humor, and treats them as his own. Whereas Ashbery’s poems and Dylan’s songs may at times seem impenetrable, Coyle’s pieces are always tethered to the real world, anchored by the name of an actual town or a river in County Carlow, a street, a pub, a shed, or a comfortable couch.

In “Carlow Poem #69,” Coyle reduces climate change to the weather in the town of Borris, describing how the “belching and farting” of cattle will bring “the hot sun of Gibraltar” to the place, resulting in “the lads/of the village…wearing turbans/in order to protect their poor balding heads.” In another poem, Coyle turns the joy of a gay pride celebration into a rainbow that stretches

From the Brownshill Dolmen

all along the Pollerton Road.

It spills out onto Tullow Street,

all across the road, and turns right

at the Library, up College Street,

and into the grounds of St. Patrick’s

where its laughing head splits

in all directions to dance

this jig of life.

And in a piece about local musicians playing in a part of Carlow Town known as the Hay Market, he tells us happily that “it will be a long evening,” but not everyone shows up: “the town fathers have not turned out/for the show. They are too busy picking lint/from their navy blue suits, and tying knots/in their beautiful ties.” While, at the same time,

The Chief Architect is over the hill

enjoying a sneaky pint on Tullow Street,

outside Tully’s, a full-bodied O’Hara’s

sitting in front of him, its head

Like a vanilla ice cream.

The music from the Hay Market, according to rumor, “can be heard in Morocco./Even as far as Shanghai. Now that’s some distance.”

Clearly, Coyle’s Carlow is a playful place, but it is also a place of tender reflection and reverie, a place, we are told “where/I long to be born again.” As enjoyable as the flights of fancy are, it is when Coyle turns inward in this way and becomes more contemplative that a reader experiences deeper, more overtly thoughtful work. These pieces are not merely tethered to the earth, they are part of it. When Coyle writes about witnessing the death of his grandfather, whose life had been marked by physical labor—

I want to throw my shoes in the river.

I want to toss my phone

across the fields.

There is nothing I can discover

through darkening a page with ink.

I want to stand out there with the trees.

I want to feel like an oak.

—the grief is palpable, as is the acknowledgement that his grandfather’s life was something more than “darkening a page with ink.” That kind of life, Coyle seems to be saying, is more authentic, more purposeful, than his own.

Writing about love in Sipping Martinis, Coyle crafts poems that are romantic without relying on sentimentality, grounded in clear-eyed actions and imagery. Part of the beauty of these poems is the surprise the speaker feels in discovering he is worthy of being loved. In “Carlow Poem #67,” for example,

There are days when a dormer window

opens up in your head. It’s like

the attic room is suddenly

illuminated in shafts of light.

The kisses you landed that day

felt like that.

The speaker’s reaction to the kisses, the epiphany, carries through the poem until, at the end,

It was like after the symphony

in the concert hall, the moment

between the last note

and then the steady rise of applause.

‘Go on, kiss me again.’

In “Thought,” Coyle turns his attention to the fragmentary, fallible nature of memory. Recalling moments from his past, the speaker is finally resigned to the idea that “none of them burn/the way I remember.” He leaves the reader and the poem and his life with this:

What I hope we’ll remember

is how great the start was,

what a fast trip we had

to the retirement home

where all we’ll be concerned about

is reliable teeth and reasonable eyesight.

A similar fatalism permeates other poems, both wise and wistful. In “First Poem for Nathan,” for example, the world-weary speaker addresses a younger man who finds solace in art, an inevitable conclusion because “You have given/real life a chance/and it’s not very remarkable.” Knowing this, Coyle himself turns to poetry, as both source and subject of his own recognition that life may not be all he hopes it will be:

There are days when poetry

seems to have evaporated

out of your life and all you are left

is bits of lumpen prose.

Yet there is hopefulness in his devotion to poetry. As he says, “I can never remember/what it is about poetry I love/but I know it when I see it.” Perhaps more than loving poetry, it is the creation of it that sustains him. In “Carlow Song #1 (which, if he ever arranges the randomly numbered Carlow Poems in order, is the ideal opener), he writes: “These poems may be dispatches from the Supreme Jester…they might involve some gibbering…A gesture on the page. Like pinching your nose when you sneeze.” And yet, despite what might seem to be frivolous or ephemeral, there is always the chance

When you take them all together

they might mean something.

They might add up. Of course,

the wind will then blow

all the pages off the garden table

and you have to sit down

and put them all back together.

This might matter to someone.

Adding up to something is what characterizes the poems in Sipping Martinis under Mount Leinster. Not only in their content, individual and collective, but also in the evident care taken with each one, despite their, at one time or another, having been blown off the garden table and reimagined, rewritten, reshaped and, in the end, mattering. This is a wonderful collection, the kind that brings a reader back time and again to Coyle’s mythical county where “[s]omething can always go/laughably wrong,” but can just as easily be where “the truth is seen/in the slow prowl/of a cat across a farmyard.”