Poetry review – PERISTERIA: Thomas Ovans appreciates the quiet, firm and consistent voice in Tim Cunningham’s poems
Peristeria
Tim Cunningham
Revival Press
ISBN 9781739618360
76pp £12
Tim Cunningham’s new collection takes its unusual title from a large orchid with a distinctive feature: ‘ghosting through the centre of its blooms / the flower sculpture of a dove.’ This is convincingly illustrated in the cover image and prompts the rhetorical question ‘Who cannot see peace, love, Pentecost, here?’ Cunningham evidently does see these things very plainly and the collection largely reflects both his delight in the natural world and also his Christian faith.
To begin with the poems about the natural world, we can straight away report that the poet has a sharp eye for details plus a fresh and adroit way of describing them. Thus ‘Dawn rubs its eyes gingerly / Tiptoes across the horizon / As if nursing a hangover.’ Clouds passing overhead are ‘chauffeured by the wind’. And in comparison to the ‘glow of chaffinch and robin’ Cunningham notes that the unassuming sparrows are ‘bulbs of a lower wattage’.
The opening poems in the book are mostly descriptive of landscape and wildlife, frequently birds. But sometimes they draw on the poet’s discovery of unexpected information like the fact that only one bird is known to have colonised Europe by crossing the Atlantic from west to east:
Bucking the trend, the wren
Brought his sheet music
From the New World to the Old.
After a dozen or so pages the poems begin increasingly to feature people and man-made settings and situations. But Cunningham’s dexterity with language and observation continues unabated: in a couple of lines he can paint this picture of a woman grieving in a dismal house ‘There on a smokey / Mantelpiece, the clock lay on its face. / A shallow grave of hands received her cheeks …’ A poem about a young single mother touchingly hints at links with the Nativity story: there is ‘A bright star flashing its neon / Outside the first floor room’; ‘She arrived not on a donkey, / But wheeling a pram …’ ; and ‘back then / a lifetime ago’ the streets were so empty ‘you could park three camels, no fuss.’
The characters in Cunningham’s poems are often to be found in or near churches. “Eulogy” describes a funeral and vividly sets the scene with ‘A low cloud of mourners fill, / Centre Aisle, the top half of the church.’ A bit less gloomily, “Introit” speaks of ‘the multi-coloured light/ Of stained glass windows, their jig-saw saints’.
The way that Cunningham looks at the church and its congregations has, I suspect, been shaped over many years and has its roots in a time when Bible stories were received less questioningly and less critically than they might be today. “The Miracle Worker” comments amusingly on current sceptical attitudes
It used to be so simple. You could feed
A curious five thousand with five barley loaves
And two fishes, make a neat symbolic point
And everyone was grateful. Now you get
The vegans up in arms …
The poem goes on to dismantle various other stories such as a miraculous catch of fish that conflicts with rules on trawling allocations.
It is not only with a light touch that Cunningham contemplates changing attitudes towards the Bible. In “Ireland’s Last Priest R.I.P” he introduces Father O’Halloran ‘last echo of the voice of St Patrick / Who preached a gospel of love’ and bitterly contrasts him with the mindset of the church hierarchy. ‘Authority’s off-key voice / Took its wrecking-ball to the edifice of love’ and the results include a ‘gospel replaced by Thou shalt nots’ and ‘Remaining bibles … catalogued under fiction.’ But even as the Church is criticised as an organisation, Cunningham urges us not to forget Father O’Hallorans’s devotion to parish work or indeed
The sisters in World War II field hospitals
Bandaging minds and gangrenous limbs,
Taking dictation from amputees.
[“Lest We Remember”]
That reference to World War II is particularly telling and poignant because we learn in other poems – particularly in “The Merciful Days” – that the poet’s father died of wounds in just such a field hospital.
Cunningham does not usually put himself in the foreground of his poems but when he writes ‘The stroke was not a stroke of luck / But a common thief who / Robs the old and middle-aged’ I think he he must be alluding to his own experience. He goes on to describe the consequent loss – and sometimes recovery – of vocabulary rather imaginatively in terms of the parable of the prodigal son
Wherever the words go is not the question
…
What matters is they are now back home
Where memory loves them no more and no less
Than the brothers who never strayed
[“Prodigal”]
The tone of this poem is typical of what is, for the most part, a gentle and quietly optimistic collection. In such a context the occasional flashes of deep anger or sorrow are all the more effective.
Sep 21 2024
London Grip Poetry Review – Tim Cunningham
Poetry review – PERISTERIA: Thomas Ovans appreciates the quiet, firm and consistent voice in Tim Cunningham’s poems
Tim Cunningham’s new collection takes its unusual title from a large orchid with a distinctive feature: ‘ghosting through the centre of its blooms / the flower sculpture of a dove.’ This is convincingly illustrated in the cover image and prompts the rhetorical question ‘Who cannot see peace, love, Pentecost, here?’ Cunningham evidently does see these things very plainly and the collection largely reflects both his delight in the natural world and also his Christian faith.
To begin with the poems about the natural world, we can straight away report that the poet has a sharp eye for details plus a fresh and adroit way of describing them. Thus ‘Dawn rubs its eyes gingerly / Tiptoes across the horizon / As if nursing a hangover.’ Clouds passing overhead are ‘chauffeured by the wind’. And in comparison to the ‘glow of chaffinch and robin’ Cunningham notes that the unassuming sparrows are ‘bulbs of a lower wattage’.
The opening poems in the book are mostly descriptive of landscape and wildlife, frequently birds. But sometimes they draw on the poet’s discovery of unexpected information like the fact that only one bird is known to have colonised Europe by crossing the Atlantic from west to east:
After a dozen or so pages the poems begin increasingly to feature people and man-made settings and situations. But Cunningham’s dexterity with language and observation continues unabated: in a couple of lines he can paint this picture of a woman grieving in a dismal house ‘There on a smokey / Mantelpiece, the clock lay on its face. / A shallow grave of hands received her cheeks …’ A poem about a young single mother touchingly hints at links with the Nativity story: there is ‘A bright star flashing its neon / Outside the first floor room’; ‘She arrived not on a donkey, / But wheeling a pram …’ ; and ‘back then / a lifetime ago’ the streets were so empty ‘you could park three camels, no fuss.’
The characters in Cunningham’s poems are often to be found in or near churches. “Eulogy” describes a funeral and vividly sets the scene with ‘A low cloud of mourners fill, / Centre Aisle, the top half of the church.’ A bit less gloomily, “Introit” speaks of ‘the multi-coloured light/ Of stained glass windows, their jig-saw saints’.
The way that Cunningham looks at the church and its congregations has, I suspect, been shaped over many years and has its roots in a time when Bible stories were received less questioningly and less critically than they might be today. “The Miracle Worker” comments amusingly on current sceptical attitudes
The poem goes on to dismantle various other stories such as a miraculous catch of fish that conflicts with rules on trawling allocations.
It is not only with a light touch that Cunningham contemplates changing attitudes towards the Bible. In “Ireland’s Last Priest R.I.P” he introduces Father O’Halloran ‘last echo of the voice of St Patrick / Who preached a gospel of love’ and bitterly contrasts him with the mindset of the church hierarchy. ‘Authority’s off-key voice / Took its wrecking-ball to the edifice of love’ and the results include a ‘gospel replaced by Thou shalt nots’ and ‘Remaining bibles … catalogued under fiction.’ But even as the Church is criticised as an organisation, Cunningham urges us not to forget Father O’Hallorans’s devotion to parish work or indeed
The sisters in World War II field hospitals Bandaging minds and gangrenous limbs, Taking dictation from amputees. [“Lest We Remember”]That reference to World War II is particularly telling and poignant because we learn in other poems – particularly in “The Merciful Days” – that the poet’s father died of wounds in just such a field hospital.
Cunningham does not usually put himself in the foreground of his poems but when he writes ‘The stroke was not a stroke of luck / But a common thief who / Robs the old and middle-aged’ I think he he must be alluding to his own experience. He goes on to describe the consequent loss – and sometimes recovery – of vocabulary rather imaginatively in terms of the parable of the prodigal son
Wherever the words go is not the question … What matters is they are now back home Where memory loves them no more and no less Than the brothers who never strayed [“Prodigal”]The tone of this poem is typical of what is, for the most part, a gentle and quietly optimistic collection. In such a context the occasional flashes of deep anger or sorrow are all the more effective.