Poetry review – ACCEPTING THE CALL: James Roderick Burns admires a varied but coherent first collection by Tim Dwyer
Accepting the Call
Tim Dwyer
Templar Poetry
ISBN: 9 781911 132776
72 pp £12.00
This compact debut collection is wholly consistent – with its themes (big city and smaller town, darkness and light, memory and the experience of now); with multiple arcs, in particular the shifting through time and place of the author’s family from Ireland to America, and the poet’s second life, in reverse; with disease and life after disease, and both the largest and smallest questions. In short, with itself. This precision and control would be impressive enough in any collection, but such consistency is almost a secondary feature, for Accepting the Call is at once the bleakest and the most hopeful book of the year.
Bleakest in spades.
Not simply “empty city streets … the tip of Manhattan,/vacant sidewalks in constant shadow” (‘Wayfaring through Bangor’), a flaneur’s appreciation for the bustling city emptied at odd times of the night and day, but “the relentless world” (‘Morning Coffee Bangor Station’) in which “there’s no limit to the reach/of loneliness” (‘Fulham Road’). The gloom rises to its height in ‘Kingston Point’:
… towering fuel tanks
and rusting ice houses. I know
the secret beauty of empty beer cans
cigarette butts and coffee cups,
in this parking lot where the world-weary
sit in their cars to receive comfort
from the river,
The only beauty in such urban desolation, clearly, is the comfort of lost souls viewing it from a sealed box, or possibly the poet’s own cherishing of such scenes. The city and its boundaries appear over and over, lovingly described at its lowest and strangest points – in biting snow and bitter flood, in freezing dawns and sweltering summers. Nor, in the great reverse journey of the poet’s life from New York back to his family’s native Ireland, is this an exclusively American bleakness. As the poet moves through the processes of cancer treatment, he sees “a hairless, ashen man/leaning against the hip rail” of the hospital lift (‘Check In’), only to discover he is ten years younger; quite what to do with the knowledge of such interior bleakness occupies many of the later poems.
There are some superficial solutions, in his younger days – in ‘Reading CD Wright, 1980’, for instance:
The brittle fern by the back window
is left unwatered day after day.
With each toke, I am more adrift
with the next line of the next poem
I wish was mine.
Or, doubling again, for his mother in service in New York decades before, it becomes a more traditional means of coping:
Cooking for the doctor’s family
brings comfort and grief –
the children laughing upstairs,
her bottle hidden in the scullery.
(‘Passage’)
But the genius of the collection is its insistence on smaller, less damaging mechanisms against the dark – small moments, practices, habits which have lasted a lifetime fending off melancholy. One is the restless engagement of the urban flaneur, prominent in the first half of the book; another, almost intentionally in contrast, and salted throughout, the habit of quiet contemplation of nature, often with a favourite feathered companion in tow. On the empty streets of a Northern Ireland town (rather than the shadowy realms of Manhattan) “I join /long-time companions, my/sidewalk pigeon and street sparrow” (‘Wayfaring Through Bangor’).
In ‘Summery’, taking a rest on an outdoor bench marked by a plaque commemorating an older bench resident, the poet slides into unexpected peace:
The Stena ferry sails for Scotland,
a pied wagtail lands by your bench
to peck at my traybake crumbs.
And for a few minutes, Glider,
I sit here and am free
from the future and the past.
These haiku moments burst through, scattered like seeds of hope about the gloom:
Then, unseen by human eye,
a small sprig of happiness
(‘Wheaten Toast’)
I see grace in the incidentals of Nature
(‘On the Carnuntum Frontier’)
And, with typical spareness, ‘Far Enough into Spring’ deploys the language of administration, of appropriate justice (and with a sideways wink, the means by which it is articulated) to underline this duality running like Blackpool rock through the whole book:
I have been sentenced
to my second life
But at each stage, oddly enough, this second life produces brief illuminations which both curve back to the beginning, and suggest new openings for the future: “a red-legged gull/lands beside me, comes close … the lone cormorant/takes another dive … Jackdaw shows up late” (‘My Favourite Bench is Free’). It is a remarkable renewal – from crabbed, limiting disease to looking outwards; from bleak urban spaces to openness, and nature; from the country of a parent’s birth to the poet’s own, and back, not a circle but a spiral winding ever upwards. The tightness of the language, and the poems’ organisation, only adds to the effect.
Accepting the Call is a compact debut collection wholly consistent with itself. Like friendly birds on a favourite bench, it hops up close, invites you to share sustenance.
Jun 14 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Tim Dwyer
Poetry review – ACCEPTING THE CALL: James Roderick Burns admires a varied but coherent first collection by Tim Dwyer
Accepting the Call
Tim Dwyer
Templar Poetry
ISBN: 9 781911 132776
72 pp £12.00
This compact debut collection is wholly consistent – with its themes (big city and smaller town, darkness and light, memory and the experience of now); with multiple arcs, in particular the shifting through time and place of the author’s family from Ireland to America, and the poet’s second life, in reverse; with disease and life after disease, and both the largest and smallest questions. In short, with itself. This precision and control would be impressive enough in any collection, but such consistency is almost a secondary feature, for Accepting the Call is at once the bleakest and the most hopeful book of the year.
Bleakest in spades.
Not simply “empty city streets … the tip of Manhattan,/vacant sidewalks in constant shadow” (‘Wayfaring through Bangor’), a flaneur’s appreciation for the bustling city emptied at odd times of the night and day, but “the relentless world” (‘Morning Coffee Bangor Station’) in which “there’s no limit to the reach/of loneliness” (‘Fulham Road’). The gloom rises to its height in ‘Kingston Point’:
… towering fuel tanks
and rusting ice houses. I know
the secret beauty of empty beer cans
cigarette butts and coffee cups,
in this parking lot where the world-weary
sit in their cars to receive comfort
from the river,
The only beauty in such urban desolation, clearly, is the comfort of lost souls viewing it from a sealed box, or possibly the poet’s own cherishing of such scenes. The city and its boundaries appear over and over, lovingly described at its lowest and strangest points – in biting snow and bitter flood, in freezing dawns and sweltering summers. Nor, in the great reverse journey of the poet’s life from New York back to his family’s native Ireland, is this an exclusively American bleakness. As the poet moves through the processes of cancer treatment, he sees “a hairless, ashen man/leaning against the hip rail” of the hospital lift (‘Check In’), only to discover he is ten years younger; quite what to do with the knowledge of such interior bleakness occupies many of the later poems.
There are some superficial solutions, in his younger days – in ‘Reading CD Wright, 1980’, for instance:
The brittle fern by the back window
is left unwatered day after day.
With each toke, I am more adrift
with the next line of the next poem
I wish was mine.
Or, doubling again, for his mother in service in New York decades before, it becomes a more traditional means of coping:
Cooking for the doctor’s family
brings comfort and grief –
the children laughing upstairs,
her bottle hidden in the scullery.
(‘Passage’)
But the genius of the collection is its insistence on smaller, less damaging mechanisms against the dark – small moments, practices, habits which have lasted a lifetime fending off melancholy. One is the restless engagement of the urban flaneur, prominent in the first half of the book; another, almost intentionally in contrast, and salted throughout, the habit of quiet contemplation of nature, often with a favourite feathered companion in tow. On the empty streets of a Northern Ireland town (rather than the shadowy realms of Manhattan) “I join /long-time companions, my/sidewalk pigeon and street sparrow” (‘Wayfaring Through Bangor’).
In ‘Summery’, taking a rest on an outdoor bench marked by a plaque commemorating an older bench resident, the poet slides into unexpected peace:
The Stena ferry sails for Scotland,
a pied wagtail lands by your bench
to peck at my traybake crumbs.
And for a few minutes, Glider,
I sit here and am free
from the future and the past.
These haiku moments burst through, scattered like seeds of hope about the gloom:
Then, unseen by human eye,
a small sprig of happiness
(‘Wheaten Toast’)
I see grace in the incidentals of Nature
(‘On the Carnuntum Frontier’)
And, with typical spareness, ‘Far Enough into Spring’ deploys the language of administration, of appropriate justice (and with a sideways wink, the means by which it is articulated) to underline this duality running like Blackpool rock through the whole book:
I have been sentenced
to my second life
But at each stage, oddly enough, this second life produces brief illuminations which both curve back to the beginning, and suggest new openings for the future: “a red-legged gull/lands beside me, comes close … the lone cormorant/takes another dive … Jackdaw shows up late” (‘My Favourite Bench is Free’). It is a remarkable renewal – from crabbed, limiting disease to looking outwards; from bleak urban spaces to openness, and nature; from the country of a parent’s birth to the poet’s own, and back, not a circle but a spiral winding ever upwards. The tightness of the language, and the poems’ organisation, only adds to the effect.
Accepting the Call is a compact debut collection wholly consistent with itself. Like friendly birds on a favourite bench, it hops up close, invites you to share sustenance.