dublinka

Gerard Smyth's The Mirror Tent is typical of a certain kind of Irish poetry, that more often than not annoys me. It's the kind where somehow an author seems blind to how hackneyed his iconography is, and how exhausted his metaphor has become. It's the kind which is excruciating in its sentimental and pat expression. It draws polite applause out of embarrassment, but in truth installs in the listener the urge to decapitate. The Mirror Tent, is suffocating. It's a languid drawl of canned name dropping nostalgia, that refuses to imagine an audience having to suffer it.