MAURICE HARMON: THE DOLL WITH TWO BACKS Salmon Poetry Knockeven Cliffs of Moher Co. Clare Ireland ISBN 1 903392 45 4 €12 email Salmon Poetry visit the website of Salmon Poetry Web design by This page last updated: 11th December 2007. |
MAURICE HARMON: THE DOLL WITH TWO BACKS | |
Much of the strength of Mr Harmon's focused collection is its ability to affect even without a reader being in possession of that specific scholarship which informs many of the poems, especially the two long beginning narratives, PRELUDE and BROKEN LIGHTS, BROKEN LANCES. It is a collection for our time; telling, as it does, of the inability of man to understand or even empathize with those fellow creatures who are different. THE DOLL WITH TWO BACKS of the title is the Pueblo Indians' Kachina: a back-to-back-doll condemned to an eternity of physcial union in which neither could ever see or understand the other.The poet uses the infamous subjugation of the American Indian as his matrix: Despite the measuring chain and circumforentor it did not sink beneath their scalps that chiefs resented being powwowed down to, spat at medals and cocked hats, scorned those who sold guns yet urged them not to kill and did not twig the songs warriors sang. ... Like you we have grown out of this land. We are one family, brothers on this land. The Great Spirit has made us both strong not to hurt one another, but to assist. No wrong will ever be done to you by the white man.In the second of the two long poems, BROKEN LIGHTS, BROKEN LANCES, this dichotomy is particularized in the narrator's passionate friendship with an Indian student. It is a moving account of a friendship that fails, despite those essential chemicals that may bond a man and a woman. The poet attempts to persuade her that they are 'linked' by the histories and myths of his Irish and her Indian genesis: How could he recover lost threads that linked her and hers to him and hisShe is not convinced: 'You talk about analogies the beginning of civilisations pagan, Christian. I see proximity, not communion. The indifferent beak lets her drop. That means failure, disappointment, betrayal, when a powerful figure abandons the weaker'.His metaphor, of course, is interchangeable. The poetry is unyielding in what it communicates — 'broken lights' that will never shine whole. Part two of this collection contains fifteen mainly short poems. They include insightful lyrics of childhood, love and memory; memory that bemoans an inevitable universal progress — from THE NORTH: Changed. Obscured. Curves, groves, hedgerows, habitats ripped apart. Defiles of dual carriageway, chicanes, restraints, controls ...I am reminded of the accessibility and elegance of the late James Simmons. | ||
reviewer: Michael Bangerter. |