NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Brian Farrington's collection SALT SUDS FOR KEEPS insists on the unstated, the implicit and fragmentary. Nature is foregrounded in virtually every poem and the political and social dimension of Farrington's work is obvious. Nevertheless a powerful sense of freedom, of life's beauty and pain resonates through these poems.

One of the most striking resonances in this volume is Farrington's delight in the musical dimension of poetry and in music's role in life. The poems in this collection carry a rich musical presence — their sounds, the words and syllables that bounce around and make the simplest acts deeper and more satisfying. Perhaps there is also, implicit in Farrington's style, a vision of poetry as a kind of musical accompaniment to being. Whether it is (INNISFREE)

	exhaust steam blowing 
	and the regular mutter of reciprocating crank 
	and big-end bearing

	hissing line

	tinkling cliff

	silver tongue

What I enjoyed especially in Farrington's poetry is the way he uses poetry to create a free self - positive, humane, fully exposed to life. Farrington intuits that the tragic, the beautiful, the truly important will find their expression here in our everydayness. Some of the finest poems in the collection include brief concise depictions of such moments, as in the four line rhymed verse LIBERTE in which the poet alludes to himself when he says,

	I am my way, my end and my direction.

	Lovers bicker, she stalks off,
	he endeavours to pursue her,
	stops and sulks instead.  Thank heaven,
	youth's a stuff does not endure!

	I caught you,
	in a half-made dress with your mouth full of pins,
	arched in a strutting curve between two mirrors,
	and you moved from yes to yes, from now to now . . .

	and your hands, cleaning the sparking plugs from the car.

	Vain as the Pompadour
	...
	casual, deft and abrupt
	...
	Prone to inordinate scunners

	There is a green hill far away, somewhere in County Cork,
	and there was I, shoring up heaven with prayers.
	What was it tempted me to switch off hope
	of glory for a minute, just to see
	the whole gazebo suddenly clatter down
	and break in golden splinters about my ears?
	Whatever it was I earthed end of faith
	and waited, for chaos to come again.

	Don't invent consolations for this death,
	or see a moral, no one has learnt a lesson,
	nor doll the pointless mishap up with purpose,
	to deck the bleak futility of fate
	with tinsel meaning.  There is no meaning here,
	nor shape nor plan, to this limp gap
	there is not answer but escape, and no escape,
	or resignation, and I'll not resign.

	Life is more than lives and carries on

A poem like PYRENEES, recounting a landscape, dwells in the consciousness in a way wholly energised, unpredictable and beautifully realised. Farrington's description of the mountains as

	The perils are huge and serene: stones clatter to the abyss,
	the mist prowls below, the way is a maze of brinks

ANNA MAGDALENA BACH is a haunting poem about the composer's wife, who bore him

	all of thirteen children

	Gentle her domestic
	fingers on the keyboard

	Now, when I think, I see the humped flood,
	the immense revolving sea, as it swilled past,
	the black wall of ship with a small round port-hole in it,
	and my ten year old eyes making fast that shape on the water,

	that shape on the sea that I am remembering still.