Deepening Into His Colours. A Contrary review by Grace Wells  Mark Roper’s great talent has always been saying much with few words. Not that he’s sparse or mean; it’s more that he writes with an enviable precision, which even in its brevity opens worlds, tells stories, and positions our gaze exactly where Roper has been looking. Without fuss or fanfare we are brought deep into the textures and colors, the fabric of an Englishman living in Ireland’s life. And while Roper’s exile from ‘home’ may have, on occasion, injected a sense of displacement, it has also provided a healthy impartiality, which allows Roper to tell us how the world is in this moment. From “And This is True”: Despite everything, what’s been, what will come, the violence, the murder, the terrible news, a vivid burn of fur, a beautiful face, are also true Roper is Englishness at its best: humane, humble, observant, vigilant. His poetry reveals as much about English sensibilities and reserve as it does about life in Ireland now. Rather than thrash around in the depths of the Irish psyche, Roper concerns himself with the minute interactions between people that make up the material of daily life. It is this humane focus which makes his work so engaging and accounts for a vast local following whose esteem has long since flooded the boundaries of respect, to hold Roper, the poet and the poems, as beloved. “And This is True” is one of a number of archetypal poems which contains all Roper’s main themes. The poem continues, No more true than the fox breaking into the henhouse, tearing all the heads off all the chickens. Than what your country did to others. Than the buried children. Than hunger. Than all you have to answer for, than all those with neither time nor freedom to stop and watch a fox in thick flower amble towards them. Within a few lines he’s touched on the way the world is, personal failing, the essential needs of his fellow men, beauty, and the urgency of the natural world. Roper’s tendency to focus on nature has given him the reputation of a nature poet, but it’s an unhelpful label, which sidetracks both Roper’s poetry and nature itself. If Roper emphasises nature it’s because he knows we live within nature, dependent upon it not merely for our biological survival, but also because a lived relationship with the natural world is fundamental to fulfilment of the personal quest. Throughout Roper’s work there’s a quiet warning that our steady destruction of the natural world is the steady destruction of ourselves. It’s possible that the warning is too quiet, that the poet’s commitment to a delicate lemniscate between nature and poetic art allows the reader to come away with a poignant sense of guilt, when the sting from a poetic slap around the face might be more pertinent. Roper’s sense of wonder at nature parallels the poetry of Mary Oliver. Both writers walk in their locality, relating what they see with a sense of mystic awe. But while Oliver has left the human world behind to become High Priestess of Praise, sending back to us lesser mortals missives preaching a life of devotion—a state few lives are afforded—Roper stays right with us. His work is the more relevant because he remains dedicated to our human interactions, to our doubts, failings, insecurities, and small moments of bravery. His immersion in our humanity and his tenderness toward our frailty give substance and significance to what might otherwise be human meaninglessness. Roper often underscores our relevance by embedding colloquial expressions into his poems. He elevates ordinary us and ordinary language so, in his transformative hands, ordinariness drops away and something luminous is revealed. Nowhere is this done more effectively than in ‘Cleaning Ladies’, where the “brides of the broom/sisters of sweeping” “who wait at the pithead/who wait at the docks/who wait by the phone” have their lives gleaned by the iridescent final lines who like a bit of sauce who make ends meet who go without saying ‘Even So’ is a most satisfying blend, Roper’s best work is all here under one roof, and there’s an engaging sense of development, not so much in the poetry itself, which from the start is assured and lean and hungering, but rather, there’s a progression in Roper’s own being. The earthly dynamics that once produced an edginess in his writing have taken their place in the scheme of things. In these ‘new and selected poems’ Roper “deepens into his colours”. The hands of his writing clock have allowed Roper progress as they’ve moved over their familiar ground, fluctuating between a five-to of doubt and bewilderment, and a five-past of wonder, passing forward and back over the poet’s appointed hour of twelve, the noon of our human ordinariness. The bewilderment has been accepted “in the sea’s bash and shifting glitter,/you are part, your not knowing is a part”; his commitment to human frailty is more wedded; even his wonder better articulated, so more often his hour of ordinariness bewitchingly, unexpectedly shifts from midday to midnight. In the new work Roper’s deepening into his own hues propels us from noon veracity to a deeper seeing where the “air begins to crumble open”, “dolphins mend water”, “hawk-headed gods” control destiny, and the flight of an owl keeps “the wide world wide a while”. ‘Even So’ completes a circular walk, bringing us home wealthier than when we began, so that although Roper tells us “there are no safe hands, all have tasted money or blood”, his collected poetry articulates that even when we have all gone without saying, those left behind will know we were once made of the “ingredients of grace”. Grace Wells is an English poet living in Ireland. Index of Reviews...>Reviews.htmlshapeimage_1_link_0

Even So

Mark Roper

2008, Dedalus Press

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