Reading poetry, the task of a reader is in part to situate the poet – where they are in a poem is often as telling as who they are. In Declan Ryan’s adroit debut, Crisis Actor, he lets us know, from the title itself, that we should not feel certain of his whereabouts.
A crisis actor (I had to look it up) is someone who “takes part in a supposed conspiracy to manipulate public opinion” and pretends to have survived a disaster. Ryan is, it would seem, mindful of the possibility of being a poetic impostor – someone who falsely reacts to other lives, distorts the voices he impersonates, takes on conflicts not his own. A poet as crisis actor. But he proves himself brilliantly equipped to see off the risks of relating other people’s narratives, alongside his own, in poems of serious-minded, clear-sighted, conversational intelligence.
Ryan has written for literary and sport publications, and the collection is dominated by his terrific poems about boxing. He is fascinated by historic matches and by the psychology of sparring. He writes about the sentimental camaraderie between boxers when out of the ring and about their often tragic fates. But in these and in his more personal poems – about love, family and other poets – he tends to keep his own feelings in reserve.
In this context, it seems ironic that the opening poem, Sidney Road, should offer us an address (even if Ryan does not pin down precisely where Sidney Road is). He describes an anonymous neighbourhood: “Hardly neighbourly,/I know fewer names than the years/I’ve been here. Rows of identikit SUVs/line the road in lieu of trees”.
He adopts and adapts a line from Louis MacNeice’s The Sunlight on the Garden, referring to his own “freedom as a ‘free lance’”, before concluding: “The months pile up since my last confession;/wheels spinning slowly, hazards on,/just low enough for running down the battery.”
It is a wilfully self-disparaging ending – the collection juddering to a halt before being allowed to start again in earnest.
The book alternates pleasingly between the pugilistic and the becalmed. Its highlights include From Alun Lewis, an imperative and moving love letter in the assumed voice of the second world war Welsh poet (the ambitious title poem involves him too).
Trinity Hospital is especially arresting: a stunning love poem, about an unofficial moment that feels like a marriage. And Rope-a-Dope makes boxing personal. A girlfriend asks to watch a match. Ryan wonders what she will make of the violence. She wonders how a boxer can “soak up/all this pain and go on standing”. It is a useful inclusion for anyone who finds boxing unfathomable or disagreeable.
But pain is not the main focus here: the poems are as much about the way prize fighters shore themselves up with words. Many boxers co-opt God into their stories or style themselves as deities. Cassius Clay says: “Almighty God was with me” (Blind Cassius and the Bear). Mike Tyson declares: “Once I’m in the ring I’m a God” (The Young God of the Catskills 1) and Diego Corrales (in The Resurrection of Diego “Chico” Corrales) has a “tattoo of Christ the Redeemer. Its arms rise and fall as he tenses his back”.
A few poems in and Ryan gives us, and himself, a break. Mayfly describes, with nicely handled indolence, a stop-off at a country pub. There could not be a more satisfying poem about taking time out and imagining it lasting a lifetime: “Watch this cherry tree convulse into winter, what/Seventy times maybe.” It is proof, too, that Ryan’s punchlines can land softly.
Crisis Actor by Declan Ryan is published by Faber (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Mayfly
On the way back to the city after the long weekend,
we stop off by prior agreement at the Mayfly,
arrange ourselves like collapsing parachutists.
Last of the nectar days, hind-end of the country,
the afternoon readying itself to make excuses
and leave us to our unslept dishevelment.
Some nameless river goes by; the sun makes brilliant hoops
from tarnished glasses. Half-picked bones;
soporific bluebottles. To have to leave this
for the road’s demands, the mercy of one last round
not enough to delay us where people live their whole lives,
most likely,
watch this cherry tree convulse into winter, what,
seventy times maybe.
