American poets who have Ireland in their blood carry a splendid burden. In the twentieth century, no nation’s writers had a more profound and energizing influence than those of that star-crossed island. William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and others inspired generations—and continue to do so.

But how can contemporary creative minds honor those past voices without being overwhelmed by the weight of their perceptions, their eloquence, their boldness?

John Roche’s new volume of poems, Tubbables, provides an interesting answer to that question; he includes a few phrases that echo past literary masters within this wide-ranging collection, but he inserts them with a subtle hand amidst other references to pop culture figures,
environmental issues, socio-political conflicts, and his own family’s history. The leavening in this mix is John’s ironic (and very Irish) sense of humor.

Let’s begin with the epigraph he has chosen, from Yeats’s poem “The Stolen Child”:
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping
than you can understand. (p. vi)

This faery’s words have an ominous tone, suggesting that we are entering some dark territory in this three-part volume—and I thought, “Who needs more tears?” However, as I read through Part I, “Dictionary Doggerel,” I felt that perhaps the epigraph’s significance lies in “Come away”
and “hand in hand” because Part I is for the most part playful, displaying that most essential tool in any poet’s workshop—a deep love of words themselves which here provide, as Yeats himself has said, “the cry of the heart against necessity” (Jeffares, p. 13).

“Caterwauling,” like all of the poems in this first section, begins with a passage from a dictionary source that supplies us with both the definition of the word and a brief history of its use. The
poem is only eight lines long, but it contains repetition, rhyme, and allusion; it’s a chant that takes us from the innocence of youth to the nostalgia of age—and, in between, the introspection of young adulthood, with the line “Caterwauling on Sandymount Strand.” Like Stephen Dedalus, Mr. Roche might easily proclaim “Signatures of all things I am here to read” (Joyce, p. 38).

When I first saw the book’s title, I was unsure of its meaning. The poem “Double Tubbable” clears up any confusion and also provides the author with a metaphor for the whole process of
poetic composition. The word “Tubbable” is a “1920’s synonym for washable” and on the surface, the five lines depict the action of laundering a mixed collection of “Whites and darks.” However, line four takes us back to dear, dirty Dublin: “Anna Livia Plurabelle gossips double” (Joyce, p. 13). Contrasts, brought together by memory and imagination, whirl all around us in the poem—and in the world.

With Part II, in poems such as “Kissing Auntie Mink,” “Family Lore,” “In the Circus of My Family,” speaker dramatizes events from his own past and those of various relatives, where generations of Irish folk face the challenges of daily life with the realization that death will end all struggles. In “Genealogy 101,” we confront a Whitmanesque litany, containing an “Either/Or” stanzaic pattern, but whereas Whitman often counterbalances joyful details of the world around him with his darker observations, the speaker in this poem sees few glimmers of light in the history of his Irish compatriots:

Either they survived the coffin ships
To get to a strange new world
Or their corpses were thrown to the sharks
Or else they stayed in the old country and starved (p. 40).

Young love has its own set of gauntlets to run. In “First Kiss?” the speaker harkens back to a day when he and other children played a not-so-innocent game of “Spin-the-Bottle.” In a “crowded room” (lots of children in these families), he experiences “this first humiliation” when the girl he is to kiss refuses to accept him because he is “too ugly.” What is also embedded in his memory is the line “…and my eyes burned with anguish and anger” from Joyce’s short story “Araby.” Sometimes, not even art can provide consolation.

The last section of Mr. Roche’s volume is longer than the first two, and it dives into still deeper waters, although the author gives Part III the self-deprecating title of “Sandwich Wrappers.” Throughout these final poems, I hear different voices try to come to terms with human frailty—and human desire. I felt compelled to listen to them. The initial poem in this part, “Dear Poet on Another Planet” contains a series of questions posed by a speaker to some extra-terrestrial creature. The first two stanzas emphasize possible differences between speaker and audience, as in this exchange containing an ironic allusion to a famous piece by Walt Whitman, that grand bard of union:

Do you sing your body electric,
sing silicone anthems,
or do you write odes to webbed anatomies?

Yet it ends with a tone of yearning, of a longing to bridge the distance between two separate souls with the line “Is there any beacon that moves your alien heart?”.

There is one poem in this collection that is my particular favorite, in part because of how the author makes use of humor even as he explores the forlorn hope we all have to escape the clutches of death. “Captain Scott’s Fruitcake” takes its inspiration from an article in National Geographic about the discovery of a frozen dessert, sole survivor of Captain Robert Scott’s expedition to the South Pole. The recipe includes these amusing directions:

Soak the still-warm cake in whiskey. Plenty of whiskey.
Deep freeze for 106 years.
Defrost gently.

Even a much maligned baker’s “treat,” however, contains elements of the sacred. After all, it did outlive one of the most honored of England’s explorers. The speaker includes an invitation to partake of this using three words taken from the sacrament of the Eucharist: “Take and eat, for this is a real fruitcake.” We must laugh, even as we kneel; Mr. Roche, in this poem—and in this collection, has given us much food for thought.

List of Works Cited

Jeffares, A. Norman, A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1968Joyce, James, Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1946

George Steele is a retired English teacher and Navy veteran living in Pittsford, New York with his wife Elizabeth who has been putting up with him, thus far, for forty-four years. They have two sons, Benjamin and Richard. Mr. Steele also composes poems, a number of which have been published in various magazines.