Reviews
A girl on the No 13 bus, a Belfast train, the M62, a backstreet pub where "a dog sips a pint" – despite their often everyday focus, there's an ingenuity and energetic restlessness evident in David Wheatley's poems. Admirers of his previous books will find the same quick wit and alert persona operating at full tilt, in writing formal and free, eloquent and plain-speaking. In the powerful "Migrant Workers", for instance, the discreetly rhymed quatrains imagine "the children they have yet to meet" calling "here / there home in this / that tongue". Wheatley's is a poetry of displacement, uncertainty and sheer possibility; jumping from place to place, idea to idea, the real to the imagined. So while the invented "Antarctic Poetry School" – and contemporary poetry itself – receives a wry, damning appraisal, a sequence praising the late African blues musician Ali Farka Touré celebrates Malian culture; "whistling / a tune whose name / means happiness". Stimulating, resourceful and often very funny, this is an impressive collection.
— Ben Wilkinson, The Guardian 4 December 2010
Letting in the light, edging into the dark
. . . As poets both Sweeney and McGovern are in their different ways modern traditionalists: both of them, that is, compose along a (usually condensed) narrative grid. In the younger David Wheatley’s work, on the other hand, one senses a restless postmodern consciousness, tugging this way and that at the dazzling display of particularities that is the world, as well as at the mind’s own brimming variety of responses, all pressuring language itself to discover a style that will be sufficient to its task of rendering what for want of a better word we’ll call reality. Mostly, I’d say, it’s a style allied to the habits of collage. As an imaginative strategy this properly (and kinetically) embodies the poet’s shrewd, articulate, always wide-awake, endlessly curious sensibility, showing – in how he relishes sensuous surfaces – his delight in (to use MacNeice’s immortal phrase) “the drunkenness of things being various”.
The title of A Nest on the Waves evokes a peaceful corner in a world of turbulence (perhaps that corner of respite where poems can be hatched). Emotionally attached to notions of home, this is also a book of visitations – to places near (the Sally Gap, Mweelrea, the N11) or far distant (west Africa, Australia). The poet, however, is never the tourist or sentimental memoirist but a maker of documentaries – mapping the landscape, taking well informed note of fauna (some lovely bird poems), flora and local habits, and reflecting on his own presence. In such poems the counterpointing habits of collage are his orchestrating agent (such as in the brilliant Lament for Ali Farka Touré , where his canvas includes Pepsi, pizza and west African rituals).
At times a poem (such as Antarctic Poetry School ) can descend into archness (the blow-away foam of a witty, well-informed intelligence, I guess), or be opaque (Semaphore), or make too self-conscious a display of its knowledge ( Triskets ), or be simply slighter (such as Little Ones ) than the most fully realised pieces. But with his allusive richness of texture, his sense of history, his ability to take on with convincing panache other voices (such as The Lock Keeper’s Daughter, The Recusant St Brenhilda on Sula Sgeir ), his startling imagery (“the triplets on the beggar’s guitar / sputtered like tachycardia”), his formal relaxation and nicely calibrated freshness of language (a kingfisher “combusts”), Wheatley’s best poems – especially those in which one detects the telling fusion of subjective feelings and objective facts (such as The Shadow Life ) – have an original shine to them, and their “light is what / we see the dark by”.
Eamon Grennan’s most recent collection in Ireland is Out of Breath. A New & Selected Poems was published in the US last year.
— The Irish Times 8 January 2011
