John Redmond reviews: To a Fault by Nick Laird

Although it is not depressingly bad, Nick Laird's first book is depressing. To a Fault follows a trajectory from the Northern Ireland of the author's upbringing to the metropolitan 'elsewhere' of London, a trajectory (on the evidence of the poems) from misery to boredom. The book's main emotional terrain is post-conflict Northern Ireland, where the shooting has almost ceased, but social divisions are as poisonous as ever:

Someone has almost transcribed
the last fifty years of our speech,
and has not once had the chance
to employ the word sorry.

The book's title is best understood in the sense of Auden's 'Letter to a Wound', as the poems collectively represent a kind of 'Ode to a Fault'. Like Tony Harrison's 'V', Laird's 'Fault' stands for "all the versuses of life": Catholic v. Protestant, Ulster v. elsewhere, man v. wife. In most of the poems the youthful speaker remains at least half-attached to his dysfunctional community. Occasionally he escapes to America, Poland, even Iraq, but the relief when he returns to his miserable province is obvious.

The matter is complicated because the author's attachment to Northern Ireland is as much literary as social. Laird's poetry is markedly derivative, a pastiche of Ulster styles to which his numerous coy allusions draw attention. In particular, the poems are a pastiche of Muldoon or, more exactly, Muldoon via Armitage. So the book is drenched in 'might-have-beens' and 'so-to-speaks', in 'as ifs' and 'maybes', the whole well-known panoply of winsome effects. A good example is 'Pedigree', an oddly defensive poem, in which the speaker narrates events from his family history:

a farmer jumped on the road, and strangled,
his pockets emptied
of the stock proceeds from the county fair
by two local Roman Catholic farmhands.

Riots in Donegal town when they were cleared.
And riots again when they were convicted.

I may be out on a limb.

The last line is an obvious echo of early Muldoon, but then so is the whole manner of narration, from the stop-start pacing, the how-serious-should-you-take-me tone, the slightly elevated po-faced phrasing ("stock proceeds") and the use of parallelistic, elliptical, colloquial clauses with feminine line-endings.

To this questionable mixture, Laird adds newladspeak, that dreaded mode of discourse which has dominated British poetry since the rise of New Labour. Like Tony Blair's forays into regular guydom, this is the voice of manufactured accessibility. It never sounds like any real person actually speaking, but it always sounds like how the media represents real people talking, as in the arch opening lines of 'Firmhand the Queried':

I remember poncing a fag off some guy at the bar,
Then downing the dregs of my last pint of stout,

Curiously, the most original ingredient in To a Fault is also the most depressing: a relentless verbal negativity. And it is relentless ? to paraphrase John Hume, if you took the word 'not' out of Laird's vocabulary, he would be speechless. Consider the following sample of last lines:

"It's not lifting the pen from this page."
"No, we could not itemise the list."
"But of course they cannot see of course."
"and this is a charge not a pleading."

Then look at this sample of opening lines:

"It's not as if I'm intending on spending the rest of my life doing this:"
"Go home. I haven't slept alone"
"It's not the flyer on the windscreen or cross-examination"
"The final one was not, as is often thought,"

It's not just not though. Laird's entire vocabulary is shot through with negativity. In the following list, for instance, each word is taken from a different concluding line: "cannot", "injured", "wounds", "stops", "out", "scapegoats", "not", "relentless", "victim", "ghost", "forgotten", "grave", "War", "itching", "featherless", "charge", "bombs", "littered", "wordless", "no", "missing", "anger".

Most first books, even those by very good poets, are unsuccessful. To a Fault is no exception. It may be that Laird would do better to lighten his style. There is a promising layer of humour running through To a Fault and probably the collection's best line is its funniest ("You wrote off the Volvo. I gave you verrucas.") Whether or not Laird will write a better book than this, I don't know. But I do hope he writes a more cheerful one.

To a Fault, Faber, £8.99

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