Making Music

The Hobbyist

Not rich enough to grant himself
a send-off as great as the Emperor Chin,
he decided to treat his baby finger
to a tomb, lavish, bijoux, to die for.
First he dug a trench, huge at one
/seventy-second scale in which to inter
five boxes of unbiodegradable Airfix knights,
swords and lances bristling in ranks.
In a pan in which he had once fluxed pewter ingots
for moulds of  Napoleonic grenadiers
he melted commemorative sovereigns
and once-upon-embargoed krugerrands,
reshaped them into bracelet-charm warhorses and bulls:
offerings for minor toy-town deities.
Forty-seven veterinary thermometers
he snapped in two to extract
enough mercury for a miniature lake
laid-out inside the mausoleum
he carved himself from Connamara marble.
Mock jade idols formed from lumps of desiccated viridian
he arranged in a circle surrounding the soapstone casket
lined with butterfly-motifed  purple silk.
Then he tired of Chinoiserie,
and began to study coffee-table tomes on Egyptology.
He copied varicoloured silhouettes of Amun and Isis,
Horus and a chorus line of nubile,
kohl-eyed lasses with Louise Brooks-style haircuts,
onto panels of modelling balsam,
before slicing the pre-embalmed  thumb of his right hand;
entombing it along with all his skill,
so no finger afterwards
could receive as good a burial.

Reviews

Making Music (Three Spires Press, 64pp. €10), Patrick Cotter’s second full-length collection, is full of inventive mischievousness and idiosyncratic wit. In the Kiddies of Lir we’re told the kiddies’ “necks poured forth like pus congealed”. The Wedding Night of Aoife and Lir becomes a mock-heroic told by Aoife where Lir “snuffled at my girly, unkissed feet”. Any romance is thrown out the window when she reveals that she was “impaled like an apple being cored”. The humour is dark and an iconoclastic heart beats throughout Cotter’s work. The Unembroidered Cloths sends up Yeats’s embroidered cloths of heaven by situating us in an “Underworld” where we “waken to find ourselves/ treading on our nightmares”, while Not Being Kavanagh is a hilarious paean to disenchantment.

Making Music is also saturated with the presence of “angels”. But unlike the glut of angels in American poetry, Cotter’s angels are of a different species altogether. In fact, one particular “Angel” has more in common with Hughes’s “Crow” than any other celestial being: “Angel failed to pack his feathers on his trip to hell”. In these poems, and specifically in Journal of a Failed Angel Whisperer Cotter creates a subversive, impish creature: “Angel beckoned/ and I radiated upwards out of the oven of my body”. A book more of nightmares than dreams, Cotter writes nonetheless that “The undreamt life is not worth living”. An anarchic voice in Irish poetry, Cotter’s new collection is playful, irreverent, and welcome.

- Paul Perry The Irish Times August 2009