Terrible and Beautiful and True

A review of Karl Parkinson’s "Song of the Fallen"

Reading the work of Karl Parkinson (Blue Lotus Books) is an exhilarating experience; it has been a joy to publish him twice in print. In this piece Dylan Brennan reviews Parkinson’s latest poetry collection, The Song Of The Fallen, which is currently available for purchase online.

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Dublin poet Karl Parkinson’s fourth collection begins with a Biblical epigraph from the Gospel of St. Matthew in which Jesus admonishes “every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not.” The implication is clear enough: the poems that follow will have little time for those among us who fail to walketh like they talketh. Though not placed in the very middle of the book, “Yer Not From The Same Class As Me” feels like something of a centerpiece. In addition to working well on the page, it’s a poem that one could easily imagine garnering laughs and applause as a performance piece, no surprise when considering Parkinson’s roots as a spoken word artist. There must be myriad reasons (some may even be justifiable) why the last few years have seen an increase in so-called “class-passing” (the phenomenon of people from traditionally middle-class backgrounds identifying as working class), but this is not the place for this kind of sociological analysis. Whatever the argument may be, the speaker of the poem is, quite frankly, not having it:

if yerwan who’s Daddy owns a farm is workin class

and yerman who’s mammy’s the school principal are workin class

then don’t even fuckin call me workin class

And, later on:

If you’ve ever bein stung by a micro-aggression

then yer not from the same class as me,

cause we’re been hit with macro aggressions

on the fuckin daily,

while you’re gettin triggered by a word,

we’re out here gettin triggered by a gun.

The serious and the humorous are balanced well in this poem. On a personal level, I was grateful for the unlocking of a forgotten memory of smashing open a chocolate Easter egg with my forehead, though I’d long been blissfully unaware of its class implications. I also nodded in glad agreement when a particular pet hate of mine was addressed:

If yuh pronounce poem, po-em, yer defo not from the same fucking

class as me

Like James Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach, I very much prefer the one-syllable pronunciation of the word. Though irreverent shots are fired (and laughs are had) at poets who talk “about poetry more than / they write poetry” and “posh dopes” on Twitter, Song of the Fallen is also shot through with an elegiac sense of loss. But first, the reader must pass through some nightmarish visions of widescale destruction.

Apocalyptic images abound from the off, the wolves of the title poem howling “to one another in the dark opal hued morning light.” This is followed by “The City Sacked” in which a Homerian “wine dark sea” is depicted “full of bloated corpses” and the “flesh melts from the bones” of “those who thought they knew the score.” This all juxtaposed against a portentous image of: “Ravens circling / in the mauve sky.” In the next poem, ‘The Chorus Of The Cataclysm,” we find ourselves “Lying here in the black mud with the dead things all around us” while the “bodies we piled up” are “all blue and swollen, some had fish stuck to them.” In these opening poems, Parkinson displays a knack for constructing clear and memorable images of decay and loss amongst imagined post-disaster scapes. Nevertheless, wide-angled representations of large-scale ruination soon give way to more personal and focused lamentations.

In “Counting the Dead” the speaker moves at a melancholy pace through a litany of departed loved-ones, from his grandmother “gone before I was even born” to the first Buddha “done in by his last meal.” Though the range of subjects broadens towards the end to encompass a wider sense of ecological grief (“the slaughter of animals, / the murder of bees, / the annihilation of whole species”) the most heartbreaking section of this captivating poem involves the passing of the speaker’s father:

My Da, he passed away when I was eleven,

it was me who answered the door at two

in the morning to the Garda,

they said he wasn’t in any trouble,

as if a brain aneurism

wasn’t any trouble,

as if dying at forty-three

wasn’t any trouble,

as if they were angels in blue uniforms

come to tell me that death was holy

while I was still young…

These lines exemplify what Parkinson does so well. Though discomposed and angered by the carelessness of language displayed by those in power when interacting with the vulnerable, the speaker manages to momentarily quell the simmering fires of resentment by allowing these lubberly cops to morph into angelic blue messengers. Almost. (Later on, in “Aggro,” the speaker will have to once again control his rage, this time when witnessing a shameful display of condescending righteousness in a local shop.) Lest the reader feel alienated by the specificities of the speaker’s grief, we are encouraged to add our own names to this catalogue of bereavement: “I am counting my dead, / and you may count yours,” adding a communal feel to this act of poetic remembrance as the poem ends with the gentle stoicism of the Buddha’s reminder that:

All that’s born is subject to decay,

So all that’s born should seek Nirvana

and end their suffering,

come take the raft to the other shore

and be born no more, and win over Death at last.

The sense of communal sorrows is further explored in “I Know,” an effective engagement with the art of empathy:

I know the scars are long and the wounds are deep.

I know the children are hungry and Christmas is near.

I know that your father is dying in a hospital bed.

I know that your eyesight is fading.

That your teeth are loose.

That your back aches.

That your lungs bark.

That your hands shake.

A refusal to turn eyes away from the horrors of physical degradation gives this poem its most enduring image:

I look at the photo of the dead youth on the wall

I remember the nights in the hospice—The screaming,

the death rattle

Throughout this book, an insistence on lamenting the departed is paired with clear awareness and acceptance of the inevitability of our demise. It is this sense of combined sorrow and fortitude that gives these poems their power. In “Cousin” after the death of Sharon, the poet wants the loss to be registered by both soul and body, to be felt on the surface of the skin, not to be sugarcoated: “I hope it rains all day long / when they lay you to rest.” In “Today I Am Older Than My Father” the poet imagines a meeting with his Da in a Virgilian spirit realm:

Should I meet him in a dream

in Hades, or Paradise,

he will be the younger man, not I.

Though there is sadness in this imagined encounter between the poet and his perennially younger father (how could there not be?), the poet’s appreciation for his own continued earthly existence manages to swaddle the gloomy heart of the poem, tempering the anguish:

It is the hair on my beard that

grows white now, and not his.

All fine by me –it’s a privilege

to have King Priam’s white beard.

Contradicting my assertions about the continued sense of fortitude and, at times, serenity in the face of corporeal demise that many of these poems display, “This World” wounds the reader by doing just the opposite. No literary depiction of snow in Ireland can avoid being compared to James Joyce’s that falls faintly throughout the universe “upon all the living and the dead” so it might as well be embraced. This is exactly what Parkinson does in the opening stanza:

It is the first day of march in 2024

and the snow is falling faintly

all over Ireland once again...

On the “hills of Monaghan / and the rooftops of the blocks of Dublin” snow is general all over the island, soon to be melted to slush by heavy rainfall “like marshmallows melting in fire.” And the resultant white landscape will be both ravishing and cruel as our mothers and fathers will struggle, weakened by the cold:

Someday this whole world will be covered in white

and it will be terrible and beautiful and true,

this world where our fathers can’t get out of chairs

when once they bounded so strong and nimble and stag-like,

and oh our Mothers all die, how can our Mothers just die one day?

Is the question that brings the poem to its close juvenile or naive? Perhaps. But it is also devastating in its direct simplicity and, crucially, it hits harder in the wake of the resilience on display in the surrounding poems.

In “Why I write poems” the following responses (amongst many others) are provided:

Because there is something and not nothing

[...]

Because there is a Holy Spirit that moves upon the water

and in the darkness

The book is peppered with words like “Hades,” “Paradise,” “Bardo,” “Samsara”…there is a clear multi-denominational spirituality that runs through the collection and, though the more apocalyptic poems suggest a cosmic comeuppance might be coming for us all, there is plenty of space for serenity and love, as in these lines from “Who I Love The Most”:

And I love all the junkies in Ireland and around the world

[...]

I love single mothers on the dole. I love the downtrodden.

I love those who must steal.

I love those who kill themselves.

Luckily for the reader there is, clearly, plenty to love in Karl Parkinson’s Song of the Fallen. Though I was particularly drawn to the elegiac poems, the fact that they find themselves nestled so closely to more cataclysmic lyrics allows them to be appreciated on the individual level but also as part of a larger depiction of the persistence of hope and love in a context of annihilation. For this reason and others, it’s well worth your time.

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