Harry White’s second collection of poems, The Kenmare Occurrences, impresses with its finely balanced and moving meditations on how the happenings of ordinary life can produce both a sense of the uncanny and a glimpse into the craving for the extraordinary we all possess. More exposures than simple remembrances, these poems invoke the unexpected and the everyday in equal measure, and sometimes at the same time. The collection’s title is drawn from a poem that specifically contrasts the fantastical and the mundane, but many of the poems deal with the complex relationship between the real and the imaginary, the remembered and the invented, the actual and the ideal, and the ordinary and the extraordinary in human existence. From the sonorous immersions of its opening poem onwards the collection is shot through with a sense of loss-the loss of past lives, alternative lives, intangible lives, redeemed lives, and possible lives. This loss, however, remains firmly in view rather than consigned to oblivion, and it is variously framed, arrested, remembered, mourned, accepted, and ultimately even celebrated in the poems themselves. Porscha Fermanis, Professor of Romantic Literature, University College Dublin
As with the astonishing Polite Forms (2012) wherein Harry White reminds us of the capacious beauty of the sonnet, The Kenmare Occurrences takes you by the hand and leads you through exquisite, painful recollection with poems more and less formal, more and less polite. This won’t hurt at all, the beauty of the verse suggests. Then, of course, it does. White’s strength is to hold both speaker and listener at a distance that is a kind of proximity; the poems acknowledge that memory is flawed, baffling, and all we have to go on. And it might all just be ‘a ruinous mistake’. His work invites us in with music charming to the ear, then it plays an echo game-with Yeats and Heaney, and especially Larkin. The Kenmare Occurrences salutes these poets as the collection sails into its own Byzantium, its own Ireland. And the verse, quite simply, changes you.
Chantel Lavoie, Professor of English Literature, Royal Military College of Canada, and author of Where the Terror Lies (Toronto, 2012)
