Swans We Cannot See
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SWANS WE CANNOT SEE
Swans We Cannot See, Andrew Jamison’s third collection, spans parenthood, masculinity, climate, food, teaching, art and literature. The seen, unseen and imagined intermingle throughout. In poetry that spreads its own wings the author glides between a range of subjects and forms displaying his craftsmanship, itself a theme explored in poems dedicated to artisans, blank verse and Parmesan cheese.
‘A Short History of the Potato’ and ‘J M Synge in Crossgar, 2022’, both playful and reverential, are sustained meditations on Ireland, past and present. ‘Death of an Artisan’, a new series of imaginary translations of Georges Bertrand, concludes the book. Transformational in many senses, Swans We Cannot See displays a poet and his poetry coming of age and taking flight.
REVIEWS:
In his third collection, Swans We Cannot See , Andrew Jamison gives us poems of parenthood and food, music and history. As its title suggests, the swan is an important symbol of beauty and industry: the tranquil creature with furious feet. So many of these poems are ars poetica – poems concerned with the art of making poetry. As such, Jamison is in a meta-textual mood. Full of craft, humour and delight, there is much below the surface in this thoughtful collection. — Stephen Sexton, The Irish Times
Stay
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STAY
Andrew Jamison’s impressive second collection, Stay, shows a deepening of style and substance. It ranges from recollections of a sojourn in Paris (‘Souvenir’), resorts in his native County Down and various sports stadia to contemplation of ‘Becoming a Box-Set Detective’. As likely to invoke R.E.M. and ‘Joy Division at the Haçienda’ as Georges Bertrand and an anonymous Irish poet, it teases ideas in lavish lyrics until
all I think of is coastal road,
all a self is, all a county is, where they end.
REVIEWS:
‘Stay acts as a way of describing his residence abroad, in England, as a “stay” rather than anything more permanent. Homesick and more melancholy than in Happy Hour (2012), Jamison’s new poems often balance a solitary, adult present moment against a more social, culturally communal other world. The stripped-down present becomes a trigger for memory, even if the memories of Ravenhill (Spectator), Windsor Park (Friendly) or the coast (Ardglass Marina) are not exactly shiningly happy: “how much we’ll pay / for what: scope, a lookout, a sense of elevation, / summer G and Ts on the balcony, / a share in the ocean’s profundity? / The seagulls pick at flotsam in the car park.” — John McAuliffe, The Irish Times
‘The translations from Georges Bertrand, like the best original poems in Stay, are interrogative, simple but not simplistic, understated yet probing, and show that Jamison has the ability to write poems of significant grace.’ — Séan Hewitt, Poetry Ireland Review
Happy Hour
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HAPPY HOUR
Happy Hour, Andrew Jamison’s crisp, appealing first collection, includes Hopper-like studies of disappointment (two brothers ‘homesick at home’) and pivots on moments in which a solitary figure (eating alone, or trudging a towpath thinking of how a girl sipped her cappuccino) takes stock of ‘time’s avalanches’ and of both the play and fade of light. They record the first impressions and the influence of memory, encompassing Belfast, London, the North of England and — following a first, astonished visit — New York City.
There’s nothing romantic about it,
eating alone in an empty diner . . .
These award-winning poems feature rich evocations (‘the hydraulic door huffing open’), playful ironies (‘This Whole Place’), wry, demotic tones (‘on a piss of a night’, Aristotle ‘blethering on’), a trip to Ikea, the abandon of driving golf balls into Strangford Lough, his grandparents’ transformation into mythic figures, and a series — listening to Ash, Kings of Convenience and Them — in which ‘tunes take me back, track by track’.
REVIEWS:
Sad and wonderful tension between what is sublime and what is commonplace — an astonishment at this world, augmented by the sardonic awareness that astonishment is nothing new – permeates themes of transience in Andrew Jamison’ first collection, Happy Hour. - Andy Eaton, Edinburgh Review
This is the kind of poet who makes poems out of the trash-strewn streets of small and large towns on the morning after Saturday night . . . This is the kind of poet who lets all the mess in, unfiltered, ungroomed, who doesn’t sort it out and stack it up, but generously and lovingly considers each thing and person. He grinds no axe, he ticks no box. The material is left to its own devices, and the greatest surprise of all is the lavish lyricism that ensues . . . - Justin Quinn, Tower Poetry
The Bus from Belfast
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THE BUS FROM BELFAST
*WINNER OF THE TEMPLAR POETRY PRIZE 2011*
The Bus from Belfast, is a short collection covering a lot of ground - Belfast to London, London to Scotland, Scotland to Leeds, Leeds to Spain and onwards.
Time and timelessness, place and placelessness, love and unlove, the local and the global, home and homesickness, Andrew Jamison presents an engaging debut.