Review: Namanlagh by Tom Paulin

Review: Namanlagh by Tom Paulin (Faber and Faber, 2025)

The “power to think / has clean left me”, Tom Paulin claims – not quite convincingly – in his sharply observant new poetry collection, Namanlagh, which chronicles the author’s experience of crippling depression and advancing age. “Have I at last started to climb out / of the deep pit”, he wonders, “where I’ve been / this three and a half years?” Physical and intellectual lethargy, it would seem, can be the stuff that poems are made of. Luckily for us, at any rate, Paulin’s “gift survived it all.”

If the volume, his first in a decade, has been justly lauded for its ethical courage and linguistic zing, it also confirms Paulin as successor and torch-bearer to a generation of Northern poets, whose time has largely passed. When he freeze-frames two young victims of a loyalist murder-gang – “Each in his open coffin / each with a polo-neck jumper / to hide the slashes” – we hear a murmur of Seamus Heaney’s shade, still grieved and grounded by “the actual weight / of each hooded victim, / slashed and dumped.” Likewise when we encounter, in “The Spare Room”, “the light’s ekeing growth” like “a bandage being torn off very slowly, / always with a sense of the damage / and the fictive hand’s quiet sloth”, we’re restored to the kind of hard-edged perceptual cogency pioneered by Derek Mahon, adrift “in a riot of sunlight / watching the day break and the clouds flying.”

The list could be extended. The canny imaginative shape-shiftings of Paulin’s title-poem, for instance, seem to have a Muldoonian tinge – and the same may be said of “Not to Speak of the Cheese”, a playful flex of ancestral speculation, which is also an inspired “trip”, attempting to locate “our common awkward surname / back in the town of Nîmes”, a site of “impacted paint” where “the Huguenots were massacred / in the White Terror / that followed the Hundred Days”. The book as a whole might be understood as the final flare of an aurora borealis that once seemed nearly permanent, and unassailable, in its rich, revelatory shining.

Admittedly, few of Paulin’s poetic peers and forebears have ever dared to broadcast, in print, their “regret” for “the loss / of the educational genius / of Martin McGuinness”, a former paramilitary commander who would, Paulin posits, quite sensibly, “have dropped the 11+”, and with it

the whole sectarian
and therefore necessitarian
system of training
the minds of the young
and imagine all those smug fee-paying
schools taxed out of existence
swept off the face of the province!

This is pure Paulin, lippy and punctilious, skillfully converting bowsy provocation into good politics and better poetry. That he’s managed to smuggle such an honourably elegiac salute into a Faber-published manuscript, indeed, may be considered a small victory in the long peace – which has yet to be won. For as Paulin reminds us, “direct rule / means the same old skules”.

In contrast to many of the younger luminaries of the Irish and Northern Irish poetry scene, for Paulin, we sense, politics means more than selective self-projection in the name of art, and necessarily transcends the well-crafted, fully costed pleas for balance that often pass for liberal opinion. Paulin is the kind of lateral thinker, instinctively partisan, for whom, bravely, there is “nothing” anymore “to be said” about “the sight of Ben Bulben, / massive and tabled”, fringed by “wild rhododendrons”: a pained vacancy that calls to mind Robert Emmet – dying for a vision of Irish nationhood that remains unrealised – and the “epitaphs / that could neither get written / nor chiselled in hard stone.” As here, the experience of personal despondency Paulin charts often comes across as the weariness of an emancipationist whose cause, for now, has been forced into dormancy.

In a literary landscape grown sleek, and chic, amid an unceasing rain of sinecures and market opportunities, the Oxford don stands out from the pack, combining the fire of a citizen-poet with the sad intelligence of a gnarly visionary. Like all great stylists, he is distinctive and elusive with every breathing lyric. To pilfer a phrase of Mahon’s, Paulin has become “The Last of the Fire Kings”: an anomaly and outsider, strangely attuned to the deeper weathers of his time and tribe. As in his tribute – one of a few – to the Palestinian poet Walid Khazendar, Namanlagh grants us entry and permission to “poke about in his darkness”: a “puzzle” that impels us with its intricacy and power, “though” we “can tell that in spirit / he’s gone out the door.”