{"id":18526,"date":"2026-02-12T11:40:44","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T11:40:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=18526"},"modified":"2026-02-12T11:40:44","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T11:40:44","slug":"review-namanlagh-by-tom-paulin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2026\/02\/12\/review-namanlagh-by-tom-paulin\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Namanlagh by Tom Paulin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Review<\/u>: Namanlagh <\/em>by Tom Paulin<\/a><\/span> (Faber and Faber, 2025)<\/p>\n

The \u201cpower to think \/ has clean left me\u201d, Tom Paulin claims \u2013 not quite convincingly \u2013 in his sharply observant new poetry collection, Namanlagh<\/em>, which chronicles the author’s experience of crippling depression and advancing age. \u201cHave I at last started to climb out \/ of the deep pit\u201d, he wonders, \u201cwhere I’ve been \/ this three and a half years?\u201d Physical and intellectual lethargy, it would seem, can be the stuff that poems are made of. Luckily for us, at any rate, Paulin’s \u201cgift survived it all.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the volume, his first in a decade, has been justly lauded<\/a><\/span> 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 \u2013 \u201cEach in his open coffin \/ each with a polo-neck jumper \/ to hide the slashes\u201d \u2013 we hear a murmur of Seamus Heaney’s shade, still<\/a><\/span> grieved and grounded by \u201cthe actual weight \/ of each hooded victim, \/ slashed and dumped.\u201d Likewise when we encounter, in \u201cThe Spare Room\u201d, \u201cthe light’s ekeing growth\u201d like \u201ca bandage being torn off very slowly, \/ always with a sense of the damage \/ and the fictive hand’s quiet sloth\u201d, we’re restored to the kind of hard-edged perceptual cogency pioneered by Derek Mahon<\/a><\/span>, adrift \u201cin a riot of sunlight \/ watching the day break and the clouds flying.\u201d<\/p>\n

The list could be extended. The canny imaginative shape-shiftings of Paulin’s title-poem, for instance, seem to have a Muldoonian tinge \u2013 and the same may be said of \u201cNot to Speak of the Cheese\u201d, a playful flex of ancestral speculation, which is also an inspired \u201ctrip\u201d, attempting to locate \u201cour common awkward surname \/ back in the town of N\u00eemes\u201d, a site of \u201cimpacted paint\u201d where \u201cthe Huguenots were massacred \/ in the White Terror \/ that followed the Hundred Days\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, few of Paulin’s poetic peers and forebears have ever dared to broadcast, in print, their \u201cregret\u201d for \u201cthe loss \/ of the educational genius \/ of Martin McGuinness\u201d, a former paramilitary commander who would, Paulin posits, quite sensibly, \u201chave dropped the 11+\u201d, and with it<\/p>\n

the whole sectarian<\/em>
\nand therefore necessitarian<\/em>
\nsystem of training<\/em>
\nthe minds of the young<\/em>
\nand imagine all those smug fee-paying<\/em>
\nschools taxed out of existence<\/em>
\nswept off the face of the province!<\/em><\/p>\n

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 \u2013 which has yet to be won. For as Paulin reminds us, \u201cdirect rule \/ means the same old skules\u201d.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cnothing\u201d anymore \u201cto be said\u201d about \u201cthe sight of Ben Bulben, \/ massive and tabled\u201d, fringed by \u201cwild rhododendrons\u201d: a pained vacancy that calls to mind Robert Emmet \u2013 dying for a vision of Irish nationhood that remains unrealised \u2013 and the \u201cepitaphs \/ that could neither get written \/ nor chiselled in hard stone.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cThe Last of the Fire Kings\u201d: an anomaly and outsider, strangely attuned to the deeper weathers of his time and tribe. As in his tribute \u2013 one of a few \u2013 to the Palestinian poet Walid Khazendar, Namanlagh grants us entry and permission to \u201cpoke about in his darkness\u201d: a \u201cpuzzle\u201d that impels us with its intricacy and power, \u201cthough\u201d we \u201ccan tell that in spirit \/ he’s gone out the door.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Review: Namanlagh by Tom Paulin (Faber and Faber, 2025) The \u201cpower to think \/ has clean left me\u201d, Tom Paulin claims \u2013 not quite convincingly \u2013 in his sharply observant new poetry collection, Namanlagh, which chronicles the author’s experience of crippling depression and advancing age. \u201cHave I at last started to climb out \/ of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":246,"featured_media":18528,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[898,1449,1686,1687,1688,6392,7072,7341,7807,9452,9456,9457],"class_list":["post-18526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","tag-ben-bulben-in-poetry","tag-cassandra-voices-poetry","tag-ciaran-o-rourke","tag-ciaran-orouke-poet","tag-ciaran-orourke-cassandra-voices","tag-namanlagh","tag-paulin","tag-poetry","tag-review","tag-tom","tag-tom-paulin","tag-tom-paulin-ben-bulben"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/246"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18526\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}