Review: Dark and Light Verse by Allen Lee Ireland

Allen Lee Ireland offers a panorama of human experience with sage observation enmeshed in rhyme and an enjoyably unpredictable viewpoint in Dark and Light Verse.

At times infused with irony, at times with surprising tenderness, this most recent assemblage of Ireland’s poems is divided into seven equally evocative segments. “Children of Light” includes the thorny perspective of “Two Men in Love” who decide to jump off a cliff while at the apex of their relationship, and the “Hate Crime” of someone knocked down on an icy pavement who freezes to death alone:

How terrible to die
Without a soul around
To know the reason why.

These grim offerings are followed by “A Dog’s Life,” four poems exploring life through canine eyes as in the portrait of “Family Dog,” which illustrates the book’s consummate variety – mixing whimsy and melancholy in equal measure.

In the portion devoted to “College Assignment,” Nurse Ratched, the cold-hearted caregiver of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, provides Ireland with a “wonderful subject for verse!” which also gives him a launching point for talking about coming of age and manhood. “Mother,” the fourth section of Ireland’s aggregation, underscores the distance he felt from the woman who doled out chocolate square by square, while “saying I love you a little insincerely.”

Some of the most sentimental contributions are contained in the section “Scenes from Battle Branch,” the author’s boyhood haunts: the walks on snowy ground, the view of a tree outside his window, the sense of the lost spirit of the Cherokee that can be heard in “the scream of a bird.” In “Mountain Metropolis” Ireland charmingly attests that “the country is a city too,” where you can “eat blackberries at the meadow’s breakfast bar.” These moments never become too earnest or maudlin, as Ireland is deftly able to rein in sentimentality and melodrama, offering instead poignant moments of reflection.

The collection continues with “The Inevitable End,” reminding us of ghost towns like Elkhorn, Montana: “Who builds a town on silver builds on sand,” and recounting the last conscious moments of “The Woman in the Water” who has taken sleeping pills and climbed into a full hot bath, one of the collection’s best offerings. These moribund images are countered with “The Question,” suggesting that, though “not even the universe is eternal,” it may still be “close enough” to make our efforts worthwhile. The closing segment, cleverly titled “Found in Space,” gives an amusing nod to “A COVID Christmas (2020)”:

This time it’s the wise men
Who are staying where they are.

Ireland’s work, a few of which have been published elsewhere, combines free verse and metered rhyming, both to excellent effect, which is a rare combination to find in a poetry collection – and rarer too to have a sense of maturity in the rhyme, rather than an overreliance on clever wordplay. The different styles highlight his acute observational skills and open-minded patterns of thought, combining the sanguine view of a realist who knows that death is inevitable with a paradoxical reverence for an ineffable spirit found in nature and, if sometimes hidden, in the human heart.

All told, Dark and Light Verse always keeps you guessing, as, living up to its title, the book encompasses the diversity of emotions and responses in the shared human experience.