Poem of the week: O Lavery’s by Stephen Sexton
As we start to emerge from lockdown, it seems ever more likely that many of the gathering places we love will have closed their doors for good.
Where do you miss the most – a favourite theatre, a football stadium, a pub? For Stephen Sexton, the answer is Lavery’s, a Belfast bar that’s home to Northern Ireland’s largest pool hall, where the longed-for baize is “a shade of green my dreams can’t reproduce”.
At first, this new sonnet by Sexton seems to be winking at the reader. That “O” in the title tells us we’re in rhapsodic ode territory, a lofty style knowingly mismatched to the bar-room setting. The way his voice casually slips between the chatty (“boys-a-dear”) and the literary (“chalk-bewildered after-dark”) put me in mind of another pool-playing sonneteer, Don Paterson.
So far, all’s well. But as the poem’s long, single sentence unfurls, the vocabulary of another world starts to creep in: “sentineling the ward”, “with a physician’s calm”, “falls breathlessly”. Perhaps focusing on “one scrappy afternoon” in this place is a way of staving off thoughts of the present, thoughts of more troubling places.
Sexton is one of Northern Ireland’s most exciting new writers. He recently won the E M Forster Award – the major US prize that last year went to Sally Rooney – for his first collection, If All the World and Love Were Young.
That book was the kind of ambitious, high-concept debut which can make a follow-up tricky. Described as a pastoral elegy, it took its inspiration from another game of skill, but a very different one – Super Mario World. On one level, it was a book about the way a console can console: the strange, lush landscapes of that retro video-game offered a thinking-space in which the poet could revisit his memories of his late mother, and her death from cancer, at one remove.
For a poet who’s already explored grief by writing about Mario, responding to coronavirus with an ode to pool doesn’t seem such an odd move. I can’t wait to see where he goes next.
O Lavery’s
Of course they must miss us like we miss them:
the spring-loaded cushions and rare vitesse
of table six, or table seventeen
of the cursed middle and top-right pockets,
or boys-a-dear, one scrappy afternoon
become a chalk-bewildered after-dark
sentineling the ward of table five
stuck for hours on free-play mode and sainted
where somebody with a physician’s calm
draws under the supernatural light
the white across the otherworldly cloth
a shade of green my dreams can’t reproduce;
who rolls their eyes and falls breathlessly to
the all-knowing bank of the possible.