Eoghan Walls’s piquant
debut crams more than most into its 60-odd pages. Faithful to the gritty
physicality of nature, what separates The
Salt Harvest from many first collections is a willingness to look for the
poetic in pretty much anything, an almost aureate diction, and a darkly
exuberant style that at times borders on excess. The book moves from secular
hymns to the sea’s unforgiving cycles – the poet praising “lumpfish snapping
medusae through stalks in the biomass” – through sketches of home life’s little
details (the yard “a damp offstage to the house” in “Thirteen Foot by Six”) to
the sprawling otherness of airport terminals and visits from extraterrestrials.
For the most part, it comes off. Favouring a loose, typically anapaestic meter
shaped into couplets and tercets, Walls can serve up a plate of cockles and gesture
towards its human cost just as he more openly handles human frailties: illness,
environmental damage, a flood that finds “sandbags are useless”. “An Ethical
Taxonomy of Cordyceps” is a bridge too far, but the vigour and reach of The Salt Harvest makes him a poet worth
watching.
first published in The Guardian, Saturday 21 April 2012