Further Convictions Pending

I’ve always had a large respect for Vincent O’Sullivan’s poems. He’s the thinking man’s poet. For a fortnight I’ve been savouring the poems in his Further Convictions Pending. They’re dense, they need careful reading. He’s always had a keen eye for domestic detail and the interaction between the sexes - regrets, hopes, desires and hungers. Wide reading and meditating about the arts and civilisation provide a background to explore the human predicament. The angst of the lapsed Catholic of the earlier poems has merged to a more ironic, wry examination of life’s complexities and subtleties as this collection, an ample selection from his last four volumes plus forty-four new poems illustrates.

I like the way he explores the boundaries between a truth and another truth and the lies and claims that arise and dwell between them as shown in this excerpt from Not One To Let On.
‘And the child who was four
or five, neither clever among other children
nor slow for her age, looked straight
ahead, knowing that something important
was dawning for the first time, something
about grown-ups and lies and her mother’s
secrets which were very different from her
father’s, because hadn’t her mother said,
hadn’t she told her only yesterday
that a secret was something extra special..’
The poem ends:
‘Her mother wearing her nightdress
when she hugged her and told her that.
and then it was time to go to her father’s
and the other lady’s, although that is still a secret.’

The expulsion from Eden is one of his long-term themes - the innocent, the victim, the underdog, the plaything. ‘There is a woman with an apple/ barely bitten, she is saying/ ‘Welcome home.’

The poems are jam-packed with pithy few-liners. 'The seasons,/ like the clocks in her own body, strike their reasons.' 'The easeful nakedness of living with mere/ things as they are.' 'This was/ and is love, grain by grain by grain.' 'The house is sold, even the weeds/ are someone else’s.' 'Still, she’s there,/ the 19th Century.' 'Consequence is a longer name for love.' 'The world as is yet to be, as what isn’t, is.' 'The colour of blood is a question too of grammar.' 'There is finally little to love, that is not each other.'

And so to the final poem and the last line which provides the title to the collection. The prosecution and the defence sum up; the verdict, ‘further convictions pending.’ What a marvellous pun. I look forward to his next volume and more of his convictions.