Flair by Paul Gallagher

Flair

The frescoes of spring
Scatter their radiance
And spill a festival of pink
Petals on the mottled green

Your tongue
A wet stem of language
Unfurls
In my mouth
O the fizz
And froth
Of brilliant
Cherry
Blossom
O the thrilling stipple
Of
Pinks

A sear
Of
Rouge weather
Puckers
The streets
Leafy frontage
And shadow
Orchards
Ripen
In the
Blur
Of
Voluptuous
Streets

It is not the bush burning

With imperishable fire
That I search for,

No, I look for the slender
Light of the cherry in spring:
Her shape made all the more thrilling
By the flaunt and call of her pinks.

PAUL GALLAGHER

…………………………………………………

Paul Gallagher’s poem ‘Flair’ opens with the single-phrase line ‘The frescoes of spring’, and we immediately have a union of the classic opposites of art and nature. Read the word ‘frescoes’ and you likely think of the Italian Renaissance. Spring is Nature’s high art, the season in which it decorates the landscape with flair and panache. It is as if the colourful lineaments of spring have been applied to and absorbed by the recently wet landscape, like fresco pigment absorbed by drying plaster.

So far, so good. Most poets would then take their poem’s main metaphor – in this case, of spring as high art – and extend it in various directions. What this poet does is switch abruptly from a rather abstract concept to a sensual close-up of a loved one’s tongue, felt inside his own mouth. The continuity is in the colour pink, from the festival of pink petals in the first stanza to the thrilling stipple of pinks in the second. And now we see the dots and bumps of the tongue’s papillae, and with art still in mind we move from Renaissance painting to the later styles of Impressionism and its offshoot, Pointillism, in which the image is built up with dots of colour. If this strikes you as ‘arty’, then that’s a criticism of the criticism rather than the poem itself, which is boldly sensual. (And it is only one interpretation: much of Gallagher’s poetry, like TS Eliot’s, communicates before it is understood.)

Gallagher is masterful at capturing the various movements of the mind within a single poem. And it feels psychologically right that his mind first takes in the broader picture of spring, appreciating it as classic beauty, and then moves more impressionistically towards detail and how he is emotionally affected by the scene. He then takes a half-step back from this bodily stirring to take in the blur of voluptuous streets – perhaps the setting in which he and his loved one reside. An individual appreciation of beauty has become a shared sensuality.

This isn’t the last twist, however. In the poem’s third section, the ‘I’ – the poet’s ego – asserts itself. The poet isn’t searching for the bush burning with imperishable fire but the slender light of the cherry (tree) in spring. The sense of these lines is that he is more attentive, more faithful to the claims of the tender (i.e. human) things of life than to shrill prophecy. Gallagher’s poetry is certainly strongly coloured by the Catholicism of his upbringing and his reading (he clearly knows his Dante), but as to whether his poems actually express belief – that’s for the reader to judge. These lines in ‘Flair’ are as explicit as Gallagher has dared to be on the subject.

The personification of the cherry tree as a woman in the beautiful closing lines returns us to the image of the loved one in the second section, but now it is less a particular woman that is evoked than the archetype of Woman. Gallagher has his Impressionist moments, but he is a Symbolist at heart.

It only remains to say that when Into Poetry accepted ‘Flair’ for publication, we asked to see more of Gallagher’s poems and were so impressed that we decided to publish a full-length volume of his work. This we have now done, and you will find ‘Flair’ and several other astonishing poems in his debut collection, Fiesta Girl. A modest, unassuming Glaswegian, Gallagher can now be seen by the wider poetry-reading public for what he has long been: one of Scotland’s finest living poets.