Timing is everything. Just after I had bought and begun to read Leon Uris’ award-winning novel on Northern Ireland, Trinity, I received word over the Internet from friends in Ireland of the publication of a new book by a young Irish poet from Belfast named Gearóid Mac Lochlainn. After a few phone calls and a little research, my attention was piqued with such post-publication statements as: “This book presents the reality of life for a community in the North of Ireland whose voice has long been silent. Many of the English language poets made no reference in their work to life such as it is presented here in Stream of Tongues (Sruth Teangatha). However, there is now a new generation of poets emerging in Belfast who are writing about life experiences such as those presented here.”

In the end, I’ve not seen such excitement and clamor over a new young poet’s work since Sherman Alexie hit the American scene some 10 years ago; nor have I had so much fun in reading a new book of poems in translation by a native Irish speaker since Michael Davitt’s 2000 collection The Oomph of Quicksilver. In this sense, similar to the Baby Beats of the San Francisco 1970s Second Renaissance (or “kiddy Kerouacs” as he calls them in the poem “Rite of Passage), Mac Lochlainn begins what might be called in future “the infant INNTIs” — the next generation of strong Celtic voices as was given us in the Irish 70s by the likes of Michael Davitt, Gabriel Rosenstock, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (who has written the effulgent introduction to Stream of Tongues), Catal Searcaigh, et.al. Gearóid Mac Lochlainn’s Belfast is much akin to Alexie’s Spokane reservation and the “things” (as W.C. Williams called them) that symbolize the war between the dominant culture establishment and the marginalized traditional culture. Mac Lochlainn’s poems in this first bilingual collection, while reminiscent of the pop wit and razor-sharp political imagery of Alexie (another poet who can make cultural cliches sound good), also bring to mind other imagined influences such as the political poems of the Franco-era Spanish poet Miguel Hernández.

In a combination of narrative (Beat) and lyric (sean-nós) voice, in Stream of Tongues and the accompanying CD we get Belfast street-lingo meets Billie Holiday, Ramblin’ Jack Eliot and Leonard Cohen. We also get the interior alliteration of Dylan Thomas. This guy has done his homework! Like Thomas, Mac Lochlainn’s poems exude a density of seemingly unconscious brilliance.

“A gloaming cloaked escape/To the cornrake’s tragic urge” — lines from the poem “Stream” are a case in point.

I am also, in reading poems from this collection, made mindful of the work of American lyric poet Jack Hirschman and his love of word-play — the voweling of nouns and the anti-grammatical use of puns and slang — in such Mac Lochlainn lines as “a slowed-strobe discoing the narrow streets.”

In the aptly titled Stream of Tongues, we’re taken into a netherworld of languages: an illuminated amalgam of scat, hip-hop, Gaelic, and comic-book rap — “into the glittering tripwires of the imagination ... swimming through the stardust of lost language ... [by] an oddball just rolled out of lingoland” ... to use Mac Lochlainn’s own words from poems in this collection.

But make no mistake, this is not the ill-literate brand of performance poetry that has invaded the American scene this past decade. This is a mature poetry dealing with the difficulties of existing within the minority Gaelic language culture in the face of the pervading English monoculture and explores the problems it encounters in its search for an effective artistic voice which will honor both the English and Irish speakers within its author. This is a powerful, emotive poetry that has the edge (although softer) of a John Trudell and “the voice” to pull off the spoken-word and music trick.

In many ways Gearóid Mac Lochlainn is a lot like Bobi Jones —in Wales — who, a generation before and not a born speaker, picked up the Welsh language and made it his own; breaking with academic tradition and bringing Welsh (as Mac Lochlainn does the Irish) back into the streets.

“I want to speak, rant, rave, untie tongue till it blooms and bleeds in seven shades of street rhythms.” — from “Poet’s Choice.”

On the CD that comes with the book, Mac Lochlainn’s haunting flute arrangement and recitation of “I Am the Tongue” is as good, in its own way, as anything Dylan Thomas ever recorded. Mac Lochlainn’s voice alone has an inherent lyrical presence — like a softer, more sober Thomas. Listening to the CD, one imagines poems like “Paddy,” (with its mesmerizing jazz accompaniment that is reminiscent of Miles Davis’s “cool” period) and its strong anti-colonial message, going out over the air waves from radio stations all over Ireland:

Inglan is a bitch, dere’s no escapin’ it.

Inglan is a bitch, fi true a noh lie me a tell, a true.

Unlike tried and true poetry and music bands here in the U.S. like The Boatrockers, Poetic Justice and The Bad Dog Band, Mac Lochlainn’s marriage provides a heavy emphasis on the words, with the music used as treatment rather than accompaniment or equal voice. Nowhere is this arrangement technique more evident than in “On the Wing” with its Irish-Tuvan throat singing, and “Barraiocht” with Gearóid assimilating a kind of Irish scat.

Aside from the pure professionalism of the CD recording (Mac Lochlainn is a professional musician and a member of the Irish language reggae band Bréag) I like the fact that the tracks were recorded in the pubs, streets and outdoors in and around Belfast. As Mac Lochlainn himself writes in the “Author’s Notes” at the end of the book: “I did not feel the dead air of the studio was the natural context for poetry or the spoken word.” Spoken like a true bard! A true poet-activist who describes the Northern Ireland situation as “a derailed roller-coaster,” and himself in the midst of this conflict as “a minor poet in a minor war.”

But amidst the lingua franca of the cultural and political poems, there are brilliantly-placed short poems evoking love, or the love of music — poems which serve as welcome relief and, yet, perfect punctuation amidst the war being waged between the language and the heart and the language and the head.

FLUTE

Embers of sound stir

the tawny lung,

rising, falling.

Chatter ebbs

into a rosewood dusk of reels.

Always “trying to catch hold of a word or phrase/deep in the dialect of lair,” Mac Lochlainn’s millennial reach is long enough to create “a new line” — sounding at times like Rimbaud in “Wolf” or Bob Dylan in his “Outlined Epitaphs,” which is quoted at the beginning of the second of three sections, titled “Belfast Blues.” No copyist, Gearóid Mac Lochlainn carries his own weight, and does so with a disciplined openness in poems such as “When the Session’s Over.”

Candle snuffed

whistle blown

glass drained

talk piped down

tunes reeled in.

Magic seeps from the night.

But listen.

Words awake.

Line dancing.

In this book, divided into sections, mention should be made of the “Mo Chara” poems in section III, which begins with an appropriate epigram from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching: “To know the light/become the shadow” and includes some delightful character-driven poems, which are Northern Ireland versions of such familiar American cultural literary icons as Wendell Berry’s “Mad Farmer” and Jim Wayne Miller’s “Briar.” These poems are balanced perfectly by a trilogy of minimalistic, broken-English, call-and-response poems translated by Irish haikuist Gabriel Rosenstock and dedicated to Crazy Horse — honoring the cultural connection shared by the Irish-speaking Irish and the Indians of both American continents as victims of European colonialism.

Finally, with pressures coming from within and without Ireland to succumb to an invasive language, Gearóid Mac Lochlainn has made the decision to make English his second language and to embrace the Irish language as his mainstay. In the poem “Going With the Flow” at the end of the book, he writes: “I think I’ll risk it/and swim in this untamed/deluge of Irish—/you never know ....” Only Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s slightly sarcastic introductory words say it better than I could concerning this bright light on the horizon of 21st century Irish verse: “He’s the real McCoy!”

(Thomas Rain Crowe is the author of 11 books of poetry and translations, including The Laugharne Poems (published in Wales by Gwasg Carreg Gwalch) and Writing the Wind: A Celtic Resurgence (The New Celtic Poetry). He lives and writes in Tuckaseegee, located in Jackson County)