Ciarán O’Rourke writes: On the evidence of his work to date – his second poetry collection, The Meek, was published in 2025 – Martin Dyar might be thought of as an able, and often savagely funny, dramatist of the universal human parish. He listens carefully, and reports in verse on what he hears, while compulsively patrolling a zone known to all (and perhaps reminiscent of Cré na Cille), where latent hurts and rancours learn to speak. ‘You must be forceful / in your concentration’, he observes against the clamour, ‘Cold cartography must / define your heart.’
There are some writers for whom history is a driving passion, and time a living field, in which glimpses of what once was, or what might have been, emerge in motion, resurrected. The ethic of voiced revelation that animated Brendan Kennelly’s Cromwell (1983), for instance, is propulsive and enveloping. Dyar works with a comparable vividness, his every poem a pitched address (from an ‘I’ to a ‘you’), and yet his approach is entirely distinct from the mode of vitalised perception that Kennelly marshalled in that book. Dyar’s voices draw their energy from the stasis that surrounds them; they crackle and spew, hovering in a state of prolixity that can be insinuating or mirthful, menacing or love-lorn, depending on the occasion.
Under the seething alchemy of Dyar’s vision, processes of macabre inevitability and exuberant self-assertion commune and co-exist. In ‘Wild Salmon’, the eyes of a local barfly are themselves observed, chanelling ‘an unkind hunger, part heartbreak, / part loquacious, vaguely forgivable lechery’ towards the women who ‘would appear in the small pub a few times a year’. ‘You stand there, seduced, but ready to retreat’, reads his poem ‘The Guru’, ‘accepting / from his presence, from the pressure of his gift, your fear.’
Playwrights (Tom Murphy, Martin McDonagh) and novelists (Kevin Barry, Oisín Fagan) have spun literary gold from the straw-stack of grime-sodden Irish disaffection that Dyar sifts through, transforming little-valley hates and aspirations into verbal opera, with visceral intent. Few poets have ventured into the same territory, however, and fewer again with the sardonic zest that is always present in Dyar’s writing. Life, he writes, with a casual sting worthy of Philip Larkin, is ‘a curiously tragic affair, / with its belated, drunk and circular // evidence of fullness.’
His evocations, for all their precision, can seem deliberately distanced or even mocking, masterfully mimicking his subjects’ blend of verbosity and cunning, as they pursue the ‘misanthropic wealth at the heart of things’. Dramatically charged – his poems surely lend themselves to performance – the poet becomes a disillusionist, positing a resilient spite at the root of human relations. ‘Further out the sea is energetically darkened’, we are told: ‘There is the promise of a rotten afternoon.’ He proceeds like an anatomist of a shared, incurable condition: a ‘clear / extinction’, he perceives, ‘possesses every cell / of language, and every creature’.
Rural vets (Dyar’s personae have little time fort their ‘towny’ rivals) recur in his work, holding a status similar to that of nuns in the poems of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, or turf-cutters in the page-vistas conjured by Seamus Heaney: emblematic figures, whose mundane rituals, closely observed, draw the poet closer to the wonder and melancholy of mortal experiences. ‘The swollen mare,’ begins one poem, ‘an animate hillside dolmen’
was the warmest thing in the field.
In the rain we approached her
with the vet who would insert his arm
into the tight cave of her life,
under her tail, in there, where I imagined
tongues of Braille-flesh spoke things on his hand
that my parents paid him to translate.
In moments Dyar steps off-stage, no more the prodigious entertainer, and delivers a personal recitation, softer and more aching than the finely tuned intensities of his usual style. There are times, he suggests, in the face of all bitterness, when ‘you will feel blessed’:
It’s then that we realise that Dyar may be a love poet, haunted obsessively, indeed, by the thought that ‘all of life is love misunderstood’. The savage ironies he dons like armour appear re-fashioned, as protective coating for the wounded animal inside (‘the bright declining bird my wet shirt shields’), stirringly alert to the wastelands of danger and disappointment it must navigate to survive.
… despite
being stopped in the hall
by a piercing welcome,
a guaranteed sorrow,
and ghosts that know your heart.
The regions – invariably Connacht-coloured – that Dyar maps feel weathered and moulded by ‘clouds of creaturely presence / diffusing together in February light’. He is fascinated by such tactilities, tentative and consuming in equal measure: the filthy web of grace, in which we live enmeshed. We revisit these poems not only for their crafted wit and surging vitality, but because they tell us who we are, helping us to unriddle our own (sometimes tawdry) enigmas, previously unfaced and unregarded.
‘The essential truth is not frightening,’ Dyar almost sings, armed as we are with a ‘set of shielding images’, which his poems have summoned out of nullity. In an age of lurking hopes and squandered possibilities, his is a valuable voice: spirited, unsentimental, brightly alive. Long may it flourish.