Notice bibliographique
Résumé
Reviewed by: The Last Straw by Tom French Thomas O'grady Tom French, The Last Straw, Oldcastle, County Meath: Gallery Books, 2018, pp. 104. €12.50 A lyric poet by nature, Tom French concluded his fourth volume of poems, The Way to Work (Gallery Books, 2016), on an anomalous note—with a coda (his term) titled "1916" in which, provoked by the centenary celebrations of the Easter Rising, he reflects on "the gulf between the beautiful ideals read out to a handful / of rubberneckers and what has become of those ideals." Notwithstanding the bit of international notice it gained for him in the form of an appearance on the radio program Open Source with Christopher Lydon, that poem is a blunt reminder of a distinction once made by Robert Frost: "Poetry is about the grief, politics about the grievances." In The Last Straw, French returns to his more natural pitch and register, characterized by an exactness of both word and phrase: Everything that can be is disconnected. Our fire dies. The starlings, nestedin the eaves, have settled. We have cut the house adrift to sleep . . . He also returns to a form that he clearly feels at home in—the sonnet, mostly unrhymed and mostly deploying flexible lines that work variations on the conventional iambic pentameter pulse of that form. Indeed, fifty of the eighty-nine poems in The Last Straw are fourteen-liners, that formal structure (often three quatrains and a couplet but sometimes either two quatrains and two tercets or four tercets and a couplet) underscoring the rhetorical movement within any given poem. The ending of "Tigh an Táilliúra, Carraroe" yields a typically pleasing example of French's talent for "turning" a sonnet. Describing, in the two quatrains that open the poem, how a customer in a pub suddenly "stands and dances to a jig on the radio," French uses the final six lines to lead the reader to reflect, as he does himself, on the implications of what he witnessed: That was thirty years ago. I have seen men in the throes of dancing since,but none like that man that morning, who stays with me not because he was blind but because he did the only thing he couldwhen the tune came on. He stood. He danced. [End Page 147] That poem is one of a sequence titled "After Hours," set in pubs around Ireland. The Last Straw includes four other sequences. In the seven poems of "Costa Blanca" the poet reflects both gratefully and guiltily on the luxury of a family holiday in Spain during the European immigration crisis. The fifteen poems that make up "Bank" afford a rich historical record of working a turf bank. "Heywood" comprises seven poems recalling the poet's education at the hands (at times literally) of the masters and the teachers at the Salesian College in Ballinakill, County Laois. Focusing on the timepieces of two British soldiers during the Great War of 1914-18 (one of them the poet Edward Thomas), "Two Watches" engages with a subject and a theme that eventually emerge as central to the volume as a whole—in the famous words of British soldier-poet Wilfred Owen: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity." In fact, some of French's most compelling stand-alone poems appear to be inspired by the spirit of Irish soldier Francis Ledwidge that lives on in that star-crossed poet's native County Meath, where French works as a librarian specializing in Local Studies. These include the truly wonderful blank-verse sonnet "Tattie Hokers," which draws on the story of a battalion of the Seaforth Highlanders, a Canadian regiment, pausing on the march between Amiens and Albert in October of 1916 to help a French farmer pick potatoes: "They can't resist / stacking rifles and throwing off backpacks // to postpone death . . ." Imagining how "Mucking in here makes it peace time briefly," French captures the pity of war indeed in his closing tercet: The scent of potatoes brings back the bothy, straw mattresses arrayed on seed boxes,the cow house swept out for men to lie down. Another, "Unidentified Farriers...
Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.
Comment cette classification a été obtenuedéplier
Prédiction distillée sur la base complète
Imitation des enseignantsNi prévalence calibrée, ni vérité terrain. Validation humaine à venir. Apprise à partir de 10 348 étiquettes directes de Codex et de 10 348 étiquettes directes de Gemma. Le mode candidate est l'union des têtes enseignantes seuillées; le consensus est leur intersection. Ces sorties portent le statut machine_predicted_unvalidated et ne sont ni des étiquettes humaines ni des étiquettes directes de modèles de pointe.
Scores Codex et Gemma par catégorie
| Catégorie | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Métarecherche | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens strict) | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens large) | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Bibliométrie | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Études des sciences et des technologies | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Communication savante | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Science ouverte | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Intégrité de la recherche | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Charge utile insuffisante (le modèle a refusé de juger) | 0,008 | 0,002 |
Scores machine (provisoires)
Les deux têtes enseignantes du modèle étudiant, lues sur ce travail. Un score ordonne la base pour la relecture; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie, et le statut de validation accompagne chaque rangée tel quel.
Scores de référence d'un modèle non mature (critères de maturité non atteints, 7 itérations). Un score ordonne; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · tel quel depuis la passe de notation : score_only signifie que le nombre peut ordonner les travaux, et qu'aucune étiquette de catégorie n'en découleClassification
machine, non validéePrédiction automatique; les deux têtes enseignantes s’accordent sur ce qui est montré ici.
Le détail, modèle par modèle et score par score, se trouve en fin de page sous « Comment cette classification a été obtenue ».