Bibliographic record
Abstract
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...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".