The Fabulous Relatives

Stephen Smith s fabulous relatives are both real and mythologised: his Ulster Protestant forebears slip back into tribal history as even more phantasmagorical characters emerge from the murk of legend, dream and fantasy to haunt him in the present. His book also includes poems from a year spent in Japan in close proximity to even stranger cultural models - poems which try to draw love and understanding from a country which is alienated from itself as well as from its past. The fifty poems in The Fabulous Relatives are variously set in Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, Yugoslavia, Japan, Thailand and India. This geographical unfixity complements the poet s preoccupation with deracines of all kinds (exiles, hitchers, prison inmates, addicts, clowns, sailors, tourists), the reality he depicts being one of unstable national boundaries, tribal conflicts and displaced populations. Patrolling these frayed edges of history , his undeluded poems mercilessly expose those ideological certitudes with which society seeks to paper over its internal contradictions: patriotism, religion, romantic love, the sanctity of the family, a transcendental view of nature, the concept of unified selfhood... Measured against this panorama of futility and strife in which Heaven is empty , no maps are left and home if a foreign country, poetry becomes at best a consolatory art, a struggle for imaginative values in a world which unsinews all utterance. Yet precisely because they internationalise this struggle for meaning...these poems more fully communicate what it feels like to be alive at the close of our unlovely century... The Fabulous Relatives is a truly auspicious debut. On this evidence, Stephen Smith may well become what we so desperately need - a poet capable of acting as a moral barometer for the age - JOHN osborne, Bete Noire