Martin Dyar, a poet from Swinford in County Mayo in West Ireland, read his latest poetic volume, “The Meek,” on Sep. 10, in the ZSR Auditorium. “The Meek” was recently published by Wake Forest University Press, whose mission is to “Bring some of the best Irish poetry, current and past, to American readers.” 

Dyar is an instructor of medical humanities in the School of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin and has held writing fellowships at the University of Iowa, the Washington Ireland Program and the University of Limerick.

“The Meek” is Dyar’s second poetic volume, following his Pigott Prize-shortlisted debut “Maiden Names” (Arlen House, 2013) and the anthology “Vital Signs: Poems of Illness and Healing” (Poetry Ireland, 2022). He is also the winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, the Strokestown International Poetry Award and the recipient of an Irish Arts Council Literature Bursary Award.

Dyar began with the poems “Like a Soul,” “In Loving Memory,” nestling in two sonnets in iambic pentameter, a centuries-old form that Dyar feels is “connected to our ears, our bodies.” “The Meek,” which is the title poem and “A Lockdown Fox,” followed by “The History of Medicine,” “The View from St. Catherine’s Hospital,” “Burke’s Goddess,” “A Case of Cormorant,” concluding with “The May Baby.”

Listening to Dyar recite his poems affected me in a number of ways. I was enchanted by how his poems reside close to the bones of both a pastoral Ireland and its natural topography, but also present us with a paradigm that suggests nature is our mother, and she is frigid. The poems struggle with the dichotomy between the life of the habitat and the life of the inhabitants. They are perennial folktales in setting and structure, but the institution of existence in contemporary times is not lost on them, which is why I’m telling you about it. 

I asked Dyar whether the title and his pejorative use of “meekness” in some of the poems was all to suggest that reverential prostration toward nature demands us to be meek. With a vivid coherence I have seldom seen, he replied  that “The Meek” “was not necessarily a crystallized state, but a marker of the times,” indicating that his volume, and poetry more broadly, was demonstrably a reinforcement of what matters, or, as he put it, what is “true North.” He cautioned that “We should be careful whose wordlessness we accept,” a graceful reminder to not give a voice to language unspoken, but to let unspokenness give itself to the impulse of language. 

There are undoubtedly lines of memorable beauty, as in ‘In Loving Memory:’ 

“Like a fool, I keep coming back to the thought.” I felt that line in particular captured the tight coiling of memory and meaning fueling the essential part of us “that is equal to the land.” 

If the true poet is he who actively injects a true reflection of what’s going on in the world into his work, Martin Dyar is a true poet.