In his fourth poetry collection, the Northern Irish poet and novelist contemplates middle age, parenthood, and human connections found in unlikely places.
Throughout this outstanding collection, there is the sense of an elsewhere, at once tantalizingly close and unreachable. The opening poem, 'Glitch,' describes a fall and the unshakable sense that follows, 'of being wanted somewhere else.' It recalls Emily Dickinson’s line: 'Life is over there–Behind the shelf…' Yet Dickinson’s lonely oddity could not be more different from Laird’s family scene ... Laird is formidably accomplished—his poems range from free verse to villanelle (further exploring freedom and limitation through form)—and is keenly aware that language is only as good or bad as people make it ... Several poems are one better than still lives—they function as animated lives ... But the greatest joy of reading this unmissable collection is Laird’s peripheral vision as a poet: the deer seen from a suburban train; the unplanned signature on a windowsill in deep red dust; the many glimpses of elsewhere.
...haunted by an uneasy attitude toward selfhood ... Feel Freeattempts to gaze unflinchingly...wondering what it means to live a life when a single, knowable self simply won’t hold still ... it seems vital that poetry continue to inquire into twenty-first century selfhood, even in the absence of satisfying conclusions ... That Laird’s poetry does this modestly, even in self-deprecation, does not diminish the courage of the act. If Feel Free does not disabuse too thoroughly readers’ own comforting notions, there is momentary refuge to be found in its wry lucidities — that rare and particular solace of camaraderie borne by good, honest mental company ... If something like 'transcendence' is folded within these pages, it is in these moments where, fraught with doubt as the human experience is, something shines through.
The quarrel in this book is between the language-loving poet for whom one phrase deliquesces into another and the more hard-bitten and judicious figure of 'Autocomplete,' who holds language to account, who wants an ethical warrant for his aesthetic skill. That ethical prerogative is there in poems on the besetting public horrors of Laird’s immediate environments, Grenfell in London, the residue of war in Northern Ireland, race in America and the refugee crisis: these subjects might be said to call for the blunter, more direct treatment they receive. But the highlights of the book are love poems and city poems for the Information Age: the poet’s situations and relationships—as a father, a son, a husband—are sized up and filtered through different kinds of brilliantly manipulated language, often tuned to a distinctive acoustic, an assonance that depends on short vowel sounds ... Feel Free, Laird’s best book yet, features other less flamboyant but equally good poems, including an affecting sequence for his mother, 'The Folding,' and hard, gem-like lyrics, 'Watermelon Seed' and 'Glitch,' and 'La Méditeranée,' which shows his gift for finding original images[.]
