DEEP IN THE HEART OF DERRY

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 22, Number 3 (March 2011), 30.

“The schoolmen were schoolboys first.” So James Joyce has Stephen Dedalus muse in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Ulysses. These words would have made an apt epigraph for The Boys of St. Columb’s (The Liffey Press, 2010), Maurice Fitzpatrick’s book of commentary and interviews published as a companion piece to the film of the same name that he co-wrote and co-produced: both book and film focus on one of the most momentous events in the history of modern Northern Ireland. Generally overshadowed by the outbreak of sectarian violence in the late 1960s that defined the last three decades of the twentieth century in the North, this event is the passage, in 1947, of the Education Act which made secondary education free for any student who passed the auxiliary test known as Eleven Plus. Essentially, in the film and the book, Fitzpatrick sets out to prove a thesis: that the implementation of this act gave rise in a single generation to a professional class of Catholics who would provide visionary leadership in reshaping the social and political culture of Northern Ireland in the last half of the century. His testing ground for this thesis is very specific: St. Columb’s College, a diocesan-run Catholic boys school in the heart of the city of Derry.

For some readers of the book and viewers of the film (available on DVD), the first attraction may be the new insight that Fitzpatrick’s focus offers into two of the best-known and most distinguished alumni of St. Columb’s—Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney and scholar, critic and novelist Seamus Deane. Indeed, these two writers—and the relationship between those two “schoolmen” who were once schoolboys together—figure prominently in Fitzpatrick’s project. Yet they are still just part of a larger ensemble comprising a cross-section of graduates from diverse backgrounds and with diverse interests and talents who went on to become household names in one field or another: musicians Paul Brady and Phil Coulter; politician and Nobel Peace Prize recipient John Hume; well-traveled ambassador James Sharkey; political activist Eamonn McCann, one of the founders of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s; and Edward Daly, Bishop of Derry from 1974 to 1993 (the heart of the so-called “Troubles”) who as Fr. Daly had become known worldwide through the image of him waving a blood-stained white handkerchief while ministering to a mortally wounded victim of the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972.

While some of these men knew each other during their years at St. Columb’s (mostly during the late 1940s and the 1950s) and while most have in later life crossed orbital paths with each other, what they really have as their first common denominator is the experience of attending St. Columb’s. That in itself proves fascinating for the viewer of the film and the reader of the book, as each of the eight men featured has a unique recollection of and a unique set of reflections on that experience. For instance, the experience of attending the school was vastly different—in some cases for better, in some cases for worse—for boarders and for day students. It was also vastly different depending on personal domestic circumstances and individual sensibility. For some of Fitzpatrick’s subjects, their time at the college was transformative in a mostly affirming way. Phil Coulter, for example, asserts: “I would have no doubt that whatever combination of talent, tenacity, temperament and work ethic I have, I would owe that to St. Columb’s.” Likewise, James Sharkey remembers his final two years as “really a preparation for something extraordinary”: “No matter how much you were a rebel and rejected education, you were always aware that there were teachers of a certain sophistication with whom you empathised. . . . I owe those people a special debt of gratitude.”

For others, however, the St. Columb’s experience was utterly traumatic. A day student from the lower-class Bogside area of Derry, Eamonn McCann remembers being treated as “an interloper” and remembers also that “The regime at St. Columb’s was quite brutal and was run by fear”: “It was run by a lot of brutality—not just slaps but the use of fists. I was knocked unconscious in an Irish class once for something very, very trivial.” Paul Brady is even more emphatic as he summons up his earliest memories of the school as experienced by a sensitive bespectacled boy from the town of Strabane, Co. Tyrone: “Shock, horror, awe, shock. I had no experience that was going to prepare me for going into a boarding school. Being in a monocultural, monosex kind of atmosphere was quite a shock to me, and it took me a long time to get accustomed to it. I didn’t have any experience of other parts of Northern Ireland, say east of the Sperrin Mountains which is a whole different vibe altogether, with strange accents, which now I know to be only south Derry accents and Antrim accents. But at the time they might have been from Timbuktu to me.” Of the eight alumni of St. Columb’s interviewed by Maurice Fitzpatrick, Brady seems to have suffered the most from the concomitant cultures of violence and of conformity imposed equally by the priests and the lay teachers at the school and either resigned to or absorbed as the norm by the vast majority of the students. His interview is particularly poignant.

Not surprisingly, not one of Fitzpatrick’s subjects is unequivocally nostalgic about his experience at St. Columb’s. But of all the interviewees, Seamus Deane is most detailed—and uncompromisingly so—in his analysis of the ministry of fear (as it were) that defined life at the college. Perceiving the institution of the Catholic Church as “a system of authority that was changing itself into a system of power, and doing that mistakenly under the aegis of the Socialist Government’s Education Act,” Deane parses with riveting rigor the complex implications of the dynamic that played out at St. Columb’s: “They couldn’t handle the effect of that legislation. The Roman Catholic Church couldn’t remain what it had been: once they had to teach the working classes, their class prejudice revealed itself. Every one of them was anxious nevertheless to exert authority, reproducing the structures of domination that the state had used; mass education exposed a church that had won respect from being oppressed. The myth of the priest could not survive his becoming a teacher in a strenuous situation. So it was sort of a melancholy place in that respect, made the more so by the excellence of some of the very good teachers.”

Yet the prevailing theme of The Boys of St. Columb’s remains that articulated by Seamus Heaney in response to Maurice Fitzpatrick’s question about the enduring “impact” of the 1947 Education Act. Appreciating how “people with merit, with intelligence, were given the scholarship, so that talent brought forward a whole new set of people,” Heaney elaborates: “That arrival into the adult population, eventually, of educated people from the working class, from farming backgrounds, brought a new kind of critical intelligence, a new kind of appetite for excellence into play. They had a sense of adventure, a sense of themselves as a generation with some sense of possibility and advantage and renewal. They were aware of the people who hadn’t got the advantages in their family and among their neighbours. They were political in that they had a strong sense of being responsible.”

And in that regard the resonance—and thus the importance—of The Boys of St. Columb’s as a documentary record extends far beyond even the engaging “tales told out of school,” about school, by an octet of men as candid as they are articulate. One way in which their personal stories resonates is as evidence of the value of education in the particular context of Northern Ireland: as Fitzpatrick asserts in his Introduction to the book, behind the stock images of the Northern predicament and the sectarian conflict—first the media shots of posturing politicians and then the literal shots and explosions heard ’round the world—there was “history to be understood.” Perhaps just as important is the broader message that the film sends out about education as the great liberator because it is first the great equalizer. The Boys of St. Columb’s is thus a sort of parable for how education—not arms or armies—can be the vehicle for change not just in one particular context but globally.

POETRY AND GRIEF: JAMES JOYCE'S "TILLY"

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 21, Number 10 (October 2010), 18.

For the past few weeks, for one reason or another, I have been thinking about poetry and grief—or more specifically, about poems which register and express grief over the loss of a loved one. I have been especially attuned to lyric poems—concise and precise articulations of the emotions involving loss that provide what Robert Frost once called “a momentary stay against confusion.” (Incidentally, Frost also once observed: “Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.”) The Irish may not have the market cornered on this sort of poem, but Irish writers have certainly turned out their fair share.

One obvious example, frequently anthologized, is Seamus Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break,” an early poem in which he recalls the death of a younger brother struck and killed by a car while the future poet, still just a boy himself, is away at boarding school. The poem leads the reader through the whole experience—from the news reaching young Seamus at school, through his being driven home by neighbors, then seeing his father in tears and being embarrassed by “old men standing up to shake my hand // And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble.’” What stays with the reader, however, is neither the glimpse of the poet’s distraught mother coughing out “angry tearless sighs” nor even the arresting image of his little brother in the first two lines of the final tercet—“Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple, / He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.” Rather, reinforced by full rhyme with the penultimate line of the poem (“No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear”), the recognition etched in the standalone final line is also etched indelibly in the reader’s memory: “A four foot box, a foot for every year.” In his essay “Hamlet and His Problems,” poet T. S. Eliot describes the challenge faced by the artist attempting to convey a complex and subtle emotion: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” Acknowledging the almost unspeakable sadness of a child’s death, the equation that Heaney draws between his brother’s life cut short and the miniature coffin he lies in reads as a classic example of Eliot’s idea.

The objective correlative may not be the only way to express publicly an emotion as private as grief, but it certainly works in “Reo” by Seán Ó Ríordáin, considered by many readers and scholars the preeminent Irish-language poet of the twentieth century. In an essay on Ó Ríordáin in his book Repossessions: Selected Essays on the Irish Literary Heritage, Professor Seán Ó Tuama observes that in this poem “Ó Ríordáin consciously or unconsciously reverses and transforms one of the oldest European love-formulas, that of the poet walking out one leafy summer morning and meeting a fair lady. Here it is a winter morning, frost in the air, the boughs bare and he encounters not love but death. . . . This is quite probably . . . [a] lament for his mother, beautiful, unique, and absolutely in the Irish as well as in the European tradition.” Translated as “Frozen” by Valentine Iremonger, in its matter-of-factness “Reo” requires no paraphrase:

On a frosty morning I went out
And a frozen handkerchief faced me on a bush.
I reached to put it in my pocket
But it slid from me for it was frozen.
No living cloth jumped from my grasp
But a thing that died last night on a bush,
And I went searching in my mind
Till I found its real equivalent:
The day I kissed a woman of my kindred
And she in the coffin, frozen, stretched.

Interestingly, in his recent translation of “Reo,” Greg Delanty substitutes for “equivalent” the word “correlative”—a telling nod toward T. S. Eliot in this poem in which the disconcerting frozenness of the handkerchief transmits to the reader the disconcerting personal loss that is the poem’s true subject.

For both Patrick Kavanagh and James Joyce, the loss of a beloved father likewise demands an expression of grief more crystallized than discursive. In “Memory of My Father,” Kavanagh invites the reader to see the personal in the same way that he does—relative to the universal:

Every old man I see
Reminds me of my father
When he had fallen in love with death
One time when sheaves were gathered.

For Kavanagh, the absence of his father (who died in 1929, ten years before this poem was written) is accentuated poignantly by various paternal avatars whom the poet encounters randomly: “That man I saw in Gardiner Street / Stumble on the kerb,” “the musician / Faltering over his fiddle / In Bayswater, London.” Paradoxically, his father becomes an enduring presence by way of the familiar figure cut by these men.

For Joyce, the objective correlative resides in a different sort of universal—in the cycle of generational death and birth illuminated for him by the birth of his grandson Stephen shortly after the death of John Joyce, the author’s father. In a letter written in Paris on January 1st, 1932 (coincidentally, to T. S. Eliot), Joyce explained how his sorrow over his father’s death two days earlier was compounded by guilt over his rigid adherence to self-imposed exile from Ireland: “He had an intense love for me and it adds anew to my grief and remorse that I did not go to Dublin to see him for so many years. I kept him constantly under the illusion that I would come and was always in correspondence with him but an instinct which I believed in held me back from going, much as I longed to.” Six weeks later, on the day his grandson was born, February 15th, Joyce captured in the concluding quatrain of his succinct four-stanza poem “Ecce Puer” (Latin for “behold the boy-child”) the essence of filial grief:

A child is sleeping:
An old man gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son!

But the poem of Joyce’s that I keep returning to with regard to the expression of grief is one that he wrote in 1904, in response to the death of his mother, Mary Jane (“May”) Murray Joyce, in August of 1903. Joyce originally titled the poem “Cabra,” after the northside Dublin community where the family was living (at 7 St. Peter’s Terrace) at the time of Mrs. Joyce’s passing, and originally intended to include it in his volume Chamber Music, published in 1907. But feeling that its sober tone did not fit with the rest of that gathering, he withdrew it and withheld it from publication until 1927, when he placed it, re-titled “Tilly,” at the opening of his 13-poem chapbook Pomes Penyeach. (The word “tilly” means “a little bit extra”—which seems to be how Joyce thought of this poem relative to the others in the volume, which were all written between 1912 and 1924 in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris.)

Comprising three free-verse quatrains, “Tilly” begins with a two-stanza depiction of a cattle drover written from the perspective that Joyce has his character Stephen Dedalus describe in A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man as the “dramatic form”—the literary point of view in which “The personality of the artist . . . refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak”:

He travels after a winter sun,
Urging the cattle along a cold red road,
Calling to them, a voice they know,
He drives his beasts above Cabra.

The voice tells them home is warm.
They moo and make brute music with their hoofs.
He drives them with a flowering branch before him,
Smoke pluming their foreheads.

Crucially, though, the third stanza represents a shift in perspective to what Stephen Dedalus calls “the lyrical form”—“the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself”—as the introduction of the first-person point of view (the “I” in the third line) reflects Joyce’s acknowledgement of a profound personal investment in the poem’s subject matter:

Boor, bond of the herd,
Tonight stretch full by the fire!
I bleed by the black stream
For my torn bough!

In effect, the broken-off branch used by the drover as a switch to steer the cattle homeward becomes for the speaker in the poem (ostensibly Joyce himself) what Stephen Dedalus calls “the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of emotion”—the emblem of what has been irreparably broken in the life of the speaker: it becomes what the alert reader might recognize in other words as an objective correlative for irreversible loss. Read this way, this “tilly” of a poem written in 1904 stands not only as a subtle lyric poem in its own right but also an intriguing companion piece to the “Telemachus” episode of Joyce’s masterwork Ulysses, set on the morning of June 16th, 1904, which focuses in large part on Stephen Dedalus’ unresolved feelings of grief—like Joyce’s own—regarding the death of his mother almost a year earlier.

(AP)PRAISING MICHAEL HARTNETT

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 21, Number 8 (August 2010), 22.

One of the many wonderful scenes in Flann O’Brien’s novel At Swim-Two-Birds has Jem Casey, “the Poet of the Pick and the Bard of Booterstown,” kneeling to assist the injured King Sweeny, a man of words in his own right: “poet on poet, a bard unthorning a fellow-bard,” O’Brien inscribes that moment. Almost inevitably I thought of that scene when I finally sat down with Notes from His Contemporaries: A Tribute to Michael Hartnett, a substantial book of poems and prose that landed on my doorstep around a year ago. A poet of remarkable range and depth who is yet generally overlooked, and thus underestimated, by readers and critics alike, Michael Hartnett died in 1999 at the young age of 58. Commemorating one of Ireland’s most intriguing poets of the last half of the twentieth century, this large-format softcover—compiled and privately published by his son Niall—is aptly titled, as it invokes a series of engaging poems, “Notes on My Contemporaries,” that Hartnett composed in the late 1960s praising and appraising a number of his fellow Irish poets, some of whom return the favor here. Poet on poet and bard on bard, indeed.

Hartnett may be best known for his early poem “A Small Farm,” which opens memorably: “All the perversions of the soul / I learnt on a small farm. . . .” He is also legendary for his decision in the mid-1970s to abandon (temporarily, as it turns out) the English language to write only in Irish; he made his intention known in a powerful poem titled “A Farewell to English”:

I have made my choice
and leave with little weeping:
I have come with meagre voice
to court the language of my people.

Yet his output was prodigious and included not only his own poems in English and in Irish but also indispensable translations of seventeenth-century Irish-language poets Dáibhí Ó Bruadair and Pádraigín Haicéad and early eighteenth-century poet Aodhagán Ó Rathaille. Tellingly, though, every time I browse around in the sampler of his work gathered in his Collected Poems, published in 2001 by Gallery Press, I end up contemplating one knotty line, in his “Note” on contemporary Thomas Kinsella, that seems to sum up Hartnett’s own poetic vision: “To poets peace poetry never yields.”

And that is certainly an essential theme that emerges, with multiple variations and permutations, from the memories of and tributes to Hartnett gathered in Notes from His Contemporaries. Remembering a period of particular darkness in her own life, short story writer Emma Cooke recalls picking up the telephone and hearing Hartnett’s voice reciting to her a line from one of his early poems: “Sad singing in darkness is our burden.” As many of the contributors observe, Hartnett’s poetic introspection probed the darkness of both the inner self and the world outside the self, and his poetry may have been the saving grace in a life frequently destabilized by the poet’s weakness for drink and by shaky health. The final stanza of Gabriel Fitzmaurice’s poem written in memory of Hartnett—“So What If There’s No Happy Ending?”—indeed suggests as much:

Open the door into darkness,
There’s nothing at all to fear—
Just the black dogs barking, barking
As the moon and stars appear.

In “End,” a poem as brief and yet also as expressive as a calligraphic brushstroke, Peter Fallon, Hartnett’s publisher at Gallery Press, sums up his life in similar terms:

End of sureness, end of doubt—

when the darkness
like a light
went out.

Yet most contributors also emphasize the remarkable resiliency of Hartnett’s spirit, as well as his hospitality and generosity and the good companionship he provided whether in a pub, in a country kitchen, or on a long car ride. One of the stories attached to the poet is that when he was a young boy, a flock of wrens landed and perched on his shoulders—“a necklace of wrens,” Hartnett himself referred to this event in the title poem of a dual-language edition of a selection of his poems written originally in Irish. (At the time of the incident, Hartnett was living with his grandmother on a farm just outside Newcastle West in Co. Limerick: she interpreted this phenomenon as evidence that he would become a poet.) Thus, as his friend Pat O’Brien observes, when he died, many of his acquaintances and admirers naturally thought of the essence of Hartnett in avian terms: “everyone one spoke with . . . would resort to images of birds. Sometimes to try to express the lyric sweetness of his poetry even when its note was ominous about the world and its brutality against people and nature and culture. Sometimes to hold the man in a worthy metaphor. He walked the country lanes, or the city streets with the grace of heights. He would always seem ready to take flight, to leave the heaviness of the earth, the concerns of the day, the gravity of his health for clearer skies.” Michael Coady casts him specifically as a wren:

You were a wren in your ways and shapes,
King of the birds that could roost in the holly,
Land on the leaf or dart to the light,
Drop out betimes and go into hiding . . .

Organized alphabetically by contributor—from Leland Bardwell to Macdara Woods— Notes from His Contemporaries stands as a monument of words to Hartnett the poet and the man. Clearly, Niall Hartnett had no trouble lining up a Who’s Who of contemporary Irish poetry to help remember his father: John Montague, Seamus Heaney, and Eavan Boland, Paula Meehan, Pat Boran, and Greg Delanty, Paul Durcan, Liam Ó Muirthile, and Gabriel Rosenstock. (Moreover, he managed to capture most of the contributors in handsome black-and-white photographic portraits that add to the appeal of this book.) While the poems testify, at times touchingly, to Hartnett’s place of high esteem among his peers, several of the prose pieces offer valuable insight into the mind of the man and the poet. One of these is an interview from 1987 conducted by fellow poet Dennis O’Driscoll, whose wide-ranging questions prompt engaged and engaging responses. Asked about his readiness to employ “rhetorical language” in his writing, Hartnett acknowledges the influence of 18th-century Irish-language poets (and fellow Limerick men) Seán Ó Tuama and Andrias MacCraith: “When I was quite young, I became very conscious of these poets and, so, read them very closely indeed. Through them, without going into their elaborate syntax, I became unafraid of rhetoric as such.” On whether Irish or English is his default language, he replies: “I’ve got over the notion of having intellectual schizophrenia about it. There was a period, especially in the beginning, when one line would come out in English and the next in Irish. ‘The Retreat of Ita Cagney,’ for example, almost broke my heart and indeed my mind to write, because both languages became so intermeshed. One is not a translation of the other. They are two versions of the same poem; but what the original language is I don’t know.”

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s account of how Hartnett came to write his poem “Foighne Chrainn” (“Patience of a Tree”) is likewise illuminating. She tells how the poem was inspired by her encounter with a malevolent female spirit known to haunt the Bearna Gap in the vicinity of Templeglantine, Co. Limerick, where Hartnett lived at one point. The folklore involving Spiorad na Bearnan centers on her being imprisoned in a tree that was then burned down by seven local young men. After six of them “came to a bad end” for their shared misdeed, the seventh fled to London, but according to Hartnett’s poem, he still could not escape his fate: “Bhí an scian roimh ann / ’s cé gur miotal í an lann / snoíodh an fheirc as díoltas crann” (“The knife was waiting there / and though metal formed the blade / from a tree’s revenge / the hilt was made”).

Perhaps someday Michael Hartnett will find his deserved expanded readership. Notes from His Contemporaries can only help in that regard, as making my way through the poems and the anecdotes, the praise and the appraisals, I found myself drawn irresistibly to the Collected Poems, which must ultimately be his claim to enduring recognition. His son recognizes that too in the simple dedication of the volume he conceived and compiled: “For the Poet.”

WHEN IN PARIS . . .

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 21, Number 7 (July 2010), 14.

A particularly satisfying moment in James Joyce’s Ulysses occurs in the third episode of the novel, when Stephen Dedalus, unhappily sharing living quarters in a Martello tower in Sandycove with the irreverent Buck Mulligan and miserably holding down a teaching position in a private boys’ school in nearby Dalkey, recalls his sojourn in Paris cut short by a summons to his dying mother’s bedside back in Dublin almost a full year earlier: “My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want puce gloves. You were a student, weren’t you? Of what in the other devil’s name? Paysayenn. P.C.N., you know: physiques, chimiques et naturelles. Aha. Eating your groatsworth of mou en civet, fleshpots of Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural tone: when I was in Paris, boul’ Mich’, I used to.” In light of Stephen’s self-inflating assertion at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—“I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race”—this self-deprecating musing on the bohemian pose he struck in Paris is truly refreshing, as he finally shows a capacity to look at himself with a healthy measure of the irony with which Joyce (the artist as an older man) viewed his quasi-autobiographical character in A Portrait.

I was thinking of that moment, among others in Ulysses, during a recent visit to Paris in which I walked a few miles in the footsteps of both the fictional Stephen Dedalus and the real-life expatriate Joyce himself. Probably the best account of Joyce’s several periods of living in “the city of lights” is Richard Ellmann’s magisterial biography of Joyce first published in 1959 and revised in 1982. He devotes parts of two early chapters to Joyce’s first two visits to Paris, several weeks in December of 1902 and then a period from January to April of 1903 which ended abruptly when the artist as a young man received a dismaying telegram from his father: “MOTHER DYING COME HOME FATHER.” These visits provided Joyce with the raw material for Stephen’s recollection of his quickly aborted career as a French medical student as well as for Stephen’s obviously inauspicious start as an expatriate artist.

Introducing Joyce’s next extended visit to Paris, which began in July of 1920, Ellmann writes matter-of-factly: “He came to Paris to stay a week and remained for twenty years.” (Between 1904 and 1920, Joyce had lived variously in Pola, Rome, Trieste, and Zurich.) And that is the point where I really began to trace a few of the steps taken by Joyce—in particular the steps he took relative to the publication, in 1922, of what he called his “damned monster novel”: Ulysses. Specifically, I became intrigued by the story of how Ulysses came to be published by a small bookshop in Paris, Shakespeare and Company, owned by one Sylvia Beach.

Miss Beach (as Joyce always referred to her) has told the tale herself, with simple elegance, in a memoir titled Shakespeare and Company (1959). American born and bred, Beach opened her English-language bookstore and lending library (supported by patron subscription) in 1919 in a former laundry at 8 rue Dupuytren in the heart of Paris’s Left Bank district. In 1921, she relocated to a larger space nearby at 12 rue de l’Odéon. At that address she became the center of a literary and artistic coterie that included expatriate American writers Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, photographer Man Ray, and pianist-composer George Antheil. (The dynamic within this circle of friends and acquaintances has been engagingly detailed by Noel Riley Fitch in his book Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties.) But for Beach herself, the history of her bookstore revolves around her relationship with James Joyce, her literary idol before she met him and the focus of much of her energies after she approached him timidly at a dinner gathering hosted by mutual friends: “Trembling, I asked: ‘Is this the great James Joyce?’ ‘James Joyce,’ he replied. We shook hands; that is, he put his limp, boneless hand in my tough little paw—if you can call that a handshake.”

Beach’s account of her friendship and interaction with Joyce is rich in detail: “Joyce’s voice, with its sweet tones pitched like a tenor’s, charmed me. His enunciation was exceptionally clear. His pronunciation of certain words such as ‘book’ (bōō-k) and ‘look’ (lōō-k) and those beginning with ‘th’ was Irish, and the voice particularly was Irish.” Just as rich is her account of her bold offer to publish Ulysses on the speculation that she would sell a sufficient number of advance subscriptions to book collectors and devoted readers to warrant the printing of 1000 copies of the first edition. William Butler Yeats was foremost among Irish writers to order a copy; George Bernard Shaw declined to do so, concluding a very witty letter by explaining, “I am an elderly Irish gentleman, and if you imagine that any Irishman, much less an elderly one, would pay 150 francs for such a book, you little know my countrymen.” With its many twists and turns of plot, subplot and counterplot, Beach’s telling of how she managed to see Ulysses into print—months later than promised to her subscribers but still in time for an advance copy to be delivered to Joyce’s flat on the morning of his 40th birthday, February 2, 1922—testifies not only to her determination and her ingenuity but even more to her unflagging belief in James Joyce as literary artist.

For me, then, 12 rue de l’Odéon, the address of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop that Joyce frequented on almost a daily basis in the early 1920s, was an essential site of pilgrimage during my visit to Paris. The site is currently marked by a simple plaque that reads: “En 1922, dans cette maison, Melle Sylvia BEACH publia ‘ULYSSES’ de James JOYCE.” While the façade of the shop has changed dramatically, Joyce himself might be pleased, and amused, that the space is now a women’s clothing shop; after all, in the eighth episode of Ulysses, he has Leopold Bloom dally admiringly before a display of women’s silks in the windows of Brown Thomas on Grafton Street in Dublin: “Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.”

Sylvia Beach managed to maintain the Shakespeare and Company bookshop until 1941, coincidentally the year of Joyce’s death in Zurich, where he had returned at the outbreak of World War II. Ultimately, the shop was forced to close during the German occupation of Paris, with the decisive moment being Beach’s rejection of a German officer’s request to purchase her last copy of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which had been published in 1939. Her memoir concludes with the liberation of Paris by American troops and specifically with Ernest Hemingway, “in battle dress, grimy and bloody,” overseeing the elimination of German rooftop snipers from rue de l’Odéon.

And yet Shakespeare and Company lives on in Paris in the name of another bookshop of legendary stature. This one is located on the Left Bank of the Seine almost directly across the river from le Cathédrale de Notre Dame. Owner George Whitman, another American expatriate, opened it as Le Mistral in 1951 but changed the name to honor Sylvia Beach’s memory and legacy after her death in 1962. In large part because of the Joycean association (albeit once-removed), it too has become a place of pilgrimage for literary-minded visitors to Paris. But it also has a unique history and character and charm of its own (including a dozen or so stations where travelers may bed down at night for the price of an hour’s work in the shop). I enjoyed a sojourn in its restful second-floor reading room, reacquainting myself with We’ll to the Woods No More, Stuart Gilbert’s translation of Edouard Dujardin’s novel Les Lauriers Sont Coupés, which Joyce credited as the precursor for the narrative technique of “interior monologue” that he employs in much of Ulysses. But that is a story for another time.

HEANEY'S TOLLUND MAN REVISITED

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 21, Number 6 (June 2010), p.18.

Recently, I happened upon an interview with Seamus Heaney published more than thirty years ago in the literary journal Ploughshares. Having read countless other interviews with Heaney over the decades, most of them involving variations on the thematic territory of his poetry’s relationship to the political and sectarian divide in his native Northern Ireland, I wondered if I would find much new in this one. True to form, Heaney is thoughtful, thorough, and articulate in responding to the questions posed by interviewer James Randall—and some of his answers have a conversational freshness suggesting that in 1979, still a relatively early point in his lengthily illustrious career, he had not proffered them literally “countless” times already.

One of the answers that I found particularly intriguing, in part because Heaney has his defensive hackles up, involves the poet’s reaction to the skepticism that some critics expressed toward his engagement, in his landmark volume North (1975), with the photographs, reproduced in P. V. Glob’s book The Bog People, of unearthed bodies that had been buried sacrificially in Scandinavian bogs during the Iron Age. “I’m very angry,” Heaney admitted, “with a couple of snotty remarks by people who don’t know what they are talking about and speak as if the bog images were picked up for convenience instead of being, as I’m trying to take this opportunity to say, a deeply felt part of my own life, a revelation to me.” The most notorious critique of Heaney’s focus on Glob’s images was yet to come: David Lloyd’s essay “‘Pap for the Dispossessed’: Seamus Heaney and the Poetics of Identity.” Published in 1985, this provocative piece took Heaney severely to task for a general romanticizing of Irish culture, including the culture of violence, that culminated in the bog-centered poems in North. “This is effectively to reduce Irish history to myth,” Lloyd wrote, “furnishing an aesthetic resolution to conflicts constituted in quite specific historical junctures by rendering disparate events as symbolic moments expressive of an underlying continuity of identity.”

In “Feeling Into Words,” a lecture presented to the Royal Society of Literature in 1974, Heaney recounted how he happened upon Glob’s book at the very time that he was casting about for some way by which his poetry might have a voice in the conversation and debate related to Northern Ireland’s political predicament. Invoking Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65, which asks what force might withstand the ravages of time—“How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?”—Heaney, like Shakespeare (who answered his own question with “in black ink my love may still shine bright”), put his faith in words, hoping that “befitting emblems of adversity” (a phrase he borrowed from Yeats’s poem “Meditations in Time of Civil War”) might help to illuminate the nature of the predicament. That is, those “befitting emblems” might help his community to recognize that the conflict is more “archetypal” than the mere religious differences, themselves emblematizing social and economic bigotry, between Catholics and Protestants. For Heaney reflecting on this matter in 1974, “the religious intensity of the violence” was more complex than a simple Catholic Nationalist / Protestant Unionist “sectarian division”: it was “a struggle between the cults and devotees of a god and a goddess”—a struggle between the “territorial piety” of those loyal to a tutelary goddess (Ireland conventionally feminized) and the “imperial power” (embodied in the British monarch) of those who have “temporarily usurped her sovereignty.” For critics like David Lloyd, Heaney’s engagement with Glob resulted in mere “pap,” a verbal stirabout cooked up for an audience content with being spoon-fed vague sentiment and watered-down rhetoric.

Yet, while Heaney might have been merely disappointed in the failure of certain readers to appreciate what Robert Frost refers to as the inherent “ulteriority” of poetry—poetry as “metaphor, saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another”—he seems to have taken altogether personally the stance of those skeptics (including Lloyd, eventually) who discredited his immediate reaction, literally visceral, when he first looked into The Bog People. Describing in “Feeling Into Words” how “the unforgettable photographs of these victims blended in my mind with the photographs of atrocities, past and present, in the long rites of Irish political and religious struggles,” Heaney adds that when he wrote “The Tollund Man,” the first of his poems to engage directly with Glob’s book, “I had a completely new sensation, one of fear.” For Lloyd, this fear that Heaney felt in imagining a personal pilgrimage to Aarhaus in Denmark to view the most famous of the exhumed bog bodies—“Out there in Jutland / In the old man-killing parishes / I will feel lost, / Unhappy and at home”—gets reduced by its “metaphoric frame” to “a writing whose dangers have been defused into pathos.”

But in dismissing Heaney’s engagement with The Bog People as a matter of “convenience,” do Lloyd and company actually underestimate—or fail entirely to understand—the very manner in which, as Heaney explains in his interview with Randall, the images in Glob’s book were “a revelation” to him not just as poet but as person? I think so, especially in light of the extent to which Heaney’s initial response to the photographs in Glob’s book might be understood in terms articulated by philosopher and cultural critic Roland Barthes in his book Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Iconoclastic when first published in French in 1980, Barthes’ study has become iconic, and his terms studium and punctum, used to describe how certain photographs catch the eye of the viewer, have become widely accepted in photography circles.

In fact, Heaney’s account in the Ploughshares interview of how he was captivated specifically by the first photo in the book, a close-up of the head of the Tollund Man, resonates fully with Barthes’ defining of punctum as an element of a photograph that “rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.” (In contrast, a photograph’s studium involves simply the basic subject matter, not the impact of the image on an individual viewer.) Remarking how the head of the Tollund Man “has had an enormous effect on anybody who ever looked at it,” Heaney admits outright the poignant connection he felt with the shriveled but remarkably well-preserved two thousand-year-old figure excavated from the Danish bog: “The Tollund Man seemed to me like an ancestor almost, one of my old uncles, one of those mustached archaic faces you used to see all over the Irish countryside. I just felt very close to this.”

That is not to say that Heaney’s discovery of The Bog People was pure accident: no doubt he was drawn to Glob’s book by his deep-rooted fascination with his native Irish bog—his “genuine obsession,” as he put it to interviewer Randall—whose sensuous mystery he had expressed in “Bogland,” the concluding poem of his volume Door Into the Dark, in 1969: “The wet centre is bottomless.” But his turning the page to the photograph of the Tollund Man seems truly to have involved what Roland Barthes calls “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” Recalling his initial response to the images in The Bog People, Heaney tells interviewer James Randall: “This wasn’t thought out. It began with a genuinely magnetic, almost entranced, relationship with those heads.” Indeed, a first line of defense against charges that Heaney’s “bog poems” were part of some cynically conceived program proffering the “pap” of “aesthetic resolution” to his “dispossessed” readers might be the fact that his punctum-prompted poem “The Tollund Man” was included utterly inconspicuously in the middle of his volume Wintering Out (1972).

In an interview with Seamus Deane in 1977, Heaney described how the poems in North “arose out of a necessity to shape and give palpable linguistic form” to the “urgency” he felt regarding Northern Ireland’s political complexity in the mid-1970s. Inspired (or “wounded,” as Barthes would say) by the literal lens that preserved on film the bodies preserved in the Scandinavian bogs, Heaney offered in his poems not a “resolution”—aesthetic or otherwise—to that complexity but rather an alternative lens (as it were) through which his readers might view its “religious intensity”: this was the lens of poetic “ulteriority”—of “saying one thing in terms of another.”

PLAYING NOW: RODDY DOYLE'S "NEW BOY"

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 20, Number 6 (June 2009), p. 10.

The so-called Celtic Tiger, a period of unprecedented economic prosperity in Ireland, seems now to have lost much of its bite. But its teeth marks—at least in the form of unprecedented social changes underwritten in large part by that prosperity—appear to be deeply permanent, and the title story of Roddy Doyle’s collection The Deportees (2007) provides one gauge of the transformation that occurred in Ireland during the Tiger's two-decade flourishing. Bringing back to literary life the character of Jimmy Rabbitte, Jr., the protagonist of Doyle’s first novel, The Commitments (1987), “The Deportees” is a sequel (of sorts) in that Jimmy, now married and with three children (a fourth arrives in the course of the story), still harbors the dream of managing a commercially successful group of Irish musicians.

In The Commitments, the band he organized performed American “soul music”—the songs of Otis Redding and James Brown and Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett—under the premise articulated by Jimmy to the band members this way in the 1991 adaptation of the novel to the big screen, directed by Alan Parker: “Do you not get it, lads? The Irish are the blacks of Europe. And Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. And the northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin. So say it once, say it loud—I’m black and I’m proud.” In “The Deportees” Jimmy assembles an even more motley crew to perform the music mostly of Woody Guthrie, the so-called “dustbowl troubadour” whose songs both record and represent a substantial swatch of the historical fabric of depression-era American life. Besides the music they perform, the most conspicuous difference between Jimmy’s two bands is the ethnic makeup. Reflecting on the radical change that mass immigration from continental Europe, from Africa, and beyond brought to Ireland by the mid-1990s, Roddy Doyle writes in his Foreword to The Deportees: “I went to bed in one country and woke up in a different one.” This is the country that Jimmy Rabbitte finds himself in two decades after the heyday of The Commitments when, bumped into and knocked over by a young Romanian on Parnell Street, then run over by an Italian bicycle courier, he experiences an epiphany that even the ultra-cosmopolitan James Joyce would have had trouble imagining exactly a century earlier. Helped to his feet by the Romanian lad and by an African woman, he realizes that his new band must literally embody Dublin’s new multi-ethnic demographic: “Jimmy’s head was hopping as he stood up. . . . But he was grinning. Jimmy had his group.”

Detailing the evolving dynamic—both musical and interpersonal—of The Deportees, the rest of the story reads as a sort of parable of multicultural co-existence in latter-day Dublin. Indeed, comprising an imposing lead singer from Africa named King Robert, a drummer from Moscow, a young woman guitarist from America, a djembe drummer from Nigeria, a woman singer from Spain, a Romanian father and son on accordion and trumpet respectively, a guitarist from Roscommon, a female survivor (still purple-haired) of Dublin’s punk scene of the late 1970s on bass, and sixty-year-old traveler Paddy Ward as an additional lead singer, the makeup of the band is fraught with tensions, suspicions and the potential for profound intercultural misunderstandings. But with Guthrie’s music of social conscience, and of social consequence, as their common denominator, The Deportees transcend their differences to emblematize—clearly—Roddy Doyle’s vision for a harmonious new Dublin.

In fact, that vision is the common denominator for the eight stories that constitute the collection, though it may be expressed most powerfully in the one titled “New Boy.” As its universally familiar title hints, this story is about a “new boy,” a black African immigrant named Joseph, on his first day in a classroom of fellow nine-year-olds. Immediately targeted for abuse by young hooligans Christian Kelly and Seth Quinn, Joseph has to learn how to interpret and to negotiate the social codes that operate in this microcosm of Dublin itself. Carrying, unbeknownst to his classmates, the emotional baggage of earlier childhood trauma in his war-torn native country (unnamed in the story), Joseph proves altogether capable of handling both the verbal and the physical bullying inflicted on him: his unruffled response to Christian and Seth actually ruffles them to the point that they come around to forming what would have seemed at first an unlikely alliance with the “new boy.” Constructed partly in opposition to the nosy classroom know-it-all Hazel O’Hara and partly in opposition to their well-intentioned but mostly ineffectual teacher (whose last name Joseph never catches), this alliance reinforces in comic fashion Doyle’s serious belief in Dublin’s—and Ireland’s—multicultural future.

Well, actually Dublin’s multicultural present, for in his typically witty fashion Doyle has the ultimate bond between Joseph and his tormentors hinge on their joint recognition of their teacher’s incessant repetition of the word “now.” Putting into the teacher’s mouth every imaginable variation on the word’s grammatical versatility—from a tut-tutting “Now now” to a general alert that there is schoolwork to be done to a stern warning regarding unacceptable classroom behavior—Doyle reminds his readers through the teacher’s unconscious verbal tic (in the course of the narrative she says the word at least twenty-eight times, with almost as many different inflections) that this story does represent Dublin now: that the city has changed utterly and irreversibly and that the entire populace must adjust and adapt and individuals must accordingly learn not only tolerance for but also generous acceptance of the “otherness” of others.

Aptly, then, the adaptation of “New Boy” as a short film by Irish-American writer and director Steph Green has been added to the roster of films available for free online viewing at the Responsibility Project website sponsored by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company as a spin-off of their publicly acclaimed series of “pay-it-forward” television commercials. The website explains: “We thought, if one TV spot can get people thinking and talking about responsibility, imagine what could happen if we went a step further? So we created a series of short films, and this website, as an exploration of what it means to do the right thing.” In an interview on the popentertainment.com website, Green explains how Doyle’s story first appealed to her: “It’s really interesting the degree to which we are strangers—and not strangers. What does it mean to have to sit next to someone? That’s the same in a classroom as on the bus. There is something about the humanity of that which I like looking at.” Starring Olutunji Ebun-Cole as Joseph, Norma Sheahan as the teacher, Simon O’Driscoll as Christian, Fionn O’Shea as Seth, and Sinead Maguire as Hazel, the adaptation was nominated for an Oscar in 2009 in the short film category. Just eleven minutes long, the film of “New Boy” can be viewed via YouTube.

McWILLIAMS AND FALLON: NEWS OF THE WORLD

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 20, Number 5 (May 2009), p. 18.

The economic news out of Ireland may be even more grim than elsewhere in the world. The government itself may be in danger of international bankruptcy. On a much smaller but no less urgent scale, after a giddy decade-and-a-half of riding high on the back of the so-called Celtic Tiger, literally countless individuals who have enjoyed prosperity beyond all imagining may be peering over the precipice of financial ruin. The higher the perch the harder the fall.

More an observer than a prophet, Irish economist David McWilliams began to chronicle both the lustrous coat of the Celtic Tiger and its dark underbelly in his book The Pope’s Children: Ireland’s New Elite, published in 2005. Both entertaining and enlightening, its mostly sardonic tone echoing the work of American political and cultural commentator David Brooks (especially his book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There), McWilliams’ book dates the turning point in Ireland’s “fortunes”—not so immediately economic as social and cultural—to the visit to the country by Pope John Paul II in 1979. Or perhaps that was the tipping point—the high-water mark of the country’s maintaining at least a nodding recognition of its traditional rural and Catholic self-identity (and accompanying “values”) before the emergence of several dominant new breeds of Irish men and women from the post-Papal floodplain of affluence generated by Ireland’s membership in the European Union.

McWilliams labels one of these emergent breeds “HiCos” (or Hibernian Cosmopolitans): the urban and urbane hybrid survivors of the war between diehard “Hibernians” on the far right wing and free-living “Cosmopolitans” on the far left who fought their battles over abortion, divorce, and immigration during the 1980s and ’90s. In 2005, McWilliams could optimistically posit these suave HiCos—with one foot rooted in the “traditional” camp and the other foot firmly placed “forward”—as the hope for the country’s future, the antidote to the bleak and cynical view of contemporary Ireland projected by the popular mass media, whom he labels the “Commentariat.” McWilliams’ optimism may be considerably diminished now, in light of Ireland’s particularly dire straits relative to the worldwide economic crisis: the future for the HiCos may be as uncertain as the future of the entire country.

Even more dire, however, may be the plight of another of McWilliams’ new breeds, the Decklanders—his name for Ireland’s rapidly increasing suburban population that during the glory years of the Celtic Tiger spread further and further out from Dublin and other city centers into housing estates with newly-constructed homes complete with every modern amenity . . . including American-style back decks. Focusing particularly on a subset that he labels “The Kells Angels,” McWilliams sketches their world thus: “they live in the outer suburbs, clustered around former market towns. For example Kells, Drogheda, Tullamore, Kildare, Naas or Gorey on the east coast, places like Watergrass Hill, Midleton, Carrigaline and Ballincollig around Cork, and towns such as Loughrea, Claregalway, Tuam and Barna in Galway. These are Ireland’s new suburbs and they will be the most vibrant part of the country by 2020, but today they are dormitories which empty out in the morning and fill up again in the evening. The great Irish suburban movie—Irish Beauty—when it is eventually made, will be based here starring an ageing Colin Farrell as a lecherous bank official going through a mid-life crisis.”

Well-educated and gainfully employed in cities as much as a ninety-minute bumper-to-bumper drive away from where they yawn and stretch at dawn and bed down at night, these Kells Angels—their long morning and afternoon commutes distancing them both literally and figuratively from the HiCos heart of Irish matters—may ultimately suffer the hardest fall as a result of Ireland’s drastic economic downturn. And then what?

Who knows? But McWilliams’ book seems to have proven inadvertently prophetic in observing the predicament of this substantial segment of the Irish populace living not only “beyond the Pale” but also beyond their financial means, racking up massive personal debt while relentlessly pursuing the never-ending materialistic dreams of the “Expectocracy”—a society in which everyone is middle-class and wanting to “trade up”: “I want the biggest fridge, the best holiday, the newest car, the loudest sound system, the healthiest food, the best yoga posture . . .”

In this respect, the “Kells” that McWilliams projects in The Pope’s Children could hardly be farther from the territory that poet Peter Fallon inscribed in “The Lost Field” more than a quarter-century ago . . . almost a decade before the Celtic Tiger came roaring into being. Read literally, Fallon’s poem is about a common-enough phenomenon in the through-other world of rural Irish property boundaries and deeds—a purchase-and-sale agreement for a parcel of land that may or may not exist: “Somewhere near Kells in County Meath / a field is lost, neglected, let by common law.” Bought from the hard-drinking and hard-nosed Horse Tobin, this unaccounted-for piece of outlying real estate has potentially costly ramifications for Fallon’s small-farming relatives who paid for it in good faith. For Fallon himself, committed to taking over the family farm in the townland of Loughcrew after returning home to Oldcastle from studying at Trinity College Dublin (“I think it exquisite,” he wrote in the title poem of his 1983 volume Winter Work, “to stand in the yard, my feet on the ground, / in cowshit and horseshit and sheepshit”), that missing plot of land is as much emblematic as actual: “My part in this is reverence.”

Originally included in Winter Work and reprinted in News of the World (Fallon’s selected poems published in both American and Irish editions, in 1993 and 1998 respectively), “The Lost Field” clearly expresses a valuing of property of a much different order than McWilliams’ “Kells Angels” would seem capable of by the turn of the new century. For Fallon, ownership is not mere material acquisitiveness but a sacred trust involving a relationship between person and place that has little connection to financial investment or commercial worth:

Thinks of all that lasts. Think of land.
The things you could do with a field.
Plough, pasture, or re-claim. The stones
you’d pick, the house you’d build.

Don’t mind the kind of land,
a mess of nettles even,
for only good land will grow nettles.
I knew a man shy from a farm
who couldn’t find a weed
to tie the pony to.

Looking to settle down not to trade up, seeking permanence not instant gratification, Peter Fallon plainly subscribes to certain “values” that, according to David McWilliams’ view of Ireland as the indiscriminately omnivorous Celtic Tiger, would soon become as lost to the Irish “Expectocratic” sensibility as that rumored “lost field” itself. “Imagine the world / the place your own windfall could fall,” Fallon writes, transforming the literal plot of land into an abstraction, an idea . . . or an ideal of unassuming and therefore, perhaps, more contented and more fulfilling living. Committing himself to the small world of Kells and environs, Fallon concludes his poem: “I’m out to find that field, to make it mine.” Is it too late for any of McWilliams’ Kells Angels to stake a similar modest claim?

SEAMUS HEANEY'S "FUNERAL RITES" AND JAMIE O'NEILL'S "FORGIVENESS"

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 20, Number 4 (April 2009), pp. 16, 19.

Published in his landmark volume North (1975), Seamus Heaney’s poem “Funeral Rites” endures as a richly evocative contemplation of the sectarian violence that came to define life in his native Northern Ireland for the better part of three decades beginning in 1969. Included in part I of the volume, the poem is one of a series of poems mostly inspired by Heaney’s discovery of P. V. Glob’s book The Bog People (coincidentally published in English translation in 1969), a fascinating anthropological study of bodies buried in the bogs of northern Europe during the Iron Age and only recently unearthed, remarkably preserved, after several millennia.

Reflecting in his essay “Feeling Into Words” (1974) on Glob’s conclusion that many of these bodies “were ritual sacrifices to the Mother Goddess, the goddess of the ground who needed new bridegrooms each winter to bed with her in her sacred place, in the bog, to ensure the renewal and fertility of the territory in the spring,” Heaney recognized that “the religious intensity of the violence” in Northern Ireland needs to be understood not just in terms of the traditional social, economic, and political Catholic-Protestant sectarian divide in that province. Rather, it must be considered in terms of a truly archetypal “struggle between the cults and devotees of a god and a goddess”—the emblematically male crown of England, and Ireland conventionally feminized as “Mother Ireland, Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the poor old woman, the Shan Van Vocht, whatever . . .”

Heaney’s first foray into the rich territory opened up by Glob’s book was “The Tollund Man” (published in his volume Wintering Out in 1972), which begins with the poet promising himself that he will go on pilgrimage to see in person the most famous of the bog bodies:

Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.

The Danish city of Aarhus sounding as a homonym for “our house,” Heaney concludes the poem on a note of cold comfort indeed:

Out there in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.

“Funeral Rites” thus represents a further example of what Heaney described as his poet’s “search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament”—a search that he framed by way of touchstones lifted from William Shakespeare (Sonnet 65) and W. B. Yeats (“Meditations in Time of Civil War”): “The question, as ever, is ‘How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?’ And my answer is, ‘by offering befitting emblems of adversity.’”

Comprising three sections, each one in turn comprising eight, seven, and five slim unrhymed quatrains, the poem actually sits on the page as a visual emblem of Heaney’s overall poetic enterprise, which he described metaphorically in “Digging,” the opening poem of his first volume, Death of a Naturalist (1966):

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

Coaxing the reader’s eye to scroll deeper and deeper down the page (“down and down / For the good turf”), “Funeral Rites” also takes the reader into darker and darker thematic ground belied by the relative innocence of the opening section, which begins innocuously enough: “I shouldered a kind of manhood / stepping in to lift the coffins / of dead relations.” For even while describing the common rite of passage into Irish male adulthood which involves attending wakes and serving as pall bearer at funerals, Heaney employs diction (“soapstone,” “igloo,” “glacier”) that resonates with a far-northern “word-hoard” (as he puts it in the title poem of North) that evokes not only Glob’s Scandinavian world but also the history and the legacy of the brutal Viking invasions of Ireland which began in the late 8th century and continued until the Battle of Clontarf in 1014:

Dear soapstone masks,
kissing their igloo brows
had to suffice

before the nails were sunk
and the black glacier
of each funeral
pushed away.

The auspiciousness of his word-choices notwithstanding, the second section of the poem actually goes back even further historically than the Viking invasions in search of “befitting emblems of adversity” as the local funerals become more numerous and their causes more nefarious with the explosion of sectarian violence in the North in the 1970s:

Now as news comes in
of each neighbourly murder
we pine for ceremony,
customary rhythms:

the temperate footsteps
of a cortège, winding past
each blinded home.

As telling as John Milton’s oxymoron “darkness visible” (describing Hell in Paradise Lost), that self-contradicting phrase “neighbourly murder” leads by way of the words “ceremony” and “customary” to an allusion to Yeats’s great poem “A Prayer for My Daughter” (1919), in which the poet asks: “How but in custom and in ceremony / Are innocence and beauty born?” The custom and the ceremony that Heaney imagines in his time and place involves the “black glacier” of the funeral, now transformed into “a serpent,” being steered south of the border through “the Gap of the North” (the Moyry Pass, the route running out of south Armagh toward Dundalk) and on to “the great chambers of Boyne”—the series of 5000-year-old passage graves (most famously Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth) that dot the Boyne Valley in counties Louth and Meath. Invoking for the alert reader both the Battle of Moyry Pass (1600) and the Battle of the Boyne (1690), the very course of the imagined funeral procession is marked by milestones of Ireland’s violent history that must be laid to rest.

In the third section of “Funeral Rites,” the insidious serpent of violence sealed inside the passage grave by a massive stone, Heaney imagines the procession returning to Northern Ireland “past Carling and Strang fjords” (placenames reflecting the Viking legacy in Ireland), “the cud of memory / allayed for once, arbitration / of the feud placated.” Then, imagining the spirits dwelling with equanimity in that Irish burial mound, Heaney finally—directly licensed by the Nordic resonance of Glob’s book—inserts into his poem the spirit of Gunnar, a hero from the Icelandic Volsunga Saga, “who lay beautiful / inside his burial mound, / though dead by violence // and unavenged”: though slain by the mother of his enemy Atli, in Heaney’s interpretation Gunnar yet rests in peace because the cycle of violence ends with his death. Obviously, Heaney’s art of digging in this poem leads to parable-like implications regarding reconciliation and forgiveness between the “cults and devotees” in Northern Ireland.

And that is why I thought of that poem in all its richness and density when I recently viewed a very short film (8 minutes, 58 seconds) titled Forgiveness, scripted by Jamie O’Neill, best-known as the author of that remarkable novel of the Great War and the Easter Rising, At Swim, Two Boys (2001). The film links three historical figures: British-born diehard Irish nationalist Erskine Childers, executed by an Irish Free State firing squad in 1922; his son Erskine, who served briefly (1973-74) as President of the Republic of Ireland; and Kevin O’Higgins, Minister of Justice in the Free State and one of the men who had signed the execution order for the elder Childers. Not wanting to play “spoiler,” I will mention only that the film is premised on the anecdote that Childers requested of his 16-year-old son that he seek out and shake the hand of every man who had signed his death warrant. While the film speaks to a different time and place than Heaney’s poem, it nonetheless shares the poem’s concluding vision of hopefulness. Understated rhetorically and directed and acted with elegant simplicity, Forgiveness can be viewed for free on Jamie O’Neill’s website.

REVIEW OF BOLAND, McGUCKIAN, MEEHAN, HIGGINS

This review originally appeared in Verse, Volume 14, Number 3 (Spring 1998), pp. 147-55.

Eavan Boland. An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987.
Medbh McGuckian. Selected Poems, 1978-1994.
Paula Meehan. Mysteries of the Home.
Rita Ann Higgins. Sunny Side Plucked: New & Selected Poems.

“Unless, of course, you improvise,” Eavan Boland muses in the closing lines of the opening poem of her previous extensive compilation, Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990, proposing that what has been lost (a recurring thematic motif of her poems) in her culture’s construction of history can be recovered only through a willful act of creative engagement with the past: only through “the improvised poetic of imprisoned meanings,” Boland suggests in another poem, “The Bottle Garden,” can those events, those persons, those moments which have been excluded from conventional historical discourses be allowed their full resonance. Indeed, many of Boland’s poems, especially those written in the last dozen years or so, admit to being “improvisations” of sorts as she uses seemingly stable moments (personal, familial, historical or mythological events) or tableaus (photographs, paintings) as points of departure for exploring the possible dynamic subtexts to the supposedly static “texts” that conventional historical perspectives might authorize. Obviously, Boland’s primary concern is with investigating “the space / between the words that I had by heart” (as she phrases it in “An Irish Childhood in England: 1951”), especially as that space—that absence, that unrealized potentiality—relates to women’s experience.

One result of this particular concern or interest is that while Boland’s poems may be read individually as “improvisations,” they may be read collectively as “variations on a theme.” In fact, while some readers of Boland’s poetry may complain that the range of reference in her images and motifs is narrowly suburban and domestic, others may recognize that the effect of her verse is cumulative, that she herself does not create a single “stable” text but instead continues to compose and re-compose in the quilt-like “algebras” (to borrow from “The Unlived Life”) of her verse the “sequence of evicted possibilities” (as she puts it in “Listen. This Is the Noise of Myth”) that constitute the unexpressed life “outside history.” Such, at least, is the essence of Boland’s mature work.

Interestingly, her early poems collected in An Origin Like Water—in particular those originally published in the volumes New Territory in 1967 and The War Horse in 1975—give little indication of the direction that her verse would ultimately take. By 1987 when, with the publication of The Journey, Boland began to emerge as a significant Irish voice on the international poetry scene, she had made a decided commitment to truly liberating vers libre—a commitment which she has maintained through the newer poems making up the first part of Outside History and continuing with In a Time of Violence (1994). Surprisingly, then, her earliest poems are consistently (even insistently) formal—not only in their structure and their language but also in their subjects and their themes. Engaging, as in her later volumes, with classical mythology, with Irish history and mythology, with other poems and poets, with paintings, her early poems are yet remarkably unremarkable—much more competent than compelling in their adherence to regularly-rhymed stanzas and in their prudent exploration of rather ordinary thematic territory. In effect, they are set pieces rather than improvisations.

Apparently, Boland herself came to recognize the stylistic and thematic limitations of her early work as she begins her 1982 volume, In Her Own Image—located exactly midway in An Origin Like Water­—with a literal “Tirade for the Mimic Muse.” Rejecting “Eye shadow, swivel brushes, blushers, / Hot pinks, rouge pots, sticks, / Ice for the pores, a mud mask”—the merely cosmetic “tricks” which characterized her previous verse—she declares:

I will wake you from your sluttish sleep.
I will show you true reflections, terrors.
You are the Muse of all our mirrors.
Look in them and weep.

Clearly feeling licensed by this declaration of poetic independence, Boland immediately remakes herself “in her own image,” and the last half of An Origin Like Water­ includes many of the subtly-realized poems which have made her a household name on both sides of the Atlantic. Somewhat unreasonably, however, most of these poems also appear in the last half of Outside History (organized with reverse chronology), making this new collection less-than-essential for readers already familiar with Boland through that earlier book.

Generally, Medbh McGuckian’s Selected Poems provides a more representative—in large part because more distilled—survey of a poet’s career to date. By reputation a difficult poet, McGuckian can sometimes exasperate even an attentive reader with her exotic (some might say eccentric) use of metaphor and other figurative language; as she acknowledges in the title poem of her volume On Ballycastle Beach (1988): “My words are traps / through which you pick your way.” But as the aphorisms which open the earlier poem “Gateposts” reflect, she can also delight a reader appreciative of the inherent disjunction of language and meaning:

A man will keep a horse for prestige,
but a woman ripens best underground.
He settles where the wind
brings his whirling hat to rest,
and the wind decides which door is to be used.

In its own way the equivalent of Boland’s notion of improvising, McGuckian’s negotiation of such disjunction characterizes her poetry early and late.

Describing in “The Dream-Language of Fergus” how “one river inserted into another / becomes a leaping, glistening, splashed / and scattered alphabet / jutting out from the voice” McGuckian in fact hints at an analogy for her own chimerical use of language throughout her career. Thus, in a poem such as “Sea Or Sky?” a phrase like “Wednesday comes out of the rim of bones with a port-wine stain on its face” might in one respect typify McGuckian’s basic poetic strategy of substituting a complex—even extravagant (even baroque)—image or set of images for a commonplace metaphor (in this case, the equation of daybreak with birth); in another crucial respect, however, in the overall context of a poem which seems to be about recovery from a romantic disappointment, it fulfills the more elaborate function of both engaging and disorienting the reader until, as she puts it in “The Dream-Language of Fergus”:

. . . what began as a dog’s bark
ends with bronze, what began
with honey ends with ice;
as if an aeroplane in full flight
launched a second plane,
the sky is stabbed by their exits
and the mistaken meaning of each.

While not mixed metaphors per se, McGuckian’s disjunctive constructions yet produce the effect of same—or of some other intentionally cultivated hybrid, a not-quite-congruous matching of tenor and vehicle: some new mutant form of expression perhaps. When this poetic strategy works, her metaphors actually operate as viable (albeit singular) objective correlatives. When it fails, the result can be that of a purely subjective irrelevance. Certainly the images which open the final strophe of “Scenes for a Brothel” are evocative: “She lets her arm rest, like the tulip’s turn, / on the wheat of her voice.” But evocative of what? Is “wheat” a color? A texture? A flavor? An odor? A source of nurture? Possibly the “answer” can be found several years later in a poem entitled “The Most Emily of All”: “you answer me / by the very terms of your asking, / as a sentence clings tighter / because it makes no sense.”

The larger question related to McGuckian’s poems, though, involves the “philosophy” which underlies her “philology”—her self-evident literal love of words and of the synesthetic potential of language. Reading at times like a telescoped metaphor shattering into a kaleidoscopic conceit, is her poetry ultimately mimetic of a belief in the exponentially polysemous nature of personal experience in particular? The cryptically autobiographical grounding of most of her poems seems to suggest so. But as the selections from Captain Lavender (1994) which conclude her Selected Poems reveal, the elusiveness of her curiously elided images may be especially capable of registering as well the larger complexity of the new territory (for her) of the ongoing sectarian conflict in her native Northern Ireland:

Like an accomplished terrorist, the fruit hangs
from the end of a dead stem, under a tree
riddled with holes like a sieve. Breath smelling
of cinnamon retires into a dream to die there.

In contrast with McGuckian’s poems, which in a sense take Boland’s “improvised poetic of imprisoned meanings” to a literal extreme, Paula Meehan’s intensely personal lyrics collected in Mysteries of the Home record with striking frankness what might be deemed an improvised life. In her first two promising (but somewhat unpolished) volumes published in the mid-1980s, Meehan wrote both out of and about a troubled childhood and adolescence in some of the meanest streets of northside Dublin. A rearrangement of the poems from her two most recent individual volumes—The Man Who Was Marked By Winter (1991) and Pillow Talk (1994)—Mysteries of the Home is actually greater than the sum even of those estimable parts as it presents less a chronicle and more a candid portrait of a mature life which, also disordered by personal crises of varying sorts, openly testifies to the capacity of lyric verse to provide both consolation and restoration. “I bless the power of seed, / its casual, useful persistence,” Meehan concludes this new book in an epilogue extracted (like the prologue) from “Mysteries of the Home,” the concluding poem of the earlier of those volumes, “and bless the power of sun, / its conspiracy with the underground, / and thank my stars the winter’s ended.”

Significantly, however, Meehan chooses “The Pattern,” a stunningly realized depiction of her mother’s authentic life of quiet desperation, as the first substantial poem in Mysteries of the Home. Dedicating the entire volume to the memory of her mother (“At forty-two she headed for god knows where. / I’ve never gone back to visit her grave”), Meehan seems to have dedicated herself to rejecting the example of her mother’s short and sad existence—to rebelling against the social and domestic orthodoxy implied at the end of the poem: “Tongues of flame in her dark eyes, / she’d say, ‘One of these days I must / teach you to follow a pattern.’” Indeed, for the most part, the art of her poems is the act of self-witness—the inscription of her multi-faceted self (daughter, sister, wife, lover, friend) devising and revising an acceptable relationship with the world-at-large. Occasionally, in a poem such as “Zugzwang,” describing in quasi-apocalyptic terms the collapse of her marriage, she will employ the third-person point of view to create distance between poet and poet-as-subject:

She places the flowers on the table.
Any day now she will let go her grip,
surrender herself to the ecstatic freefall.
We are all aware that when she hits bottom
she will shatter into smithereens.
Each shard will reflect the room, the flowers,
the chessboard, and her beloved sky beyond
like a calm ocean lapping at the mountain.

Generally, however, even while employing a variety of strategic conceits—including allegories and dream visions—to raise the transparently autobiographical to the realm of the “poetic,” and even while experimenting with prose poems, folktale structures (and motifs), epigrammatic structures, the long poetic line, Meehan displays steadfast confidence in the validity of first-person expression.

This confidence defines even “Three Paintings of York Street,” one of the few poems in Mysteries of the Home originating outside Meehan’s immediately personal experience. Exhorting a visual artist to stand witness to violence against women, the second of the “Paintings” (“Woman Found Dead behind Salvation Army Hostel”) asserts the responsibility of poet and artist to acknowledge intimate identification with the anonymous victim:

You will have to go outside for this one.
The night is bitter cold
but you must go out,
you could not invent this.

Ultimately, of course, this exhortation extends to the reader of the poem as well; in fact, it fully implicates the reader in the complex symbiosis of the social and the personal—a graphic problematizing of the relationship between and among artist, subject and audience which lyric verse may always aspire to but does not always attain. Subtly but decisively, the final strophe of the poem inscribes this symbiosis:

Your hand will steady as you draw the cobbles.
They impose a discipline, the comfort of habit,
as does the symmetry of brick walls
which define the alley and whose very height
cut off the light and hid
the beast who maimed her.

Considerably less “self”-centered than Meehan’s poetry, the work gathered in Rita Ann Higgins’ Sunny Side Plucked frequently—and perhaps more intrinsically—effects a similar symbiosis in observing and illuminating the improvised lives of the underclass in her native Galway. Written with an insider’s insight, Higgins’ poems even validate those lives, not just investing them with but truly discovering in them a dignity of almost “epic” proportions: “Aphrodite / of the homely bungalow, / cross curtains, / off-white Anglia at the side,” Higgins suggestively begins the title poem of her first volume, Goddess on the Mervue Bus (1986). Indeed, the cumulative effect of these poems is “epic” in the broader sense as well, as virtually anthropological in their range, they capture and preserve their human subjects in the full compass of their mortal being—literally from conception onward. Yet they are also relentlessly—even ruthlessly—irreverent in their witty presentation and interpretation of the codes, the mores and the manners which define the existence of Higgins’ socially and economically marginalized women and men. The answer to the innocent-sounding question at the start of “Light of the Moon,” for example—“Can you tell me the way to the maternity?”—seems cute enough:

Walk on a beach
in the West of Ireland
at four in the morning
in the middle of summer
with a man who’s six foot two
and you’ll get there
sooner or later.

Typically, however, Higgins allows this too-simple explanation to build to a more telling climax:

When he lies on top of you
for the next three-quarters of an hour
shielding you from the light of the moon
the answer comes to you.

Question:
Like a flash?

Answer.
No, like the thundering tide.

Always implicated in the subject of any given poem by virtue of belonging to the underclass that she depicts, Higgins herself is yet a subtly elusive presence throughout Sunny Side Plucked. At times she will appear in the foreground of a poem; in “Poetry Doesn’t Pay,” for instance, she recounts trying to persuade the rent collector that she has “really got something there” with her poems: “All I want is fourteen pounds / and ten pence, hold the poesy,” he replies. On occasion, she will adopt a persona—as in a richly vernacular dramatic monologue like “Mamorexia”:

Cop yourself on—
your shadow looks
better than ya,
pull yourself together
and for crying out loud
go and eat something

something decent.

Usually, though, Higgins remains somewhere in the background of her poems. Sometimes she is “visible”—the sympathetic but unsentimental first-person narrator of her neighbors’ quotidian dreams and disappointments. Written from the first-person plural perspective, the title poem of her most recent volume, Higher Purchase (1996), typifies her ability both to blend into the motley fabric of her community and, from that vantage point, to take note of the poignant details of lives in disarray: acknowledging a certain satisfaction in watching a once-smug family having their household furnishings re-possessed—including “the phone table, / though they had no phone”—Higgins still identifies with the ignominy of being made a public spectacle, especially when “one young skut / who knew no better, shouted, // ‘Where will ye put the phone now, / when it comes.’”

At other times, Higgins’ presence is primarily “audible”—the speaker in the poem functioning more as a center of communal consciousness. In “Philomena’s Revenge,” a poem recording the after-effects of electro-convulsive therapy on a wayward daughter, she is almost godlike in her detachment:

These days
she gets on with the furniture,
wears someone else’s walk,
sees visions in the glass.

She’s good too
for getting the messages;
small things, bread and milk
sometimes the paper,

and closing the gate
after her father drives out,
she waits for his signal
he always shouts twice,

‘Get the gate, Philo,
get the gate, girl.’

Sometimes a poet’s vision and voice can serve even as the humane conscience of her community.

READING SEAMUS HEANEY'S "IN IOWA" IN IOWA

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 17, Number 10 (October 2006), p. 20.

Could I ever have imagined, when I first read Seamus Heaney’s “In Iowa” when it was published in The New Yorker in April of 2005, that someday that poem would speak directly to me—as if as a message sent from on high? Not likely. I have been reading Heaney for almost thirty years now, and one of the most striking aspects of his poetry involves its rootedness in what Heaney, in his volume Electric Light, refers to as the “known world”: primarily his boyhood world of rural south County Derry, with a few other Irish locales occasionally added to that richly layered landscape. For regular readers of Heaney, those places have become household names: Toome, Moyola, Broagh, Mossbawn, Derrygarve, Anahorish, even the intimately local Toner’s bog; and Gallarus, Clonmacnoise, Glanmore, Devenish.

Granted, Heaney does sometimes step outside of the Irish realm. France, Spain, California, and Denmark all figure in the poems of the well-traveled Nobel Laureate. So does Greece, as in “Sonnets from Hellas” he recounts his travels in the days immediately preceding the announcement of his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. Describing the sensation of awakening to “Wave-clip and flirt, tide-slap and flop and flow” in the seaside town of Pylos, he writes: “I woke to the world there like Telemachos, / Young again in the whitewashed light of morning.” And his poem “Known World” itself recollects his visit to Macedonia for the Struga Poetry Festival in 1978—though, never far from his own Ireland and Northern Ireland divided and subdivided by territorial politics and sectarian discord, he finds the political turmoil of the Balkan states all-too-familiar: “That old sense of a tragedy going on / Uncomprehended, at the very edge / Of the usual, it never left me once . . .”

But Iowa?

My own familiarity with that part of the Midwest is primarily through Meredith Willson’s Broadway hit The Music Man which I took my daughters to see a local production of about ten years ago. As sung by the chorus of River City townsfolk, “You really ought to give Iowa a try” functions as a sort of mantra for the middle-American dream that the musical celebrates. And of course I love W. P. Kinsella’s whimsical wonder-filled novel Shoeless Joe, the basis for the popular film Field of Dreams. “This must be heaven,” Shoeless Joe Jackson surmises, emerging from the limbo (or the purgatory) of a seemingly boundless cornfield into the perfect geometry of a beautifully manicured baseball diamond. “No,” Ray Kinsella replies. “It’s Iowa.”

But Heaney?

Included in his latest volume of poems, District and Circle, “In Iowa” is a sonnet, a crafty fourteen-liner that recounts an experience he had during a long-ago visit to the Hawkeye State. As the opening lines reveal, he felt from the start lost, not very happy, and anything but at home: “In Iowa once, among the Mennonites / In a slathering blizzard, conveyed all afternoon / Through sleet-glit pelting hard against the windscreen / And a wiper’s strong absolving slumps and flits. . . .” Infused with what Heaney has referred to famously as “the music of what happens”—the slant-rhyming and consonant-heavy “noise” of the language here reflecting how even the weather conditions are disorientingly foreign—these lines yet give way to an object in the landscape that proves surprisingly familiar to the son of a County Derry farmer: “I saw, abandoned in the open gap / Of a field where wilted corn stalks flagged the snow, / A mowing machine.”

No doubt simply left sitting there after the hay been cut and baled the previous autumn, this common piece of equipment becomes a focal point for the stranger in a strange land: “Snow brimmed its iron seat, / Heaped each spoked wheel with a thick white brow, / And took the shine off oil in the black-toothed gears.” More than just a study in black and white, however, by its very familiarity the mowing machine actually activates in the poet what he himself has described as the Irish capacity “to live in two places at the one time and in two times at the one place.” Transporting Heaney in his mind back to his “known world,” it clearly works as a stabilizing agent for the disconcerted traveler, helping to restore, at least temporarily, the equilibrium—the spirit level, as it were (to borrow from the title of his volume of poems published in 1996)—disturbed by his harrowing trip along icy I-80. Waxing biblical, he recalls the sensation of relief that he felt: “Verily I came forth from that wilderness / As one unbaptized who had known darkness / At the third hour and the veil in tatters.” The poem then ends with a sort of bemused musing on how such a seemingly innocuous moment could be so resonant with implication: “In Iowa once. In the slush and rush and hiss / Not of parted but of rising waters.”

Obviously, Heaney survived his discombobulating visit to Iowa—and lived to write about it. Well, I too survived my first visit to the land of “Silos and Smokestacks” (as a roadside sign just inside the state border announces)—thanks in part to the affirmation of Heaney’s poem. By utter coincidence, sixteen months after reading “In Iowa” in The New Yorker, I read the poem for a second time, in the pages of District and Circle, in the lobby of a sketchy Day’s Inn just off I-80 . . . the night before the life-altering experience of leaving behind my beloved first-born daughter in that “unknown world” for her freshman year at Grinnell College—in Grinnell, Iowa.

I had been forewarned by friends and neighbors who had passed through Iowa: “Nothing but cornfields from horizon to horizon.” Still, the reality exceeded even my vivid imagining of what that could be like. In fact, to borrow from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!—a musical set even farther west than The Music Man—it was “corn as high as an elephant’s eye.” In August we were of course spared the wintry mess that Heaney encountered; oddly, we were also spared the debilitating heat that part of the country usually endures at that time of year. Instead, the area was fogbound at night and covered with a heavy dew in the morning—such atmospheric conditions only adding to the sense of Heaney-esque displacement that I experienced in my own way. I felt not just that I was nowhere but that I was abandoning my daughter in the middle of nowhere! Having tossed District and Circle into my suitcase almost as an afterthought, I thus took my happenstance reading of “In Iowa” in Iowa as some sort of sign that maybe, just maybe, my darling Mairéad could find herself happy and at home . . . so far from home. So far from her “known world” of Newbury Street and Harvard Square and Duxbury Beach and the Ice Creamsmith in Dorchester-Lower Mills. So far from the true “field of dreams,” of dreams come true, Fenway Park.

Time will tell (and so far so good). But in the meantime, on the very morning that we were saying our goodbyes, I learned by way of an engaging article written by English Professor Michael Cavanagh for the Summer 2006 issue of The Grinnell Magazine that Heaney’s visit to Iowa recorded in his poem was, specifically, a visit to Grinnell College in March of 1979. A warm and witty reminiscence, Cavanagh’s essay also serves as a helpful illumination of two elements of the “back story” to the poem. One involves Heaney’s general nervousness about flying—understandably exacerbated by the weather conditions as Cavanagh drove him to the airport in Cedar Rapids: small wonder that the ice storm made an impression on him deep enough to provoke a poem more than a quarter-century later. The second involves Heaney’s reference to Mennonites in the first line of “In Iowa.” In Cavanagh’s version of events, this detail figures in the poem only incidentally—the result of a pit stop at the Amana Colonies, a local Mennonite community where Heaney bought as a souvenir for his wife “a pinkish and pale green glandular-looking ashtray that said ‘Welcome to the Amanas!’” (Discovering that the ashtray was made not in Iowa but in Korea, Heaney doubled back and picked up a jar a corn-relish as well.)

For Heaney, though, it is all of a piece. Asked by Cavanagh in 1999 what he remembered of his visit to Iowa twenty years earlier, Heaney wrote in reply: “I remember the snow journey and seeing a melancholy mowing machine or hay-tosser in a blizzard-pelted field: a kind of R. Frost ‘Desert Places’ epiphany.” He then added: “I had the Amana Colonies ashtray for years.”

All I brought back from Iowa was a t-shirt with “Grinnell College” printed across the front. That and all of the usual anxiety of a father leaving his daughter not just beyond the Pale and not just beyond the bog but truly what seemed like beyond the beyond! “In Iowa once,” indeed.