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.

(RE)VISITING MICHAEL HARTNETT, 1941-1999

This piece first appeared in The Irish Literary Supplement, Volume 19, Number 1 (Spring 2000), p. 27.

Most of my direct personal contact with poet Michael Hartnett, who died last October at the sadly young age of 58, happened during a two-week period about seven months before his death. First I received an utterly unexpected phonecall from the man himself at 7:15 one morning, an oddly delayed reaction (or so it seemed) to an article of mine that included discussion of his poetry; I had sent the piece to him as a courtesy sixteen months earlier, but as it turns out, he had moved house shortly before I mailed it, and (better late than not at all, I suppose) the packet had just caught up with him. Then, a day or so later, a brief note from him arrived in the mail; obviously written before the phonecall, it closed: “If you’re still alive, drop me a line.” I did so shortly, concluding hopefully by echoing the promise he had exacted from me on the telephone that I would visit him the next time I traveled to Dublin: “Someday we shall meet, I’m sure. . . .”

Alas, we never did meet; nor did we communicate further after that quick exchange of comments and compliments. But when I heard of Hartnett’s death, I felt his loss almost as if I had known him personally for years—and, in a sense, I did know him peculiarly well. In fact, Hartnett entered my life by way of a non-encounter with him that has teased my imagination for more than two decades. The place was Tralee, Co. Kerry, the time the autumn of 1978. As bad luck would have it, I learned the morning after from the landlady in my B&B that a poet had entered a pub in the town the night before and commenced to recite poems in Irish for whatever pittance the patrons deigned to toss his way. The poet was Michael Hartnett (a.k.a. Micheál Ó hAirtnéide), and I knew just enough about him to understand that he was fulfilling in deed as well as in word the promise he had made in evoking and invoking his literary ancestors in the bold title poem of his 1975 volume A Farewell to English, re-issued earlier that year by Gallery Press:

00000But I will not see
00000great men go down
00000who walked in rags
00000from town to town
00000finding English a necessary sin
00000the perfect language to sell pigs in.

00000I have made my choice
00000and leave with little weeping:
00000I have come with meagre voice
00000to court the language of my people.

At once an iconoclast and a throwback, Hartnett aspired to realize the not-quite-paradox of both breaking with convention and embracing tradition. He aspired to reconcile, through a commitment to writing exclusively in Irish, the two halves of what Thomas Kinsella has called “the divided mind” of the modern Irish poet writing in English who hears across the silence of the vacuum-like nineteenth century the resonance of more than a thousand years of poetry written in Irish. As Kinsella described this condition in 1973: “I recognize that I stand on one side of a great rift, and can feel the discontinuity in myself.”

Eventually, Hartnett had second thoughts about his decision to write only in Irish—perhaps in due course, for as fellow poet Eamon Grennan observes in “Wrestling with Hartnett,” his fine essay included in the special Irish issue of The Southern Review in 1995, the trajectory of his work resembles “a journey that starts, stops, starts again, doubles back on itself, pursues false paths, tries different approaches, feels its way into the clear, and presses deliberately and forcefully ahead.” Many of the landmarks and the milestones of that journey are represented in his Selected & New Poems (published in 1994 by Gallery Press in Ireland and by Wake Forest University Press in America), a satisfying introduction to a poet who, while at times daunting to read both for the vicissitudes of his thematic and stylistic emphases and for the intensity and the density of his acute lyric sensibility, yet consistently rewards the reader attentive to the subtleties and the complexities of his poetic vision.

Hearing of Michael Hartnett’s death, I turned respectfully toward that volume—toward the autobiographical darkness of “A Small Farm” (“All the perversions of the soul / I learnt on a small farm”), the uncompromising social commentary of “The Retreat of Ita Cagney” (Patrick Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger” with the sexual stakes raised by its woman’s point of view), the formal elegance of “A Visit to Castletown House” (remarkable for the poet’s Yeats-like command of its eight-line stanza), the existential angst of the artist in “The Naked Surgeon” (“hope died out and left me there, / a naked surgeon, my patient dead”). In many ways that volume in its entirety testifies to the closing verse of “The Poet as Mastercraftsman”: “To poets peace poetry never yields.” Just as persuasively, it testifies to the authority of Hartnett’s Yeats-countering exhortation (a crafty sonnet, no less) omitted from Selected & New Poems but included in his dual-language volume A Necklace of Wrens in 1987:

00000DÁN PRÁTA

00000Inniu chuir mé mo dhánta,
00000aoileach, scian, scealláin:
00000an pháirc mo phár bán,
00000an rámhainn mo pheann.

00000Tiocfaidh na gasa ina ndideanna glasa
00000ceann ar cheann,
00000tiocfaidh an bláth bán is croí ina lár
00000mar sheile ón ngrian.

00000A dhalta, ná bí díomhaoin
00000ach bailigh do threalamh le chéile
00000mar táid filí na tíre
00000ag atreabhadh úir na hÉireann
00000is fágfar tusa I do bhochtán
00000gan phráta, gan dán.

00000POTATO POEM

00000Today I planted poems—
00000dung, knife, seed:
00000a field my page,
00000my pen a spade.

00000Green nipples will come
00000one by one,
00000white flowers, their centres,
00000like spits from the sun.

00000Learners—no longer idle,
00000but gather your implements
00000for all of Ireland’s poets
00000replough the Irish earth
00000and you will be bereft
00000of potatoes and verse.

With hindsight, I think that it is the spirit of that poem, a more distilled form of the spirit informing “A Farewell to English,” that has teased me for the past twenty-odd years that I have been (for the most part casually) visiting and revisiting Hartnett’s poetry: its expression of the poet’s heartfelt belief in—and his own cultivation of—the restorative power of enduring poetry. Surely this is the spirit that provoked what appears to have been the principal enterprise of the last fifteen years of Hartnett’s life and career—his recuperation by way of masterful translation of a trio of so-called “dispossessed” poets from the other side of that “great rift” that he, like Kinsella, gazed across. More limited in its compass than Kinsella and Seán Ó Tuama’s anthology An Duanaire (1981) and less “exotic” in its subject matter than Seamus Heaney’s celebrated Sweeney Astray (1983), Hartnett’s cumulative body of poems by seventeenth-century poets Dáibhí Ó Bruadair and Pádraigín Haicéad and early eighteenth-century poet Aodhagán Ó Rathaille yet stands within the larger corpus of his work as a major legacy in itself to the furtherance of the Irish poetic tradition: “Irish poets learn your trade,” indeed!

Ultimately, then—perhaps even inevitably—when I heard of Michael Hartnett’s death I found myself drawn to his translations of Ó Bruadair in particular (published by Gallery as O Bruadair in 1985). For so much of what Hartnett evidently sought in his determined symbolic gesture of bidding farewell to English in the mid-1970s seems to be embedded in the artistic rigor and the thematic integrity that he clearly associates with his fellow native (putative, at least) of Newcastle West, Co. Limerick. Introduced to Ó Bruadair’s work in 1954, when he was thirteen years old, Hartnett has admitted that before long this file, this professional poet of the old Gaelic social order, became “the symbol of what I wanted to be.” Not surprisingly, his selections from the three-volume Irish Texts Society edition of his precursor’s verse focus almost exclusively on the downward spiral of the presence—and the practice—of poetry in Irish society during the politically and culturally turbulent decades of the seventeenth century. As his version of “Is Urchra Cléibh” (a lament written after the departure in 1692 of many of the Irish chieftains) reflects, Hartnett identifies especially with Ó Bruadair’s perspective as beleaguered guardian of a noble art:

00000To see the art of poetry lost
00000with those who honoured it with thought—
00000its true form lowered to a silly chant,
00000sought after by the dilettante.

Hartnett has observed of Ó Bruadair: “He was concerned with culture.” So too was his translator. Taking down from the bookshelf my dog-eared, pencil-marked copy of O Bruadair in the wake of Hartnett’s death, and remembering how twenty-one years earlier I had been so taken with the idea of a latter-day poet so literally keeping the faith of his literary forebears as Hartnett reportedly did in that pub in Tralee, I found the opening stanza (or rann) of the opening poem of that volume, a poem originally composed for the children of poet Cúchonnacht Ó Dalaigh (who died in 1642), an altogether apt epitaph for the life and the career of Michael Hartnett himself:

00000Bereft of its great poets
00000our old world’s in darkness.
00000The orphans of those masters
00000offer answers that lack sharpness.

ROCKIN' WITH ROCKY DE VALERA

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 16, Number 6 (June 2005), p. 31.

“One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with.” So says the narrator of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), establishing in the opening paragraph of that classic novel the meta-fictive foundation that the book is constructed on. Asserting not many pages later that “a satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham,” the narrator clearly licenses the reader to break the rules of reading just as willfully as O’Brien and his narrator (a college student writing a novel within O’Brien’s novel) break the rules of writing.

Having first plunged into that marvel-filled book back in 1977-78 when I was (like the narrator before me, and like O’Brien before his narrator) a student at University College Dublin, I instinctively thought of it—and indeed took license from it—when I picked up The Last of the Bald Heads (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2004), a hot-off-the-press memoir by Ferdia Mac Anna, for a very brief time one of my classmates at UCD. Thus I have to confess that after a cursory glance at the opening pages of the opening chapter, I immediately broke the first rule of reading by fastforwarding until I got to almost literally the dead center of the book—the chapter dealing with the author’s abbreviated attachment to UCD’s Master of Arts Program in Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama. Having had the distinct pleasure some years ago of discovering myself immortalized in a photograph (shot in the National Library of Ireland) included in Frank Delaney’s book James Joyce’s Odyssey, a companion to Joyce’s Ulysses, I just had to know (O, the vanity of human wishes) whether I had made the pages of Mac Anna’s book as well.

And I had!

Well, sort of . . . to the extent that I at least recognized myself in Mac Anna’s thumbnail sketch of the students enrolled in the M.A. program: “It turned out that I was the only Irish person in a class composed of a couple dozen Americans and several Canadians.” Hey, I was one of those Canadians! Kudos to Ferdia Mac Anna for making that distinction regarding the North Americans who made up the bulk of the group. Had he stayed in the program longer (Ferdia, we hardly knew ye!), he might also have distinguished the Austrians, the Italians, and the one Japanese student who rounded out the class roster. Looking around our seminar room, we laughed among ourselves that the M.A. program must be sponsored by Bord Fáilte/The Irish Tourist Board. Mac Anna may have laughed with us, but if so, I daresay his chuckles were spiked with a healthy measure of irony—and of skepticism. As he admits, “I found it hard to motivate myself to study—I kept feeling that I should be doing something else, something more worthwhile.” Ouch.

The curmudgeonly Prof. Roger McHugh thwarting his ambition “to write a novel while writing a thesis about writing a novel” (Flann O’Brien would have approved), Mac Anna was not long for the world of the M.A. program, and to a great extent The Last of the Bald Heads recounts his quest for that elusive “something else.” Like any quest narrative worth its weight in paper and ink, this one has its share of detours and diversions along with the ordinary twists and turns on the switchback path of life. The book covers a lot of territory.

As it turns out, I was on board—at least as a witness, at least at the start—for the most exhilarating part of the journey: Mac Anna’s short-lived (but repeated and later reprised) foray into the world of Irish rock-and-roll as the frontman for a band with the clearly-intended-to-provoke name of “Rocky De Valera and the Gravediggers.” As Mac Anna recalls—and as I recall right along with him—the band, its lead singer flamboyantly decked out in dicky bow and black eye patch, made its debut in the student pub on the Belfield campus of UCD early in 1978: “The place was packed. We started with ‘Peter Gun,’ then went into ‘Shakin’ All Over.’ It was like a riot. At some stage I threw myself into the front rows and the front rows threw me back. The crowd loved us and we got three encores.”

Obviously, the experience was intoxicating, figuratively as well as literally, for the newly fledged vocalist: “Afterwards we sat in the bar, drenched in sweat but beaming with satisfaction. People came up to congratulate us. We were bought pints. A Students’ Union guy came up and booked us for a lunchtime open-air gig the following week. I decided that I would not be completing my Master’s after all. There would be no more lectures. No more tutorials. No thesis. I was enrolled full-time in the University of Rock.”

To the best of my recollection, that was the last time I saw Ferdia Mac Anna. He fell off the face of my earth in Dublin. Or I fell off the face of his.

Either way, his entertaining account of his on-again off-again career as Rocky De Valera, which I had seen launched all those years ago, sufficiently piqued my curiosity about the man behind the eye patch that I decided to read both backward and forward (again, Flann O’Brien would have approved) from that point where our lives had briefly converged at UCD.

The Last of the Bald Heads actually both opens and closes on rather sobering notes, as both before and after regaling the reader with tales of his boyhood and adolescence (and then his protracted adolescence) Mac Anna recounts, with humor-laced candor, the details of his surviving first a brain aneurysm and then testicular cancer. Bookending the memoir, those experiences lend a moral anchor to the story of a life of typical restlessness spiced up by some not-so-typical episodes.

Among these are the ones that involve cameo appearances by Bono and U2, by former Jimi Hendrix bass player Noel Redding, by novelist Roddy Doyle, among many other “names.” Not that Mac Anna needs to name-drop—and not that he does. The son of renowned Abbey Theatre director Tomás Mac Anna, he grew up in Howth mixing with “celebrities” of one sort or another (mainly bohemian) and, thanks to the paterfamilias, even landed a minor acting role or two himself, including a walk-on in a Paris production of Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy. He also had a part in the celebrations at Croke Park marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Uprising. Recollecting that the four-night spectacle was afflicted by terrible weather, he takes obvious pleasure in recounting how, assigned the task of holding up the final letter “E” on a set of placards announcing the birth of the Irish nation, he played a small role in the rewriting (as it were) of Irish history: “On the third night the wind snapped off the bottom half of my letter. From the stands it appeared that the glorious, heroic blood sacrifice of 1916 had culminated in the birth of the new republic of ÉIRF. Diehard nationalists must have been mortified.”

Perhaps inevitably, the natural father-son tension of Mac Anna’s growing up that runs like a thread (at times like a threaded needle) through this book came to a head during a school pageant, directed by his famous father, at Coláiste Mhuire, at that time Dublin’s only Irish-language school for boys. Playing the role of Noah’s son Japheth sharing a vision of heaven, young Mac Anna froze on stage when the time came for him to recite the host of Irish heroes found in the divine afterlife. Unable to recall the names of Finn McCool, Cúchulain, Michael Collins, James Connolly and Brian Boru, he improvised wildly: “Mussolini was the first. There was a huge gasp from the audience but, unable to stop myself and not knowing what I was saying except that I had managed to finally remember the names of some famous people, I went on—James Bond, Taras Bulba and Genghis Khan . . . I may have added Rasputin and Stalin to the company, I can’t remember. I’m nearly positive that I didn’t say Hitler.”

That scene is one of many set during Mac Anna’s time at Coláiste Mhuire—a period that he records with a wit that is at times almost as savage as the Christian Brothers who ran the school. Practicing a ministry of fear—a particularly vicious brand of Catholic Nationalism—the Brothers obviously deserve the scornful treatment the author affords them.

But Ferdia Mac Anna has tales to tell out of school, too, and the third major episode of his life that he documents (after his boyhood dramas and traumas and then his stint as Rocky De Valera) involves his two-season hitch as a producer for Gay Byrne’s ever-popular The Late Late Show on RTÉ. Eventually, though, even the allure of rubbing shoulders with the likes of novelist James Baldwin, actor Oliver Reed, and singer-songwriter Dory Previn wore off and the allure of “Beer and Blood and Rockandroll” (the title of the book’s penultimate chapter) took hold of Mac Anna’s life once again. Until cancer took hold.

The brief Afterword to The Last of the Bald Heads begins: “After cancer, my life became a lot simpler. . . . I became a bit of a recluse and that was when I started to write.” And write. And write. Since putting down his memoir, I have read cover-to-cover (Flann O’Brien might not approve!) the three wonderful comic novels that Mac Anna has penned since settling into married life with three children: The Last of the High Kings (1991), The Ship Inspector (1995), and Cartoon City (2000). Who could have guessed that Ferdia Mac Anna had so many words in him? Certainly not I, his erstwhile classmate at UCD more than a quarter-century ago. Ferdia—or Rocky—we hardly knew ye, indeed!

Postscript (10/1/08):
In 2006 The Last of the Bald Heads was reissued with a new Afterword and a new title—The Rocky Years: The Story of a (Almost) Legend. In the Afterword, Mac Anna presents an engaging account of the resurrection of Rocky De Valera and the Gravediggers in the Summit Inn in Howth on the night of December 30, 2005. Despite a broken guitar strap (on the first tune, no less), an almost-swallowed harmonica, and a complete power outage, the event proved a resounding success. As a recent YouTube video testifies, Rocky and the lads continue to live on . . . and to rock on.

REVIEW OF EAMON GRENNAN, THE QUICK OF IT

This review of Eamon Grennan, The Quick of It (Graywolf Press, 2005) first appeared in Harvard Review, Number 30 (2006), pp. 179-80.

Toward the close of The Quick of It, a gathering of sixty-six untitled 10-liners, Eamon Grennan presents an explicit elucidation of the art of poetry at work in this highly-satisfying volume. Describing the simple act of raking freshly-mown grass—“your movements slow, deliberate, steady / As rowing”—he concludes: “Caught between satisfactions of rhythm, sound and sight, you see this is how / What you want to say may come clear as you revise (rake the dead away, // Bring the living to light), till you find under a tuft of cut grass a wild bees’ nest / Which you cover again, seeing its tiny golden honey-eggs blaze by daylight.” Acknowledging the intrinsically revelatory nature of lyric poetry, Grennan yet clearly abides by Emily Dickinson’s advice that “The Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind.” Accordingly, the poems that make up this volume tend to unfold rather than to explode as Grennan grapples with the inadequacy of his artistic medium to “say it the way it is”; in another poem, likening his challenge to that of the 18th-century French painter Chardin, he writes: “Only you look again, stretch your hand, dip the bristles, risk again the failing stroke.”

For Grennan, the risk here entails in part his choosing a significantly smaller canvas than usual for his brushwork. Having crafted in his volume Still Life With Waterfall (2002) a loose series of 13-liners that afforded him both the discipline of the sonnet and the flexibility of a nonce form, he raises the stakes by shrinking the form in The Quick of It. One result of the concentration of detail into the more compact structure is a concentration of language as well: an opening up to a deep sonic richness—a “rhapsody of rapt cacophony” as he describes the singing of a flock of starlings—hitherto uncharacteristic of his writing. Retaining the supple free verse line that characterizes his poetry throughout his career, Grennan continues to eschew end rhyme but textures his verses with a gratifying variety of other melopoetic devices: internal rhyme, assonance, consonance, alliteration. Musing on how he has never witnessed “that pivotal single instant” when solid stone gives way to the omnivorously eroding force of the sea, he has sound and sense converge impressively in his imagining of that moment “In which sea-roar and land-groan become a single deafening sky-sound / Before that jawing withdrawal, collapse, that racing after, so foam, stones, / Churn of sand, swirl of seawrack make a wrecked mouth bulging with one // Loud clamour-tongue, which the rock you stood on plunges into, dumbing it.”

Much of The Quick of It involves just such an attempt to capture not only the ephemeral but also the essential: the quidditas of what the poet experiences or observes. In a poem recording his own attentiveness to the attentiveness of a wren he notices in the bushes, Grennan actually discloses a source for this aesthetic in the example of Gerard Manley Hopkins. His strong-stressed lines inherently confluent with the sprung rhythms of Hopkins, Grennan appears to be acknowledging outright the influence on his poetic vision of Hopkins’ notions of “instress” and “inscape”: “It is that nib-specific focus I’m seeing in the bird / And hearing in the music, the in-lit contingent presence things hold // In the moment to moment passage of their happening.” Fully attuned to the natural world, Grennan at times even reflects a Hopkinsesque spiritual aspect. Glimpsing a robin on the wing, for example, “its burnt-orange / Breast, an emblem blown to brightness by the cloudy morning,” he responds: “I almost // Feel it as the quick blink of God’s one eye, the eureka-brisk surprise given / And taken, the echt unmanageable absolute of it in the moment passing.”

Dividing his year between Poughkeepsie, New York and Connemara in the western part of his native Ireland, Eamon Grennan is an altogether cosmopolitan poet. While some of his poems have recognizable Irish settings, the volume as a whole resonates with a capaciousness that transcends place specificity. The Quick of It is an altogether engaging and enriching book of lyric poetry.

GRAPPLING WITH PROTEUS

This review of Eamon Grennan, Still Life with Waterfall (Gallery Books, 2001; Graywolf Press, 2002) first appeared in The Irish Literary Supplement, Volume 22, Number 1 (Spring 2003), p. 14.

Ironically, given the density of its prose, the “Proteus” episode of Ulysses may provide crucial backshadowing for the vision informing Eamon Grennan’s truly luminous—at times even numinous—book of poems Still Life with Waterfall. “Ineluctable modality of the visible,” Stephen Dedalus muses to himself: “Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot.” In many respects “Proteus” reads as James Joyce’s own musing, by way of G. E. Lessing’s Laocoon, on the relationship between the world apprehended Nebeneinander—that is, spatially, objects side by side—and the verbal artist’s necessary expression of that world Nacheinander—that is, temporally, through words presented one after another: “the ineluctable modality of the audible.” Of course, Joyce himself contests Lessing’s categorical distinctions in the ensuing episodes of Ulysses, constantly complicating the reader’s expectation of the linear nature of narrative.

More broadly, however, “Proteus” involves what may be the intrinsic enterprise of lyric poetry: the attempt to acknowledge—through the attempt to capture in words—the truly protean character of human sensation, emotion, intellection. Robert Fitzgerald’s rendering of Eidothea’s advice concerning the sea deity Proteus that Menelaus shares with Telemachus in Book IV of The Odyssey describes this enterprise: “If you could take him by surprise and hold him, / he’d give you course and distance for your sailing / homeward across the cold fish-breeding sea.” Tellingly, the opening poem of Still Life with Waterfall opens with a powerful image out of nature that embodies symbolically the undertaking of the lyric poet: “On slow wings the marsh hawk is patrolling / possibility.” Titled “At Work,” the poem reads readily not just as a graphic recording of brutal beauty but also as a metaphorical representation of artistic pursuit and execution—of a literary capturing and reconstituting of (in effect) “that scuttling minutiae of skin and innards, / its hot pulse hammering . . . / that moved so swift and silent / and sure of itself, only a minute ago, in the sheltering grass.”

Pursuing such “possibility” in poem after poem, Grennan even evokes at times a defining stylistic feature of the “Proteus” episode. In “Grid,” for example, recording how “A deer in the field of morning, tan coat gleaming— / . . . stares till he sees what you are, then a huge / expulsive whufff and he’s dolphining green waves / to a safer distance,” he could almost be invoking Joyce’s glossing for his friend Frank Budgen of his coining the word “almosting”: “That’s all in the Protean character of the thing. Everything changes: land, water, dog, time of day. Parts of speech change, too. Adverb becomes verb.” Observing in “Cold Morning” how “the eight o’clock light change[s] / from charcoal to a faint gassy blue, inventing things,” Grennan—like Joyce before him—seeks both the language and the complementary form by which to register the endless changeability of outer and inner worlds: of phenomenal experience and of the individual’s reception and processing of that experience.

In fact, Grennan finds—or invents—the very form for containing the ever-shifting potency of language: an unrhymed and rhythmically supple nonce stanza of thirteen lines that itself proves “protean” in his hands. Indeed, the effect of Grennan’s twenty-two thirteen-liners (interspersed among the fifty-two poems in the volume) resides quite literally between that created by Paul Muldoon’s countless deconstructive renovations of the classic fourteen-line form of the sonnet and Seamus Heaney’s forty-eight innovative twelve-liners which constitute “Squarings” in Seeing Things. Sometimes (like Muldoon) breaking down the formal structure into discrete strophes to reinforce the rhetorical structure of the poem, Grennan yet consistently achieves (like Heaney) that ideogrammatic compression idealized by Ezra Pound: the presentation of “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” A single sinuous sentence, the final poem of Still Life with Waterfall both articulates and illustrates the efficacy of Grennan’s newfound form; observing a robin’s bullying of a finch cut short by the lethal attack of a sparrowhawk, Grennan concludes: “and I began to understand / how a poem can happen to you: you have your eye on a small / elusive detail, pursuing its music, when a terrible truth / strikes and your heart cries out, being carried off.”

For readers familiar with Grennan’s poetry through his four previous volumes published in North America (five in Ireland), the relative uniformity of his thirteen-liners may seem at first a radical departure for a poet whose trademark pieces (“Wing Road,” “Men Roofing,” “Two Gathering,” “Wet Morning, Clareville Road”) incline toward an organic expansiveness. But these poems, like the others that make up Still Life with Waterfall, actually share with his earlier work his characteristic attentiveness to the details of the natural world, to the subtleties of domestic relations and familial bonds, to the mirror images of art and life—in short, to what Yeats referred to as the “mere complexities” of being human. As the book’s title promises, Grennan finds a way to hold in words, to embed and to embody in stable poetic forms, the protean flux and flow of the world, the signatures of all things he is here to read.

THE POETIC BLACKBIRDS OF BELFAST LOUGH

This review of The Blackbird's Nest: An Anthology of Poetry from Queen's University Belfast (Blackstaff Press, 2006) first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 18, Number 1 (January 2007), p. 18.

Given that Queen’s University in Belfast now houses the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, readers of Irish poetry might be forgiven if their list of writers associated with that institution begins with its most famous alumnus. But with the publication of The Blackbird’s Nest: An Anthology of Poetry from Queen’s University Belfast, Blackstaff Press, in conjunction with the Heaney Centre, has made a move toward ensuring that the list does not end with Heaney or even with the small cohort of poets who emerged alongside him in the early 1960s or in his immediate wake. Arranged chronologically by author’s date of birth, the seventy-one poems collected by editor Frank Ormsby represent poetic activity from almost the start of the twentieth century right up to the present.

The roster of fifty-three poets is impressive: many turn out to be household names, but some are surprises. Even among the former, however, some of the poems that Ormsby selects are surprises—refreshingly so. From Heaney’s body of work, for example, the editor chooses not any of the Nobel Laureate’s signature pieces (“Digging,” “The Tollund Man,” “Punishment,” “The Harvest Bow”) but “Postscript,” which urges the reader to be pervious to “big soft buffetings” that “catch the heart off guard and blow it open,” and also “A Sofa in the Forties,” which mines a memory from Heaney’s simple childhood in rural Ulster: “All of us on the sofa in a line, kneeling / Behind each other, eldest down to youngest, / Elbows going like pistons, for this was a train // And between the jamb-wall and the bedroom door / Our speed and distance were inestimable.” While Ormsby does include Ciaran Carson’s well-known “Belfast Confetti”—“Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation marks, / Nuts, bolts, nails, car keys”—he picks “Hamlet” as well, a long-lined and intentionally rambling narrative poem that shows off Carson’s ventriloquial talent as a storyteller.

A pair of poets whose work tends to be both allusive and elusive, Medbh McGuckian and Paul Muldoon have two engaging poems each in the anthology. So does Michael Longley, whose sonnet “Ceasefire” universalizes the grief of Northern Ireland’s sectarian strife by dramatizing an encounter at the end of the Trojan War: “When they had eaten together, it pleased them both / To stare at each other’s beauty as lovers might, / Achilles built like a god, Priam good-looking still / And full of conversation, who earlier had sighed: // ‘I get down on my knees and do what must be done / And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.’”

In fact, one of the gratifying aspects of The Blackbird’s Nest is its representation of what Heaney (borrowing from Patrick Kavanagh) refers to in the book’s Foreword as the way that, in an academic environment, “Imagination . . . is in constant negotiation between the parish and the universe.” This is evident from the start, as the first two poems are translations from Latin by Helen Waddell, who attended Queen’s from 1908 to 1912; she was also awarded an honorary degree in 1934. Two translations from the work of twentieth-century Italian poet Eugenio Montale by Indian-born professor G. Singh have a similar sort of reach and richness. So does a pair of translations from Catalan poet Gabriel Ferrater by Arthur Terry, a former professor of Spanish at Queen’s; surely, the closing lines of “A Small War” speak as much to the troubled streets of Belfast as to anywhere else in the world: “I was young, like most who go to wars, / who are scared of the flesh, and destroy and abuse it. / All, in a word, emblematic, eternal.” A poem by History professor Sabine Wichert, apparently tapping into her growing up in post-WWII Germany, likewise looks beyond the literal walls of the University and also beyond the border of Northern Ireland.

Poems by writers who simply spent some time at Queen’s, in one capacity or another, add a further dimension to The Blackbird’s Nest. Crusty British poet Philip Larkin, who served as sub-librarian for five years in the 1950s, is represented by two poems, including the compelling “Church Going,” in which the apostate poet admits wryly, “Hatless, I take off / My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.” Writer in residence at Queen’s from 1991 to 1994, London-born Carol Rumens has a wonderful variation, couched playfully in the language of an unconsummated sexual encounter, on the Irish aisling (dream vision) tradition. Boston-born Janet Fitzpatrick Simmons, who taught for a time in the Department of English, has a poignant lament for her late husband James Simmons (who is also included in the anthology): “How could I have imagined this loss: / me standing over my beloved’s grave in the wind / that blows off the Atlantic visible from this Killult churchyard . . .?”

Hovering over (or perhaps behind) the entire anthology is the figure of British poet and professor Philip Hobsbaum, lecturer in English at Queen’s from 1962 to 1966 and founder of the legendary “Belfast Group” of writers, which included not only poets but also future playwright Stewart Parker and fiction writer Bernard MacLaverty. While making clear in his Introduction that Hobsbaum’s influence as poet was minimal, editor Frank Ormsby stresses the legacy of his organizing and hosting weekly meetings at his flat: “Literary friendships and productive rivalries developed and a number of poets progressed towards the pamphlet- and book-length collections that would make the north of Ireland one of the power points of Irish poetry and of poetry in English in the second half of the twentieth century.” Certainly Hobsbaum engineered the bridge between the few poetic pillars of the first half of the century represented in the anthology—John Hewitt and W. R. Rodgers, Robert Greacen and Roy McFadden—and those who would follow Heaney and company.

But as Ciaran Carson, Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre, suggests in his Afterword to The Blackbird’s Nest, poetry at Queen’s has never been fully institutionalized—a fact corroborated by the diversity of voices that round out the anthology. These include James Fenton, a part-time student in the 1960s, who writes in the Ulster-Scots dialect: “A fissle unther the deed, saft-hingin thatch, / A strippit shedda, a wheekin scad, / Ye jook crootched an shairp an quait / Amang the queelrods.” They also include the working-class vernacular of former University security guard John Campbell: “I’m an old jobbin’ poet, born outa my time, / if you buy me a likker, I’ll read you a rhyme. / I’m not hard to pay, a wee lager and lime . . . / If yer flyin’, I’ll take a quick half-in.” And Irish-language poets are represented by Gréagóir Ó Dúill and Cathal Ó Searchaigh, as well as by Gearóid Mac Lochlainn, whose “An Máine Gaelach” proves linguistically bold even in translation as “The Irish-speaking Mynah”:

00000Quixotic bird, tattered old sea-dog,
00000he stammered out amazing repartee
00000and drunken troopers’ curses,
00000all the passwords of the old Falls Road IRA.
00000Resting actor, stuck to the barstool
00000of his perch, a veritable Sweeney
00000tethered by his string of gabble.

The cover of The Blackbird’s Nest features an image of a single bird’s egg. Its title referencing the ninth-century Irish poem “The Blackbird of Belfast Lough,” which has afforded the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry an apt visual emblem (reproduced as a frontispiece in the book), the anthology offers only a glimpse into the poetic incubator of Queen’s University. But it is an enticing glimpse, and the nicely detailed Biographical Notes that close the book point readers toward available collections by the individual poets represented in this fine gathering.

FOUND IN TRANSLATION II: LOUIS DE PAOR'S "LANGUAGE QUESTION"

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 16, Number 9 (September 2005), p. 26.

Last month I wrote for these pages some musings on Louis de Paor’s moving poem “Iarlais” / “Changeling” from his dual-language volume Gobán Cré Is Cloch / Sentences of Earth & Stone. One engaging poem summoning up in the back of my mind another by this fine Irish-language poet, I let my fingers do the walking to that volume’s neighbor on the bookshelf, Aimsir Bhreicneach / Freckled Weather, and found what I was I looking for: a wonderful lyric poem titled “Seanchas” / “Old Stories.” A further illustration of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s implication that language is intrinsically a way of knowing—that we interpret the world via the linguistic tools at our disposal—this poem acknowledges de Paor’s linguistic indebtedness to a family housekeeper he remembers fondly from his childhood in Cork.

The opening lines of “Seanchas” / “Old Stories” thus register the deep-seated relationship between and among reality, imagination and language—in this case, clearly a rich rural dialect:

00000D’fhág sí boladh fuinseoige
00000is móin ag dó ar theallach oscailte
00000le scéalta aniar as clúid teolaí a haigne.

De Paor himself translates:

00000She left the smell of mountain ash
00000and turf burning on an open fireplace
00000with stories raked up
00000from a warm chimney corner in her head.

Introducing the housekeeper by alluding to her natural storyteller’s ability to bring her rural past vividly to life in his family’s urban present, de Paor uses metaphor (rather than simile) to blur the distinction between the world seen literally and the world perceived through the lens of language. As he phrases it, the virtual and the actual are one and the same: just as her strength as a seanchaí—as a teller of seanchas (old stories)—can transport her listener to an unfamiliar realm, so the “warm chimney corner in her head” is as real in de Paor’s poem as the “open fireplace” of the rustic cabin that she grew up in.

Yet, while both initially and ultimately the poem may be “about” the way language affects perception, and also about how the use of language in poetry represents a heightened version of that phenomenon, “Seanchas” / “Old Stories” opens up other intriguing thematic territory:

00000oícheanta cuirfiú tar éis céili
00000chomh hairdeallach le giorria sínte sa chlaí,
00000tormán croí
00000ag sárú ar thrudaireacht na gcarranna
00000nó go slogfaí solas brúidiúil na saighdiúirí
00000sa dorchacht ropánta.

Her descriptive recollection resonates in English too:

00000coming from a dance after the curfew,
00000lying flat in the ditch, sharp-eared as a hare,
00000a clamour of heartbeats over the stuttering
00000patrolcars until the vicious lights of the soldiers
00000were ambushed by the dark.

Recounting a time she hid from marauding British soldiers during the Anglo-Irish war, this example of one of her “old stories” may tantalize the reader into imagining the housekeeper as the embodiment of a bowed but unbroken Irish nationalist spirit. Indeed, the scene she describes even seems reminiscent of William Butler Yeats’s quasi-apocalyptic poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”: “Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare / Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery / Can leave the mother, murdered at her door, / To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free.”

But de Paor’s poem quickly complicates such a reflex interpretation, as another of the housekeeper’s old stories effectually de-romanticizes Irish militant nationalism:

00000reibiliúin gan mhúineadh ina dhiaidh sin
00000a thug caint gharbh is salachar na mbán
00000ar a sála isteach sa chistin sciomraithe,
00000a chiur an tigh faoi dhaorsmacht
00000le drochbhéasa is focail mhóra go maidin.

In English:

00000later on badmannered rebels
00000brought filthy words and mud
00000on heavy boots through the spotless kitchen
00000invading the house with rudeness
00000and big talk until morning.

Casting the often-idealized republican rebels as louts themselves, as no less boorish than the British soldiers they would displace, de Paor’s re-telling of her story in his poem simultaneously casts the housekeeper as the embodiment of a spirit of independence alright—but not in the conventional manner in which Ireland has been feminized by poets and politicians alike. She is no Cathleen Ni Houlihan, no old woman transformed (in Yeats’s version) into a young girl “with the walk of a queen.”

In fact, as the next lines reveal, in her defeat by the very values of the “modern” Ireland that the Irish rebels helped to put into place, the housekeeper emerges as a wistful symbol of a different claim for “self-government.” In this respect she is a spiritual sister of old Abby Driscoll in Frank O’Connor’s well-known short story “The Long Road to Ummera.” When her son Pat finally pronounces over her grave “Neighbors, this is Abby, Batty Heige’s daughter, that kept her promise to ye at the end of all,” the old woman comes to represent the triumph of traditional values—specifically, a sense of decency and respect for the past—over a post-revolutionary society increasingly defined by philistine pettiness masquerading as progress. Embodying Oscar Wilde’s incisive definition of a cynic as “someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,” Abby’s son himself represents a particular manifestation of the dominant forces that O’Connor’s and de Paor’s fellow Corkman Sean O’Faolain described in the 1930s: “To put the things in a few words—the figures of the new Ireland are the petty capitalist, native stock . . . ; the priest, native stock again; and the politician, almost always native stock. . . . Sanctity and salvation are on our banner. Security and stability are in our hearts. If we can have hard cash in our pockets we shall feel not merely holy but happy.”

De Paor’s housekeeper is not so fortunate as old Abby:

00000bhí sí neamhspleách rompu
00000agus ina ndiaidh
00000nó gur cheansaigh dochtúirí,
00000dlíodóirí, banaltraí is mná rialta
00000a hanam ceannairceach.

Her mettle stronger than that of either the British soldiers or the rebels, she yet eventually becomes the victim of a by-product of modernization—institutionalized treatment of the elderly:

00000she was independent before and after them
00000until doctors, lawyers, nurses and nuns
00000broke her heart.

For de Paor, then, his housekeeper’s linguistic example—itself an expression of her vital personal spirit—proves to be not just a useful gift for the future poet but a legacy for which he has been appointed, or anointed, custodian. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill has written famously of the responsibility the contemporary Irish-language poet bears with regard to the native idiom. Translated by Paul Muldoon as “The Language Issue,” her “Ceist na Teangan” answers its own question about the future of Irish:

00000I place my hope on the water
00000in this little boat
00000of the language, the way a body might put
00000an infant

00000in a basket of intertwined
00000iris leaves,
00000its underside proofed
00000with bitumen and pitch,

00000then set the whole thing down amidst
00000the sedge
00000and bulrushes by the edge
00000of a river

00000only to have it borne hither and thither,
00000not knowing where it might end up;
00000in the lap, perhaps,
00000of some Pharaoh’s daughter.

Clearly, by virtue of the vibrant and vigorous form of the language that she passed on to Louis de Paor, his family’s housekeeper was just such a Pharaoh’s daughter.

But, recalling Padraic Colum’s poem “A Poor Scholar of the ’Forties,” in which the poet imagines fragments of the Latin and the Greek taught in nineteenth-century hedge schools showing up occasionally in twentieth-century conversation (“Years hence, in rustic speech, a phrase, / As in wild earth a Grecian vase!”), the surprising ending of “Old Stories” / “Seanchas” reveals that she played even that role with a characteristically singular twist. For tearing the veil of innocence from the seemingly innocuous English verb “mobilise,” she bequeaths to young de Paor in a private malediction against the fascist Blueshirts—yet another heavy-booted mob, active in Ireland in the post-revolutionary period—an altogether original battle cry that he would instinctively use under schoolboy duress. In effect, she invigorates, even renovates, the English language as well as the Irish:

00000Chuir sí fiúise is buachallán buí
00000ag gobadh aníos tré stroighin
00000is tarra im chaint
00000is chloisfí stair a cine gan chlaonscríobh
00000im ghlór fuilteach i gclós na scoile:

00000“I’ll mobilise you, you bloody Blueshirt.”

Little gets lost in de Paor’s translation:

00000She set fuchsia and ragwort
00000peeking through concrete and tarmacadam
00000in my talk and you could hear
00000the history of her people unrevised
00000in my blood-spattered voice in the schoolyard:

00000“I’ll mobilise you, you bloody Blueshirt.”

FOUND IN TRANSLATION: EYE TO EYE WITH LOUIS DE PAOR’S "IARLAIS"

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 16, Number 8 (August 2005), p. 23.

Recently, reading “Photography,” Susan Sontag’s well-known essay first published in The New York Review of Books in 1973, I found myself not just transported by the power of a photograph but also translated, in effect, by the power of poetry. The catalyst for all of this was Sontag’s paragraph describing an image snapped during the Vietnam War by Associated Press photographer Huynh Cong “Nick” Ut: “A still photograph is a ‘privileged moment,’ turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again. Photographs like the one taken in 1971 and put on the front page of most newspapers in the world—a naked child running down a South Vietnamese highway toward the camera, having just been hit by American napalm, her arms open, screaming with pain—were of great importance in mobilizing antiwar sentiment in this country from 1967 on.” Actually shot on June 8th of 1972, just outside the village of Trang Bang, Nick Ut’s universally reproduced photograph is a literal example of a picture being worth a thousand words (or more).

Simply as a photograph, it has that rare quality that master photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson described in 1952 in the foreword to his landmark collection of photos titled The Decisive Moment: “Sometimes there is one unique picture whose composition possesses such vigor and richness, and whose content so radiates outward from it, that this single picture is a whole story in itself.” A searingly candid record of the horrors of war—those horrors etched as permanently in the girl’s pain-contorted face as in her naked napalm-scorched body—Ut’s photo speaks proverbial volumes that need no translation for any viewer with a soul. Even the viewer’s knowledge that the nine-year-old girl in the photo, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, survived her wounds and grew up to become a United Nations goodwill ambassador working for world peace does not lessen the unutterable wrongfulness of what Ut captured in his photo. As Sontag observes, “Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one—and can help build a nascent one.” Not just transporting, this photograph proved to be transforming as well, as it became instantly imprinted in the mind’s eye, and thus in the conscience, of a world largely oblivious—and largely willfully so—to the true tax and toll that war exacts on the innocent.

Appreciating all of that resonance as I read Sontag’s essay and pictured in my own mind’s eye that truly indelible image, I also appreciated how an image like that—no, how that exact image—can continue to resonate not only over time but also across cultures and contexts, taking on additional import without losing an iota of its original impact. Specifically, that paragraph of Sontag’s essay stirred in me a memory of a remarkable poem I had read some years ago that directly invokes Nick Ut’s photograph. I thus took down from my bookshelf Gobán Cré Is Cloch / Sentences of Earth & Stone, a dual-language volume by Irish-language poet Louis de Paor. Thumbing my way beyond the book’s midpoint, I eventually came to “Iarlais” and its facing-page translation, “Changeling.”

“Poetry,” Robert Frost reportedly declared, “is what gets lost in translation.” Its formal structure of three free verse stanzas supporting its three-part rhetorical structure, “Iarlais” surely loses little in translation by its author. First the Irish:

00000Chuir sí a dhá láimh
00000in airde go humhal
00000gur bhaineas di
00000a geansaí róchúng
00000is d’imigh de chromrúid
00000ar chamchosa ag sciorradh
00000an an urlár sleamhain
00000don bhfolcadán.

Reworked in English by de Paor, that opening stanza appears to register an ordinary moment of a day-in-the-life of the stay-at-home father he was at the time of the poem’s conception:

00000She did as she was told
00000putting her arms above her head
00000as I pulled off the tightfitting jumper,
00000then ran crookedly
00000on bow legs slipping and
00000sliding across the wet floor
00000heading for the bath.

Straightforwardly descriptive, these opening lines prove to be subversively deceptive.

Indeed, exemplifying poetry’s capacity to make both the strange familiar and the familiar strange, the poem registers in its abrupt shift of language and image the poet’s own involuntary recollection of Nick Ut’s unerasable tableau:

00000I bhfaiteadh
00000na súl
00000ghaibh an iarlais uimpi
00000cló muirneach m’iníne
00000is rith isteach sa tsíoraíocht
00000uaim ar bhóthar gan ceann
00000i Vietnam Thuaidh
00000chomh lomnocht
00000le súil gan fora,
00000gan luid uirthi a cheilfeadh
00000a cabhail tanaí
00000ar mo shúil mhillteach
00000nuair a chaoch an ceamara
00000leathshúil dhall uirthi
00000mar seo.

In English:

00000In the blink
00000of an eye the changeling
00000took on my daughter’s body
00000running for all eternity
00000down a narrow unending road
00000somewhere in Vietnam
00000naked as an unlidded eye
00000without a stitch to protect
00000her wizened body
00000from my evil eye
00000when the camera winked
00000at her like this.

Superimposed on the image of his own daughter, the poet’s memory of that famous photo is itself infused with his openness to Irish folk belief in “changelings” and in the force of “the evil eye.” Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 1995, preeminent Irish-language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill asserts that the very nature of the Irish language allows the native speaker equal access to the supposedly mutually exclusive realms of “reality and fantasy.” Claiming that “Even the dogs in the street in West Kerry know that the ‘otherworld’ exists, and that to be in and out of it constantly is the most natural thing in the world,” she explains: “The deep sense in the language that something exists beyond the ego-envelope is pleasant and reassuring, but it is also a great source of linguistic and imaginative playfulness, even on the most ordinary and banal of occasions.”

Of course, in “Iarlais” de Paor’s “playfulness” is altogether serious and sobering, as the folkloric elements convey a loving father’s perspective on the suffering of an innocent daughter. A rationalizing in the folk imagination of infant illness and mortality, the “changeling”—the sickly child exchanged by “the Fairies” for a healthy one—is quite literally a parent’s worst nightmare. In this case, the poet even projects his own culpability as “the evil eye” that has inflicted pain on the child now caught in the camera lens of his afflicted imagination.

But, consistent with Seamus Heaney’s description of the “verbal philandering” intrinsic to poetry written in Irish, de Paor’s working of troubling variations on the Irish word for “eye”—súil (súl, shúil, leathshúil)—in the second stanza affords the poem its restorative closure in the third stanza:

00000Nuari a nocthtann tú chugam
00000ag scréachaíl le tinneas
00000tá taise a cló buailte
00000ar do chraiceann fliuch
00000loiscthe ag an uisce fiuchta
00000ag allas scólta mo shúl.

00000When she comes back
00000screaming with pain
00000the mark of that tortured ghost
00000is branded on her dripping skin
00000scalded by the hot water
00000sweating from my unshuttered eye.

Perhaps truly, if unintentionally, complicit in sending his daughter into a bathtub of too-hot water, the poet may yet have his guilt assuaged, even absolved, by those heartfelt brimming tears—tears of empathetic fatherly love—burning his eyes at the end of the poem. Perhaps a similar capacity for love—not just for pity—contributed to what Sontag saw as the “moral outrage” provoked by Ut’s snapshot of a young girl’s agony. (“I almost love you,” Seamus Heaney wrote in a related vein in “Punishment,” a poem linking the photograph, published in P. V. Glob’s book The Bog People, of a female body buried for centuries in a Scandinavian bog with the thought of a young woman in Northern Ireland in the 1970s scapegoated for consorting with British soldiers.)

A compelling lyric poem by any measure, Louis de Paor’s “Iarlais” / “Changeling” may be that much more intriguing for having been written during the poet’s residency in Australia from 1987 to 1996. (A native of Cork, de Paor had a lectureship at the University of Sydney. He is currently Director of the Center for Irish Studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway.) A “translation”—literally, a “carrying across”—in more ways than one, the poem’s engagement with Nick Ut’s transcendent photograph of Kim Phuc transports the reader far beyond the familiar realms of immediate time and place.

FROM THE LAUREATE, THE KEY CADENCES OF ENGAGEMENT

This review of Billy Collins, Nine Horses (Random House, 2002) first appeared in The Boston Globe, December 1, 2002, p. D 8.

In “Introduction to Poetry,” a poem included in his first book, The Apple That Astonished Paris (1988), current US Poet Laureate Billy Collins provides a key—actually, a ring of keys—to how a reader might engage with any poem. “Hold it up to the light / like a color slide,” he suggests, “or press an ear against its hive,” or “drop a mouse into a poem /and watch him probe his way out.” Perhaps a wink toward the origin of the poetic term “stanza” in the Italian word for “room,” the last key he extends may be the best for unlocking the wonders housed in his own writing: “walk inside the poem’s room / and feel the walls for a light switch.”

Certainly this strategy works with the poems gathered in Nine Horses, his ninth full-length collection. Admitting in a recent essay that his poems tend to be driven far more by “the engines of imagination” than by “the engines of memory” in vogue among contemporary poets, Collins in fact writes on the margin of several poetic conventions. Hardly formalist, his deceptively casual poems are yet composed of carefully measured strophes (most commonly of three or four lines) made up of gracefully balanced and quietly cadenced phrases. Hardly autobiographical (and not in the least confessional), they yet afford in their intrinsic humor and their essential humaneness glimpses of the man behind the mask of words. Hardly thematically heavy, any given poem yet resonates with a profundity appropriate to the degree of levity or gravity that generated it in the first place.

In short, a typical Collins poem has a self-illuminating quality to it, or (to compile metaphors the way Collins characteristically does) a gratifyingly organic feel about it, a sense that like some splendidly blooming plant, it develops naturally from even a most inauspicious instant of germination. “Velocity,” for example, starts out with the poet, traveling cross-country by train, fretting that he has only the tired subject of “life and death” to write about. However, as a doodled sketch in his notebook develops into a motorcyclist “leaning forward, helmetless, / his long thin hair trailing behind him in the wind,” Collins comes to reflect on how his increasingly detailed drawing resembles the locomotive pulling the train. Ultimately, those linked emblems of speed suggest “from the point of view of eternity” the very image of all humanity hurtling through life toward death: “we would all / appear to have speed lines trailing behind us /as we rush along the road of the world, / as we rush down the long tunnel of time.” Obviously, Collins arrives at the very destination of subject matter that he wished to avoid, but the circuitous route he takes proves much more “scenic” than either he or his reader might have anticipated.

Such transformation of the ordinary into the interesting, the familiar into the captivatingly strange, virtually defines Collins’s poetry. Sometimes the poet’s inspiration comes from his recognizing a curious synchronicity: for instance, the appearance of Arthur Godfrey and Man Ray, or Ken Kesey and Dale Evans, on the same obituary page brings to his mind “an ark of death,” random “pairs of men and women / ascending the gangplank two by two,” “all saved at last from the awful flood of life.” Sometimes he will tease out the unlikely implications of a fact acquired serendipitously: hearing on the radio that jazz saxophonist Eric Dolphy, “36 years old when he died, / has now been dead for 36 years,” he muses playfully on the “little shift” that occurred “when we all took another / full Dolphy step forward in time, / flipped over the Eric Dolphy yardstick once again.” Equal parts ingenious and ingenuous, poems registering moments of awareness like those can leave a reader feeling the paradoxical sensation that Collins inscribes in “The Literary Life”: “Everything seemed more life-size than usual.”

So can a poem like “The Return of the Key,” in which, imagining opening a birdcage with a key plucked from William Carlos Williams’s famous poem “Nantucket,” Collins takes the reader on a dazzling flight of fancy that concludes with the liberated bird disappearing “into the anthology of American poetry / that lay open on the table— / the key clenched in its beak / the pages lifting like many wings in the breeze.” A verbal equivalent of the visual wit of surrealist painter Rene Magritte, this poem reads as a heightened version of Collins’s unabashed delight in poetic possibilities—his constant readiness, as he declares in a poem cataloging the many pleasures of Paris, “to cheer the boats of the beautiful, / the boats of the strange, / as they float down the river of this momentous day.” Pervious to even the simplest of cues—a song stuck in his head, a change in the weather, the work of art that lends his book its title, a sudden impulse to learn about Coventry Patmore—Collins engages his reader by way of his own engaged reading of both his outer and inner worlds. As he concedes in “Aimless Love,” a poem listing all manner of such cues, “my heart is always propped up / in a field on its tripod, / ready for the next arrow.”

While Collins might refer self-deprecatingly to his craft of poetry as merely “making lines, / making comparisons,” clearly he has found a readership: the enthusiastic reception—both critical and popular—of his Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001) attests to that. Nine Horses should only add to his rightful acclaim. One of the truly indelible images in the book is of a roadkill groundhog remembered as “a small Roman citizen, / with his prosperous belly, / his faint smile, / and his stiff forearm raised / as if he were still alive, still hailing Caesar.” But in poem after poem, Collins achieves a comparable effect—the effect he both describes and achieves at the end of “Night Letter to the Reader,” the book’s prefatory piece, in which “the moon, / looking like the top of Shakespeare’s / famous forehead, / appeared, quite unexpectedly, / illuminating a band of moving clouds.”

A FURTHER STROLL DOWN HEANEY'S "CANOPIED PAD"

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 17, Number 8 (August 2006), p. 21.

Writing in this space a couple of months ago about Seamus Heaney’s poem “Broagh,” I was tempted to pause and muse at some length on a single word in the first stanza of that poem. The word was “pad,” and as I mentioned in my general commentary on the poem, it represents Heaney’s attempt to record the local pronunciation of the word “path.” Thus, his phrase “a canopied pad” refers to a path leading, through overarching trees, down to the riverbank (in Irish bruach abhana) which gives the place, Broagh, its name and the poem its title.

But there is a bit more to Heaney’s choice of that spelling than literally meets the eye, and this time I am not going resist the temptation to reflect a bit more deeply on it. Heaney himself actually provides a clue—or a cue—for how readers might recognize that, in spelling “path” the way that he does, he is grappling with the difficulty of using standard orthography (the 26 letters of the English alphabet) to record nonstandard pronunciation: in this case the not-quite-th sound that many Irish people produce where a speaker of the so-called Queen’s English would naturally hit the mark. That clue/cue appears in “Fodder,” the first poem of the volume Wintering Out, which begins: “Or, as we said, / fother . . .” The explanation for why, in certain communities of Ireland, the d sound in “fodder” would be pronounced almost like a th and why the th sound in “path” would be pronounced almost like d (or perhaps almost like t) is somewhat technical, involving using the term “phoneme” where we might want to use the simpler word “sound.” But it is relatively easy to understand when you stop and think about it—and even moreso when you try out the variant pronunciations yourself.

So here goes. The phonemes /t/ and /d/—as in the words matter and madder—are referred to by linguists (scholars devoted to the scientific study of language) as “alveolar stops.” They are produced when you stop the air flow from your lungs by holding your tongue against the alveolar ridge with the velum closed. (The alveolar ridge is the hard ridge at the front of your mouth, above your teeth; the velum is the soft curtain of flesh at the back of your mouth.) A sudden removal of the tongue will produce a /t/, a voiceless alveolar stop. If the vocal chords vibrate during the process, you will produce a /d/, a voiced alveolar stop. Try pronouncing matter and madder while holding your fingers lightly against your throat: you will feel the vibration on madder but not on matter.

In contrast, the two “th” phonemes, /y/ and /ð/—as in the words ether and either—are referred to by linguists as “interdental fricatives.” They are produced by the tongue obstructing the air stream between the upper and the lower teeth, or at the bottom of the upper teeth. The /y/ is a voiceless interdental fricative, the /ð/ is a voiced interdental fricative. Try pronouncing ether and either, making sure (even in an exaggerated way) that your tongue is decidedly between your teeth: again, you should be able to distinguish between the voiced and the voiceless phonemes.

Now here is the catch in Ireland. The Irish language—the language spoken by the majority of Irish people until the middle of the 19th century—does not include the phonemes /y/ and /ð/. So, just as “Hiberno-English,” the English language as spoken in Ireland today, still owes obvious debts to the Irish language through adoption or adaptation of both vocabulary (loanwords) and syntax (certain grammatical structures), it also owes a debt of pronunciation to the Irish language in that many Irish people produce an “allophone,” conditioned by their ancestral language’s system of phonemes, which simply approximates the target phoneme when attempting to produce either /y/ and /ð/ or /t/ or /d/. (Though more common involving the attempt to produce /y/ and /ð/, the “error” can occur going either way). What happens is that they place their tongue on the back of the upper teeth—below the alveolar ridge which would produce an alveolar stop, yet not between the teeth which would produce an interdental fricative. The result, not found in “standard English” pronunciation, is what linguists call a “dental stop.” Thus the word “fodder” gets pronounced fother (more or less) and “pad” appears for the word “path” in Heaney’s poem “Broagh.”

Or so Heaney intends. Strictly speaking, the voiced alveolar stop /d/ at the end of “pad” does not accurately register the voiceless dental stop, the not-quite-/y/ that Heaney is really aiming for at the end of “path”: probably the voiceless alveolar stop /t/ would be a closer approximation of the “not-quite-th” sound that many Irish people would produce. But that inexactness reflects some of the imprecision inherent in attempting to represent nonstandard pronunciations with standard orthography—to say nothing of how the appearance of “pat” on the page might have caused undue confusion for readers not tuned in to Heaney’s intention here.

As it turns out, Heaney’s intention—or his reach in attempting to register that dental stop—dovetails with a “language question” that was made conspicuously manifest in several ways in the decade or so following the publication of “Broagh” and “Fodder” in Wintering Out in 1972. Perhaps achieving its highest profile in Brian Friel’s marvelous play Translations, first staged by the Field Day Theatre Company in Derry in 1980, this “question” has many prismatic facets involving Ireland’s linguistic heritage. Friel explores in particular the legacy of the politics of naming associated with the Ordnance Survey mapping of Ireland in the 1830s. The play’s most dramatic moment occurs when the British sapper Yolland tries to persuade his Irish translator Owen that they should retain the local Irish placename “Tobair Vree” instead of substituting some relatively random Anglicized name. “Something is being eroded,” Yolland declares, and Owen begrudgingly concedes the point.

More to the point of Heaney’s spelling of “path,” though, is Tom Paulin’s pamphlet, published by Field Day in 1983, titled “A New Look at the Language Question.” Observing that the English language as spoken in Ireland “lives freely and spontaneously as speech, but . . . lacks any institutional existence and so is impoverished as a literary medium,” Paulin argues that “A language that lives lithely on the tongue ought to be capable of becoming the flexible written instrument of a complete cultural idea.” While Paulin focuses more on “discursive prose” and more on vocabulary—“a word like ‘geg’ or ‘gulder’ or Kavanagh’s lovely ‘gobshite’”—the principles are essentially the same regarding poetry and regarding pronunciation. No less than his inclusion of words like “rigs,” “docken,” “ford,” and “boortrees” in “Broagh,” Heaney’s representation of the local pronunciation of “path” brings his readers that much closer to that place along the riverbank, that place with its “black O” in the first syllable and its “last / gh the strangers found / difficult to manage.”

HEANEY'S "BROAGH": THE WORLD MADE WORD

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 17, Number 5 (May 2006), p. 25.

In recent months I’ve been musing in these pages on place-consciousness in the Irish literary imagination—especially in the imagination of exiles. Certainly, as Patrick Sheeran has noted, “topomania” (his variation on what French philosopher Gaston Bachelard has named “topophilia”—the love of place) not only is “a product of the native tradition” but also “may well be fostered by displacement.” As Sheeran argues in his essay “Genius Fabulae: The Irish Sense of Place”: “The awareness of place qua place is especially acute in those who have left it as is shown by Joyce’s Dublin, Yeats’s Sligo, O’Flaherty’s and Ó Direáin’s Aran, Ó Cadhain’s Iar Chonnacht, Kavanagh’s Monaghan, Montague’s Tyrone and Heaney’s County Derry. It is a quality of awareness that occurs at a fracture point; between being rooted and being alienated, being an insider and an outsider.”

But as Seamus Heaney notes in his own essay titled “The Sense of Place,” that awareness can have its subliminal counterpart that almost invariably predates the moment of fracture: “I think there are two ways in which place is known and cherished, two ways which may be complementary but which are just as likely to be antipathetic. One is lived, illiterate and unconscious, the other learned, literate and conscious. In the literary sensibility, both are likely to co-exist in a conscious and unconscious tension.” For Heaney himself this dual sensibility is evident from the start of his poetic career in his mentioning of “Toner’s bog” in “Digging,” the first poem in his first volume of poems, Death of a Naturalist (1966). A placename not found on any official map—except possibly the most detailed plotting of the landscape in Heaney’s native rural south County Derry—the immediate “meaning” of Toner’s bog is exclusively local: it is a real place in the real world of Heaney’s “lived, illiterate and unconscious” childhood.

Inserted into the poem, however, the named place takes on different properties: grounding the poem in that real world, the reference not only authenticates Heaney to himself and to his readers as a commentator on rural Irish experience but also authenticates that experience, validating it as viable subject matter for the poetic imagination. A major acknowledged influence on Heaney, Patrick Kavanagh once noted in a poem that “Naming . . . is the love-act and its pledge.” Thus, identifying Toner’s bog by name, Heaney is staking a claim that is both personal and poetic, both pre-literary and literary.

Eventually, most obviously in Heaney’s third volume, Wintering Out (1972), such naming would take on a political resonance as well. This is especially pronounced in a poem like “A New Song,” in which the mere mention of Derrygarve, a village on the Moyola River in south County Derry, first provokes in the poet a fond memory of “the river’s long swerve, / A kingfisher’s blue bolt at dusk // And stepping stones like black molars / Sunk in the ford, the shifty glaze / Of the whirlpool, the Moyola / Pleasuring beneath alder trees.” Quickly, however—and understandably, given the poem’s provenance in the early 1970s during the escalation of the sectarian “Troubles” in Northern Ireland—Heaney realizes that naming is also claiming: that no less than Derrygarve, which derives from the Irish doire (oak wood) plus garbh (rough), a comparable Anglophonic placename is not a mere “vocable,” is not a mere sequence of meaningless sounds. Indeed, Heaney implies, the local towns of Castledawson and Upperlands are just what they sound like: staunch emblems of the British presence, both historical and contemporary, in the North.

In this respect, other places that Heaney invokes by name in Wintering Out may carry similar implications: Anahorish (deriving from anach fhior uisce, “place of clear water”) and Toome (“My mouth holds round / the soft blastings, / Toome, Toome,” Heaney writes) and Moyola (“The tawny guttural water / spells itself”). But the most subtle of Heaney’s territorial claims on place—on place made word and on word made place—may be the poem “Broagh,” the first word of which translates the title, a contracted variant of the Irish phrase bruach abhana:

00000Riverbank, the long rigs
00000ending in broad docken
00000and a canopied pad
00000down to the ford.

00000The garden mould
00000bruised easily, the shower
00000gathering in your heelmark
00000was the black O

00000in Broagh,
00000its low tattoo
00000among the windy boortrees
00000and rhubarb-blades

00000ended almost
00000suddenly, like that last
00000gh the strangers found
00000difficult to manage.

Understandably, this poem has received a measure of critical attention, as well as a measure of readerly appreciation, for its obvious focus on the challenge that “strangers” (plausibly, but not exclusively, the British) face in pronouncing correctly not only that lightly guttural gh but also that first vowel, the clipped o, which makes this seemingly simple word into a sort of two-syllable tongue-twister. Tellingly, however, “Broagh” begins to operate as “a verbal contraption” (W. H. Auden’s fine phrase) fueled by local specifics long before that tricky vowel. In fact, each line of the first stanza concludes with a word that, almost as much as the name Broagh itself, grounds the poem in Heaney’s particular world: “rigs” is a regional term for ploughed furrows; “docken” is a local variation on the deep-rooted weed known elsewhere as burdock; “pad” approximates the local pronunciation of “path”; and “ford,” deriving from the Old Norse word fjord (found as a suffix in Irish placenames like Waterford and Wexford) and referring to a shallow point in the river that would allow one to wade across, has clearly been retained in the vernacular from the time of the Viking invasions of Ireland in the 9th and 10th centuries. (The Viking legacy would of course be Heaney’s central fascination in his 1975 volume North.) In a similar fashion, the word “boortrees” in the third stanza resonates as the local pronunciation of “bower trees”—that is, elderberry trees.

Obviously, then, “Broagh”—on the surface a mere two sentences, readable in one breath—is deceptively simple. And in a way that is Heaney’s point: no less than the language of poetry, the language of the everyday world can be loaded with implication—sometimes political implication. In “Digging,” he describes his grandfather “going down and down / For the good turf” and closes that poem with his famous promise: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.” In “Broagh,” he actually employs a form which visually reinforces that metaphorical action. Explaining how, beginning with Wintering Out, Heaney began to write “compressed, mostly two-stress lines, unrhymed, arranged in slender quatrains, and having an extremely narrow appearance on the page,” critic Blake Morrison describes the effect as “arterial” and/or “artesian”: Heaney’s poems work like “drills, wells, augers, capillaries, mine-shafts, bore-holes, plumb-lines.” Digging beneath the surface of naming in “Broagh,” Heaney reminds his readers, just as he was reminded by hearing the name Derrygarve, not only that place can be known and cherished in more than one way but also that our conscious and unconscious appreciation of a place can be affected by its very name.
way but also that our conscious and unconscious