REVIEW OF TOM FRENCH, THE LAST STRAW

This review first appeared in New Hibernia Review, Volume 22, Number 3 (Autumn 2018), 147-49.

A lyric poet by nature, Tom French concluded his fourth volume of poems, The Way to Work (Gallery Books, 2016), on an anomalous note—with a coda (his term) titled “1916” in which, provoked by the centenary celebrations of the Easter Rising, he reflects on “the gulf between the beautiful ideals read out to a handful / of rubberneckers and what has become of those ideals.” Notwithstanding the bit of international notice it gained for him in the form of an appearance on the radio program Open Source with Christopher Lydon, that poem is a pretty blunt reminder of a distinction once made by Robert Frost: “Poetry is about the grief, politics about the grievances.”

In The Last Straw (Gallery Books, 2018), French returns to his more natural pitch and register, characterized by an exactness of both word and phrase:

Everything that can be is disconnected.

        Our fire dies.  The starlings, nested

in the eaves, have settled.  We have cut

        the house adrift to sleep . . .

 He also returns to a form that he clearly feels at home in—the sonnet, mostly unrhymed and mostly deploying flexible lines that work variations on the conventional iambic pentameter pulse of that form.  Indeed, 50 of the 89 poems in The Last Straw are fourteen-liners, that formal structure (often three quatrains and a couplet but sometimes either two quatrains and two tercets or four tercets and a couplet) underscoring the rhetorical movement within any given poem.  The ending of “Tigh an Táilliúra, Carraroe” yields a typically pleasing example of French’s talent for “turning” a sonnet.  Describing in the two quatrains that open the poem how a customer in a pub suddenly “stands and dances to a jig on the radio,” French uses the final six lines to lead the reader to reflect, as he does himself, on the implications of what he witnessed:

That was thirty years ago.  I have seen

       men in the throes of dancing since,

but none like that man that morning,

who stays with me not because he was blind

       but because he did the only thing he could

when the tune came on.  He stood.  He danced.

That poem is one of a sequence, titled “After Hours,” set in pubs around Ireland.  The Last Straw includes four other sequences. In the seven poems comprising “Costa Blanca” the poet reflects both

gratefully and guiltily on the luxury of a family holiday in Spain during the current European immigrant crisis.  The fifteen poems that make up “Bank” afford a rich historical record of working a turf bank.  “Heywood” comprises seven poems recalling the poet’s education at the hands (at times literally) of the masters and the teachers at the Salesian College in Ballinakil, County Laois.  Focusing on the timepieces of two British soldiers during the Great War of 1914-18 (one of them the poet Edward Thomas), “Two Watches” engages with a subject and a theme that eventually emerge as central to the volume as a whole—in the famous words of British soldier-poet Wilfred Owen: “My subject is War, and the pity of War.  The Poetry is in the pity.”

In fact, some of French’s most compelling standalone poems appear to be inspired by the spirit of Irish soldier Francis Ledwidge that lives on in that star-crossed poet’s native County Meath, where French works as an Executive Librarian specializing in Local Studies. These include the truly wonderful blank-verse sonnet “Tattie Hokers,” which draws on the story of a battalion of the Seaforth Highlanders, a Canadian regiment, pausing on the march between Amiens and Albert in October of 1916 to help a French farmer pick potatoes: “They can’t resist / stacking rifles and throwing off backpacks // to postpone death . . .”  Imagining how “Mucking in here makes it peace time briefly,” French captures the pity of war indeed in his closing tercet:

The scent of potatoes brings back the bothy,

       straw mattresses arrayed on seed boxes,

the cow house swept out for men to lie down. 

 Another, “Unidentified Farriers, Western Front,” is obviously prompted by a photograph:

They have taken time out from the slaughter

       to enjoy the banter and be photographed

by a cameraman who steps from under

       a black cloth and carries their souls away.

In this decade of centennial commemorations in Ireland, French is a rarity among contemporary poets in his commitment to validating and valuing the upwards of 300,000 Irish-born soldiers, long marginalized by politics, time and history, who served in the British Expeditionary Force during the Great War.

One of French’s great strengths as a lyric poet is his capacity to find the makings of a poem in diverse, and sometimes obscure, corners.  These include his own personal experience as in a poem like “Kilcreene,” which records an intimate moment with an aging relative undergoing treatment at the Lourdes Orthopaedic Hospital in Kilkenny. Describing how he helped the old man undress and then watched him resign himself to bed, French writes:

                   I know now this is how a god lies down.

I kiss his stubbled cheek, his handsome face,

       and bear, in shopping bags, his clothes away.

Another is “Sisyphus in Cricklewood,” which tells of an Irish émigré to London who has worked “painting the one bridge for years”:

He’d been fresh off the boat when he began.

       An old hand showed him the ropes early on

and left him to it when he’d got the hang.

       Now he does it most days with his eyes closed.

Each new year he sets out for the far bank

       and, each new year, for the far bank again. 

Another is “Church of the Resurrection, Ballinfoyle,” an intriguingly respectful—even reverent—poem in essentially post-Catholic Ireland.  Inscribing “the priest and the sister above on the altar / who would pass for a couple of ancient lovers / passing the bread and wine to one another,” French grants them a grace and a dignity inflected with not even an iota of irony:

He loves her.  She knows where everything goes.

       Now they bow to the miracle of each other,

to the tabernacle which is their kitchen cupboard.

The recipient of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2001, the Dermot Healey Award in 2015, and the O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry in 2016, Tom French is a lyric poet of the first order. His poems are richly realized and a true pleasure to read.

MICHEL DÉON CASTS A COOL FRENCH EYE

This piece first appeared in the Irish Literary Supplement, Volume 38, Number 1 (Fall 2018), 12-13.

The primary claim to fame of Michel Déon as an “Irish” writer rests on a novel set in Ireland that he published in French in 1973.  Never translated into English, Un Taxi Mauve, which received the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française, was adapted to the big screen in English in 1977 as The Purple Taxi.  (It did not receive rave reviews.)  Born in Paris in 1919, Déon was a prolific author in French beginning in the 1940s and the recipient of major literary honors, including membership in l’Académie française. After first settling on the Greek island of Spetsai in the Aegean Sea, Déon and his wife and their two children relocated to Ireland, specifically to south County Galway, in 1968.  He died in Galway in December of 2016 at the age of 97.

Reportedly, Déon lived just long enough to see in print an advance copy of Horseman, pass by!, a gathering of his nonfiction writing about Ireland translated by Clíona Ní Ríordáin, a professor of English at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, where she teaches literature and translation studies.  Originally published as Cavalier, passé ton chemin! by Gallimard in 2005, this book comprises a dozen chapters populated by a cast of characters mostly local to his adopted and adoptive village of Tynagh, by the ghost of William Butler Yeats, and by a couple of fellow literary figures whose renown both precedes and exceeds Déon’s sketches of them.  Those two figures are Ulick O’Connor and John McGahern.

Remarkably, given Déon’s initial impression of the mercurial O’Connor, the two men developed an “episodic” friendship and even collaborated casually.  Déon’s first encounter with O’Connor, at the Shelburne Hotel in Dublin in the company of a dozen writers, was hardly auspicious, the pugnacious Dubliner having just given the boot to a British writer in the entourage: “I’m going to kick that hoor of an Englishman up the arse, if he doesn’t leave this instant.  What is he doing in my country?”  But eventually Déon came to appreciate him in all his motley complexity: “In our far-west Irish retreat his coming always leaves a mixed impression.  No one could fail to be impressed by his moral standards, his hard-hitting intelligence, and his rich poetic memory.  He arrives in the garb of a city-dweller, elegant after his own fashion, that is to say a mixture of a dandy and a tramp—with clothes half-ragged, half-chic—a large felt hat pulled down over one ear, and a purple cashmere scarf hiding part of the collar of a much-worn black overcoat whose mix and match buttons I can imagine him choosing just to add to the composition of his character.  Isn’t he already a character?  No, I think he just has an aristocratic disdain for the distasteful tasks of everyday life that bore him stiff.”

Déon’s friendship with McGahern was both thinner and murkier.  Centered around a lunch at the famous Moran’s Oyster Cottage in Kilcolgan, the chapter on their acquaintance focuses mostly on McGahern’s writing, most specifically on his final novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun.  Déon’s estimation of that work illuminates his own perspective on his adopted world: “Nothing so profoundly human and so unvarnishedly honest has ever been written about rural Irish society.  It rises above the blackness with which Irish literature usually speaks about its world, about its love-hate relationship with the Catholic Church and about the suffering it cultivates irremediably with such masochism.”  But McGahern the person remained a cipher to him, even after Déon visited him on his farm in County Leitrim: “I scarcely found out anything else about that deeply reserved man.  It was true that the shelves in his house in Foxfield were weighed down with books, but the names and the titles were difficult to make out.  The room where he worked was a monk’s cell of two by four metres.  The desk was a simple table made of light-wood, facing the wall.  McGahern doesn’t allow the landscape to disturb him.” (That single visit took place in January of 2005; McGahern died a little more than a year later.)

Coolly candid in his vignettes of O’Connor and McGahern, Déon casts a cold eye indeed not only on Yeats the poet but even more so on his commodified presence in the countryside in the general vicinity of Tynagh.  Dismayed by “the frenetic advance of cultural tourism” centered on Yeats, Déon courts consternation at every step he takes on a self-guided tour of the indelibly inscribed territory of Thoor Ballylee and Lady Gregory’s Coole Park.  First he visits Ballylee: “the entrance to the tower is now via a thatched cottage where all the inevitable horrors are arrayed—things like green scarves, green caps, green shields adorned with shamrocks.” He is even more appalled by the preserved schoolhouse originally underwritten by Lady Gregory at Kiltartan Cross: “The school, which has been converted into a museum, is a masterpiece of bad taste, even by Irish standards where the competition is fierce.  It could be taken for a train station in a coal-mining outpost. The charming lady who sells tickets at the desk—no tacky souvenirs there—will look like Lady Gregory in a couple of years.  With the exception of three important letters, the exhibition is of no interest: newspaper cuttings, photos, posters, a few books and, in the back room, a recreated classroom.  It’s got everything: inkwells, exercise books, pens, a blackboard, desks, and, at the front of the room, in a long skirt, a mannequin of a pretty school teacher that looks as if it might fly off like Mary Poppins.”

But Déon reserves his most righteous irreverence for Sligo Town and environs—Rosses Point, Benbulben, Drumcliff, all with obvious Yeatsian associations—which he describes visiting for the first time in decades.  And it is in this section of his chapter on Yeats that the reader might recognize that the overarching theme of Horseman, pass by!involves the myriad changes rural Ireland experienced in the economic boom of the late twentieth century.  Complaining about small-town traffic congestion, the shuttering of second-hand bookshops, the EU-mandated construction of roadways that have eliminated cattle- and sheep-clogged trunk roads as well as “the hedgerows of hawthorn, brambles and fuchsia,” the proliferation of “new buildings that spring up chaotically like poisonous mushrooms,” Déon asks: “Oh my dears, what are you doing to one of the most poetic countries in Europe?”  Musing on all of this as a self-sure octogenarian, Déon is unabashedly nostalgic for “the aristocratic Sligo” of the 1960s.  Fortunately, the severity of his judgment is generally mitigated by the richness of his writing—the distinctive wit, the smartly observed detail, the pleasing turn of phrase.

Ironically enough, Déon’s assessment of Ireland at the turn of the new century and of the new millennium—his nostalgia-infused disquiet about the country’s future—actually resonates with the perspective of Yeats’s Byzantine gilded bird perched on its bough and singing “Of what is past, or passing, or to come.”  Clearly, first with the flourishing and then with the waning of the so-called Celtic Tiger, many of Déon’s fears about what might get lost in transition have been, for better or for worse, irreversibly realized over the dozen years since the original publication of Cavalier, passé ton chemin!  But his most telling gauge of change and loss registers not in his mordant measuring of Sligo but in his series of wistful sketches of mostly anonymous individuals grounded in the physical and social landscape of south Galway.  These include members of the Galway Blazers, a fox-hunting crowd who invited his wife, a serious horsewoman, to join their circle.  One of this crowd, the superannuated Lady H who rides side-saddle while sporting a tricorne hat, ultimately becomes, in her physical and mental decline, an emblem for Déon of her social class in its decline. Ditto for Derek T, “the last gentleman of leisure in our part of the west of Ireland.”  The third husband of the mistress of Woodlawn, a decaying estate near Kilcolgan, Derek represents “the end of his race”: “He was the perfect symbol of the middle English aristocracy, who had arrived in Ireland centuries earlier as conquerors following in Cromwell’s footsteps. Ireland had slowly destroyed them, taking their virtues and distilling in them the slow poison of its laziness in a curious seesaw movement.”  Willfully obliviousness to the social and economic changes of latter-day Ireland and their effect on the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, Derek finally engineers his own abrupt end.

Most of the characters drawn by Déon are truly the likes of whom will not be seen again (that old refrain).  One of these is the bicycle-riding postman from Ballindereen, in the vicinity where the author and his family lived when they first moved to Ireland.  Remembering him in “his big postman’s cap and trussed up in his black Sunday suit, with his trouser legs stuffed into his bicycle clips to reveal huge clodhopper shoes,” Déon writes: “Tim was like Prometheus when, standing upright on the pedals, he climbed the slight incline that led to us.” Reflecting on him decades later, he wonders: “Would he have liked the changes in his country?  . . . Would he shed a tear in memory of the poky little shop-cum-post office, the road that flooded under the slightest downpour, the freezing church, and the petrol pump that the shopkeeper manoeuvred with a fierce energy one could only dream of?”

Other cameos include a handyman named Pat-Jo Smith whom Déon admired for his embodiment of “the very Irish privilege of being at ease everywhere, being uncomfortable in no situation, an exemplary absence of barriers between people, a social fabric with no class divisions.”  And there is Sarah, who took to the roads after burying the last of her six children. She is a timeless figure: “For centuries, she had been walking the roads of Donegal, Mayo and Connemara, miming an imaginary conversation with the dead with expressive gestures, swinging the bundle she was carrying filled with a few rags, cans of beer, and potatoes cooked in ashes, her only food.”  Another figure in the landscape is an elderly local named Ciaron Barnett.  Displaced from his farm by his son after suffering a heart attack, he slipped away from his ever-vigilant wife and hitched a ride with Déon to Galway City; he returned home three days later, “grinning from ear to ear, delighted with his adventure”: “He’d bought a calf and a horse along the way, leaving what could be deemed a down payment of honour, fifty pence, for each of them.  The rest of the sum was to be completed when his eldest son went to collect them with his cattle truck.”

Unified by Michel Déon’s sharp eye and winning voice, Horseman, pass by!is truly engaging from start to finish.  It is also candidly illuminating of the author’s specific time and place: rural Ireland during a period of many rapid changes.  Subtitled Irish pages, it might remind some readers of Heinrich Böll’s Irish Journal published in German in 1957, just shy of a half-century before Cavalier, passé ton chemin!  Those same readers might recall Böll’s gently ironic disclaimer: “This Ireland exists: but whoever goes there and fails to find it has no claim on the author.”

A FRENCH CONNECTION: FRÉDÉRIC JACQUES TEMPLE À DUBLIN

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 29, Number 8 (August 2018), 5.

“You flew.  Whereto?  Newhaven-Dieppe, steerage passenger.”  So James Joyce, in Ulysses, has his character Stephen Dedalus recollect one leg of the journey he took from Dear Dirty Dublin to La Ville Lumière—Paris, the City of Light.  Joyce made that journey himself, as early as 1902, and eventually, beginning in 1920, spent most of the last two decades of his life in Paris.  He completed Ulyssesthere and wrote Finnegans Wake there too.

But Joyce is just one of many Irish writers who lived famously in Paris.  Other household names include Oscar Wilde, John Millington Synge, Samuel Beckett and Brendan Behan.  James Stephens, who maintained an apartment in Paris for more than thirty years, reportedly misplaced (briefly, fortunately) the manuscript for his novel The Demi-Godswhile living there.  Poets Brian Coffey and Thomas McGreevy also found inspiration there during extended sojourns in the city.

The number of French writers sojourning in Dublin is considerably smaller, but recently I happened upon one who not only visited but actually sketched out in verse the outline of his time there.  In fact, for Frédéric Jacques Temple, Dublin seems to have been a place of pilgrimage.  He reflects on this in a little remembrance he wrote about meeting Thomas McGreevy, sometime in the 1950s, in Montpellier, France, at the home of a mutual friend, transplanted British man-of-letters Richard Aldington.  According to that remembrance, Temple, moved by his subsequent epistolary friendship with McGreevy, visited Dublin twice—both times, though, after the Irish poet’s death in 1967.  The first time, he was invited by the Alliance Française in Dublin and gave a talk on McGreevy, titled “An Irishman in Paris or the Key Witness,” that drew an audience of nearly 200 people to Bewley’s Oriental Café on Grafton Street.  His second visit, at the invitation of Roger Little, a noted Trinity College professor of French, led to his writing a series of eight very short poems.

There is not a lot to say about them as poems per se (except that I found them pretty easy to translate).  In their brevity, their slightness, they seem to aspire toward satori, the Japanese equivalent of Joycean “epiphany” associated with a poetic form like haiku; but they never quite achieve that level of illumination.  Perhaps they are best thought of as vignettes: a literary term, vignettemeans “little vine” in French and derives from the tendril-like decorations that nineteenth-century printers would add to title pages of books and the first page of chapters.  Gathered under the title “À Dublin” (“In Dublin”), these vignettes—sort of calligraphic pen strokes, not much more substantial than monkish marginalia—are part of a larger gathering of poems that Temple titled Périples(Journeys).  Reflecting the poet’s self-consciousness as a visitor, that context actually lends his Dublin verses resonance beyond their substance.

Indeed, beginning with the first poem, Temple inscribes a sort of touristic connect-the-dots map of Dublin with literary and nationalistic shadings:

We will go tomorrow

to lay flowers on the tomb

of Maud Gonne

in Glasnevin Cemetery.

Immortalized in poems by her ardent admirer W. B. Yeats, Maud Gonne, a fervent nationalist, became in 1902 the literal embodiment of “Mother Ireland” thanks to her acting the title role in Cathleen ni Houlihan, a play co-written by Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory for the Irish National Dramatic Company.  Late in his life, Yeats would ask rhetorically: “Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?”  

Perhaps that specific association prompted the second poem in the sequence:

Remember

Cathleen ni Houlihan

who sparked the powder 

to dislodge Albion.

Interestingly, Temple’s use of Albion, an ancient name for Great Britain (dating at least to the fourth century B.C.), may also implicate James Joyce, who has his character “the citizen,” a diehard Irish nationalist, deploy the phrase “perfidious Albion” in a rant against the French in the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses.  Joyce probably knew that the phrase had great currency in France, especially among journalists, during the nineteenth century.  He may even have known that the phrase was first coined by French poet and playwright Augustin Louis de Ximémès in a poem titled “L’Ère des Français” in 1793: “Attaquons dans ses eaux la perfide Albion.” Temple too may have known that earliest reference. 

There may be a Joycean element in the third poem as well:

If you are wise

you will see

in the mist of the Liffey

the phantoms of Chapelizod.

Named for its association with the Irish princess Iseult (or Isolde) in the Arthurian Legend of Tristan and Isolde, the Liffey-side village of Chapelizod figures prominently in Joyce’s final work, Finnegans Wake, as the home of his central character Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle, and their children Shaun, Shem, and Issy. But Temple’s reference to “phantoms” may also invoke the writings of Sheridan Le Fanu, whose novel The House by the Churchyard(1863) and tale “Ghost Stories of Chapelizod” (1851) are both set in the village.

Joyce definitely factors in the next two vignettes.  The first, a tribute to Temple’s old pen friend, obviously involves a visit to the Martello tower where, like his character Stephen Dedalus in the opening episode of Ulysses, Joyce once lived:

In Sandycove I enter

James Joyce’s tower

and doff my cap

to salute the shade

of Tom McGreevy.

The next one returns the reader to Finnegans Wake:

At Mulligan’s Bar

in Poolbeg Street

we hoist a solemn toast

to the memory of Anna Livia.

In Irish, the name for the River Liffey is Abhainn na Life, from which Joyce derived the name of his character Anna Livia Plurabelle, who is the embodiment of the river in Finnegans Wake.

By the evidence of the next poem, Temple had drink on his mind more than once during his Dublin visit:

I am going to Bewley’s

to drain three pints of stout.

Molly Malone

sings her tune

at the foot of Grafton Street:

<<coques et moules fraîches,

mussels and cockles, oh! oh!>>

Temple’s transcription of how he misheard the lyrics of the popular ballad “Molly Malone” may be endearing, but he would have been disappointed in his quest for Guinness, as Bewley’s does not serve alcohol—only tea and coffee!

Undaunted, however, he continues his literary tour by taking his reader down Grafton Street to College Green and through the arched gateway of Trinity College.  Did Temple personally know Samuel Beckett, the TCD alumnus who spent the last fifty years of his life living and writing in Paris?  The poem offers no hint; but it does seem to suggest that Temple was housed on campus during his Dublin visit hosted by Professor Little:

In Beckett’s lodgings

at Trinity College

I caress in a dream

the 340 vellum pages

of the Book of Kells,

a wonder of the world.

The series ends on Duke Street, not far from Trinity and that famous illuminated manuscript (which dates to around 800 A.D.), at another drinking establishment with another Joycean association:

It is winter,

let’s duck into Davy Byrne’s

and take on for ballast

a feed of coddle.

That venue is immortalized in the “Lestrygonians” episode of Ulysseswhen Leopold Bloom slips in for a bite to eat: “He entered Davy Byrne’s.  Moral pub.” Bloom orders a gorgonzola cheese sandwich and a glass of burgundy for his lunch.  Temple opts for a more robust dish with a particular Dublin flavor (as it were): sometimes simmered in Guinness, coddle usually includes pork sausages and rashers of bacon mixed with chunks of potatoes and sliced onions then seasoned with salt and pepper and maybe a sprig of parsley.  Ballast, indeed!

Born in 1921, Frédéric Jacques Temple is now 97 years old and apparently still living in Montpellier where he met Thomas McGreevy more than sixty years ago.  His poetic record of his time “à Dublin” lives on too.

PLANTING THE POTATOES WITH HARTNETT AND YEATS

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 29, Number 7 (July 2018), 5.

Some years ago, I shared with a friend a poem by Michael Hartnett that I had recently happened upon.  Published in Hartnett’s bilingual volume A Necklace of Wrens (Gallery Books, 1987), “Dán Práta / Potato Poem” is deceptively simple.  Comprising fourteen short lines arranged in two quatrains and a sestet, the poem is self-evidently a sonnet variant.  As such, it might be read as fundamentally subversive—as Hartnett’s covert staking of a claim in the territory of a form intrinsically associated with the British poetic tradition: Wyatt, Surrey, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Wordsworth.  In fact, in that regard the poem is doubly subversive—not only written in the Irish language, it also deconstructs via its curtal lines the more-British-than-the-British iambic pentameter meter widely associated with the sonnet.  Add to that the more-Irish-than-the-Irish subject matter of the potato—that tuber that became inextricably associated with the country’s history after being introduced to the hospitable soil and the temperate climate of Ireland from the New World in the late 1500s—and “Dán Práta / Potato Poem” is a pretty full plate of subversion, indeed.

But the friend I shared the poem with, himself an Irish poet of considerable repute, read “Dán Práta / Potato Poem” much differently.  Perhaps suffering from his own anxiety of influence, he wondered frankly how Hartnett had managed, or dared, to write a poem about potatoes on the mud-caked heels of Seamus Heaney, Ireland’s preeminent poetic voice of the past half-century.  Heaney had staked a bold claim on potato fields very early in his career, most famously in “Digging,” the opening poem in his first volume of poems, Death of a Naturalist, published in 1966.  He remembered with both visual and tactile precision the sensation of working the potato drills behind his father on the family farm in County Derry:

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands. 

Yet as Heaney acknowledged implicitly in “At a Potato Digging,” a poem written around the same time and filled with the imagery of crows and crow-black fields and lines of potato pickers moving between hedges and headlands that echoes the opening lines of Patrick Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger,” Kavanagh had already turned over that ground a generation earlier, both in that famous long poem and in various other poems such as “Ploughman,” “The Man After the Harrow,” and “Spraying the Potatoes.”

No doubt Hartnett too would have recognized Kavanagh as a poetic precursor.  Presumably, however, he also knew of an earlier—much earlier—poetic reference to potatoes, in the work of 17th-century Irish-language poet Dáibhí Ó Bruadair. Hartnett discovered Ó Bruadair in the early 1950s in the three-volume Irish Texts Society edition of his poems (published between 1910 and 1917) and eventually translated a selection in a volume titled O Bruadair (1985).  A committed student of that poet’s rich body of work, he would not likely have missed the ITS editor’s glossing of the word potáta, from a poem dated 1674-75, as “one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, occurrences of the word in Irish.”  Arguably, then, the relationship between Hartnett’s dan práta and Heaney’s “potato poems”—and, for that matter, Kavanagh’s poems harvested from the “stony grey soil” of his native County Monaghan—is mostly, perhaps totally, incidental.

But its relationship to a poem by William Butler Yeats may be less incidental and may in fact make “Dán Práta / Potato Poem” not just doubly but triply subversive.  In Hartnett’s own translation, the two quatrains that open the poem make transparent the poet’s deployment of metaphor, his indulgence in what Robert Frost calls “the pleasure of ulteriority”—“saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another”:

Today I planted poems—

dung, knife, seed:

a field my page,

my pen a spade.

Green nipples will come

one by one,

white flowers, their centres

like spits from the sun.

But as Paul Fussell observes in his book Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, a sonnet operates on a “principle of imbalance,” and when Hartnett’s fourteen-liner makes its “volta,” or “turn,” into its sestet after those opening eight lines, the poem changes direction in just the way that Heaney described so appositely in an essay titled “The Makings of a Music”: “‘Verse’ comes from the Latin versuswhich could mean a line of poetry but could also mean the turn that a ploughman made at the head of the field as he finished the furrow and faced back into another.”  Irish poet Eavan Boland elaborates on this effect in an anthology she co-edited titled The Making of a Sonnet: “The octave sets out the problems, the perceptions, the wishes of the poet.  The sestet does something different: it makes a swift, wonderfully compact turn on the hidden meanings of butand yetand wait for a moment.  The sestet answers the octave, but neither politely nor smoothly.  And this simple engine of proposition and rebuttal has allowed the sonnet over centuries, in the hands of very different poets, to replicate over and over again the magic of inner argument.”

In Hartnett’s hands, the “answer” is announced in the abrupt shift from the matter-of-factness of the two preceding quatrains to the decidedly imperative tone of the first line of the sestet:

Learners—no longer idle,

but gather your implements

for all of Ireland’s poets

replough the Irish earth

and you will be bereft

of potatoes and verse.

But that imperative also announces not only its engagement with but also its speaking back to probably the most famous imperative in all of Irish literature, Yeats’s exhortation—essentially his last will and testament directed to his poetic successors—in the penultimate section of his valedictory poem “Under Ben Bulben” written in 1938, the year before he died: “Irish poets, learn your trade / Sing whatever is well made . . .”  In effect, Yeats is imposing his will on the next generation of Irish poets, placing on them a geis, a moral obligation to continue inscribing his particular, and particularly romanticized, vision of Ireland: “Sing the peasantry, and then / Hard-riding country gentlemen, / The holiness of monks, and after / Porter-drinkers’ randy laughter . . .”

In 1966, John Montague, the senior poet of Hartnett’s generation, responded to Yeats in a little essay titled “Living Under Ben Bulben”: “There are times when I wonder if that passage was not composed with malice aforethought.  A friend told me once of interrupting two old men near Belmullet, in order to ask the way, and being shown a path that led onto a sea cliff: is that what Yeats meant by bequeathing us a catalogue of subjects that can now only be legitimately treated in parody?”  Less than a decade later, in his iconic declaration of poetic intention, “A Farewell to English,” Hartnett would add his voice to this complaint, rejecting specifically the influence of “our bugbear Mr. Yeats / who forced us into exile / on islands of bad verse.” 

In “Dán Práta / Potato Poem” Hartnett's response is more oblique but no less dismissive of Yeats’s authority.  Matching imperative with imperative, this poem is an act not just of subversion but also of reclamation of poetic territory.  It is Hartnett’s exhortation to each future generation of Ireland’s poets to replough—and, implicitly, to replant and thus to claim as their own—the metaphorical “crow-black fields” and “stony grey soil” of their precursors.