Irish Matters

DEEP IN THE HEART OF DERRY

2011-03-01T08:00:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POETRY AND GRIEF: JAMES JOYCE'S "TILLY"

2010-10-01T08:00:00.001-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(AP)PRAISING MICHAEL HARTNETT

2010-08-01T08:00:00.003-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

End of sureness, end of doubt—

when the darkness
like a light
went out.

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

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

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

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

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

WHEN IN PARIS . . .

2010-07-01T08:00:00.003-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HEANEY'S TOLLUND MAN REVISITED

2010-06-01T08:00:00.001-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PLAYING NOW: RODDY DOYLE'S "NEW BOY"

2009-06-01T12:30:00.001-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McWILLIAMS AND FALLON: NEWS OF THE WORLD

2009-05-01T12:00:00.001-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2009-04-01T12:00:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear soapstone masks,
kissing their igloo brows
had to suffice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REVIEW OF BOLAND, McGUCKIAN, MEEHAN, HIGGINS

2008-12-06T13:30:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Question:
Like a flash?

Answer.
No, like the thundering tide.

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

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

something decent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

READING SEAMUS HEANEY'S "IN IOWA" IN IOWA

2008-10-19T19:54:00.000-04:00

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

2008-10-05T04:00:00.000-04:00

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

2008-10-05T03:00:00.000-04:00

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

2008-10-04T04:15:00.000-04:00

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

2008-10-04T04:00:00.000-04:00

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

2008-10-04T03:45:00.000-04:00

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"

2008-10-01T20:00:00.000-04:00

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"

2008-10-01T19:00:00.000-04:00

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

2008-10-01T18:30:00.000-04:00

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"

2008-10-01T13:01:00.000-04:00

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

2008-10-01T13:00:00.000-04:00

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

IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS

2008-10-01T03:03:00.000-04:00

These musings were the "Gallery Notes" I contributed to a photo exhibit at UMass Boston in November of 2007.

~New work from Dublin photographer Fionán O’Connell~

Harbor Gallery, University of Massachusetts Boston
Curated by Andrea Souza, November 2007

Titling this show IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS, Fionán O’Connell makes a statement at once as bold and as playful as the photographs that we see on exhibit here in the Harbor Gallery. It is a bold statement because, ripped from the headline-punctuated “Aeolus” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the phrase locates O’Connell’s work in some sort of relation to the towering figure of Joyce, whose literary inscription of Dublin as it stood on June 16th of 1904 established the benchmark for any and all artistic depictions of the city. As Joyce told his friend Frank Budgen while working on Ulysses, “I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.”

But it is also a playful statement because O’Connell himself displays none of the anxiety of influence—or even of confluence—that such first-generation post Joyce ergo propter Joyce writers as Flann O’Brien and Samuel Beckett experienced and expressed in their work or that such latter-day writers as Roddy Doyle and Dermot Bolger have had imposed on them by Joyce-centric readers. Thus while some viewers of O’Connell’s photographs might see them as palimpsests, afterthought images laid over the century-ago streets of Joyce’s etched-in-typeface DEAR DIRTY DUBLIN (another of the Aeolian headlines), O’Connell himself can maintain a blissful obliviousness to Joyce as he goes about his photographic business: the Joycean title of this show is actually the afterthought here, a bit of tongue-in-cheekiness on O’Connell’s part that matches the spirit of the individual photographs that make up the show.

And yet might the show’s title still have a pertinence that runs deeper than the eye-catchy nature of a borrowed headline? After all, is Ulysses not a novel which in large part reminds readers—through Joyce’s concentration on the sensibilities of its three main characters, Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Molly Bloom—of the myriad ways in which we know the world . . . in which we see the world? In a letter Joyce wrote in 1919 to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver, he defended “the various styles” of the novel’s eighteen episodes, explaining: “in the compass of one day to compress all these wanderings and clothe them in the form of this day is for me possible only by such variation which, I beg you to believe, is not capricious.” Set in a newspaper office, the “Aeolus” episode illustrates this point exactly: interrupting the otherwise conventional linear narrative with those boldface headlines—THE CROZIER AND THE PEN, OMNIUM GATHERUM, RAISING THE WIND—Joyce illuminates how the medium of newspaper rhetoric (and layout) operates as both message and massage in our edge-of-consciousness processing of ordinary daily experience.

Fionán O’Connell, too, focuses on how we see the world . . . but not just through a camera viewfinder. Rather, directing his lens to record the “streets broad and narrow” of “Dublin’s fair city” not as touristy postcard panoramas but as one-off curbscapes—peripheral glimpses of crosswalks, shopfronts, doorframes, billboards, architectural cornices—he produces, or reproduces, the effect of a typical Dubliner unselfconsciously registering the undistilled spirit of the city on a typical day. Coincidentally, in Stephen Hero, an early draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce had his protagonist describe this sort of liminal awareness with regard to the clock of the Ballast Office: “I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin’s street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany.” Not fixated on the epiphanic per se, O’Connell aims more for a photographic image that “shows forth” the metaphysical dimension of some physical detail of the city simply by his capturing that detail, usually nondescript, in an aesthetically pleasing composition.

No less than Joyce, however, whose aesthetic transcribes urban texture into urbane text, O’Connell looks for ways to replicate in his photographs ordinary street-level sensation. One recent development in his vision—an attentiveness to the way that shop windows both reflect and refract not only their own interior displays but also the exterior world of the city—involves, again coincidentally, a Joycean aspect. Often shots of stylishly decked out mannequins, these photos bring to mind specifically that scene in the “Lestrygonians” episode of Ulysses when Leopold Bloom, hungering for both food and sex, pauses before a presentation of lingerie in the window of Brown Thomas on Grafton Street: “Gleaming silks, petticoats on slim brass rails, rays of flat silk stockings.” Joyce’s friend Frank Budgen recalls that when composing this scene the author set for himself the challenge of finding not just the Flaubertian mot juste but also “the perfect order of words in the sentence.” Joyce explained the challenge thus: “Seduction appears in my book as women’s silk petticoats hanging in a shop window. The words through which I express the effect of it on my hungry hero are ‘Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.’ You can see for yourself in how many different ways they might be arranged.”

Ditto for Fionán O’Connell’s expressive “arrangement” of visual detail even in photographs taken seemingly by chance from the ultimate Dubliner’s perspective—the saddle of a moving bicycle. In a note to his show at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC in 1992, O’Connell described this intrinsic dimension of his creative vision:

In Dublin, it rains a lot and the buses are slow and unpredictable. So, from a very young age, the bicycle seemed the best way of getting around. Cycling in the rain used to deter me from taking a camera out at all until I realized how I could incorporate the rain and the bike into my photographs. The showers and constant drizzle did something to color, and so began my long affair with double yellow lines, striped traffic cones, traffic lights, signs, puddles, manholes, and low light blurs.

Clearly, a century removed from “Joyce’s Dublin”—and from Dublin’s Joyce—Fionán O’Connell can stake his own artistic claim in the new “heart of the Hibernian metropolis.”

ROAD BOWLING WITH GREG DELANTY

2008-10-01T03:02:00.000-04:00

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 17, Number 1 (January 2006), p. 20.

Decades ago, British novelist Kingsley Amis declared that “nobody wants any more poems about paintings.” I suppose he had a point, as many such exercises in translating the visual into the verbal come across as just that—mere exercises. There are notable exceptions, of course—W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” being one of them. An engagement with a marvelous piece by 16th-century Flemish painter Pieter Breughel (the Elder) depicting the fatal fall of wax-winged Icarus, Auden’s poem invites us to reflect on how “suffering”—that common denominator of the human condition—“takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” Observing how in Breughel’s painting “everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster” of Icarus’ headfirst plunge into the sea, his “white legs disappearing into the green / Water” while the ploughman on the clifftop above holds heedlessly to his task behind his plodding horse and the ship in the shimmering bay sails on its way, the poet affords us perspective on a particular catastrophe relative to the larger canvas of general human history.

I thought of all that recently when I happened upon a news story out of Ireland involving Tim Pat O’Donovan, a former road bowls champion who has been suspended by Bol Chumann na hÉireann for one year “for allegedly bringing the game into disrepute.” A member of the Ballinacurra Bowls Club of Midleton, Co Cork, O’Donovan is seeking a High Court injunction against BCÉ. The exact nature of O’Donovan’s transgressions were not detailed in the report I read. One can only wonder! An ancient sport, road bowls is played in Ireland primarily in the far-flung (from each other, at least) counties of Armagh and Cork. A simple-sounding game, it involves usually two players competing to see who can take the fewest throws to project a 28-ounce iron ball along a stretch of winding road around 3 miles long. Spectators place bets on the throws and on the ultimate outcome.

According to his legal counsel, O’Donovan needs to keep at the bowling to avoid going “stale.” No doubt the scales of Irish justice will weigh that case with all due deliberation. Whatever the ultimate outcome of that “contest,” the news story reminded me of a poem about road bowls published a few years ago by Cork City native Greg Delanty. The opening poem of his 1995 volume American Wake, “After Viewing The Bowling Match at Castlemary, Cloyne 1847” first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly along with a reproduction of the oil painting by Daniel MacDonald (1821-53) that triggered the poet’s musings on this pastime.

A Corkman himself, MacDonald exhibited his paintings regularly during his short lifetime, both at venues in Cork and at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin. Interestingly, when first displayed at the Cork Art Union, his depiction of road bowling, now in the permanent collection of the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery in Cork, was subjected to close scrutiny—and was given a rather severe commentary—in a review published in The Cork Examiner:

Its characteristic is floridness. It seems, in scenery and coloring, too fine for its subject. But when the artist’s judgement shall have been sobered down, somewhat, to the forcible simplicity of things as they are, we think he will be capable of a great deal. His figures on the left are well disposed, though rather too crowded, and too freshly tinted. Those on the right are very expressive and very good. The squire, or well-dressed young farmer, leaning forward, less to mark the chances of the bowl, than to put his ‘commether’ on the coquettish little peasant girls before him, is very well imagined and executed. The principal figure—yes, really, we should be much better pleased if that principal figure was left out altogether, by particular desire. The head seems arranged for an appearance on the stage, and it wears pumps—the figure, we mean. Moreover, the face is the very facsimile of a portrait in the room by the same artist. Mr. MacDonald has much to unlearn.

Seemingly, however, some of those very aspects that were grounds for complaint are among the features that drew Greg Delanty to the painting. Addressed to American visitors to Cork, the poem opens with an attempt to make the strange less strange by presenting in more familiar terms the striking get-up of MacDonald’s figures:

00000I promised to show you the bowlers

0000000out the Blarney Road after Sunday mass,
00000you were so taken with that painting

0000000of the snazzy, top-hatted peasant class

000000000all agog at the bowler in full swing,

000000000down to his open shirt, in trousers

00000as indecently tight as a baseballer’s.

Now a longtime resident of Vermont, where he teaches at St. Michael’s College, Delanty is accustomed to “translating” from one culture to the other. He even has a baseball poem, “Tagging the Stealer,” in his 2001 volume The Blind Stitch. Recalling “Home From Home,” a poem included in Southward (1992), in which the poet promises to help a visitor navigate not only the maze of streets but also the amazing talk of his native city—“the rapid slagging & knawvshawling that are / loaded with words you’ll find in no dictionary”—Delanty recognizes the need to play host in this poem as well. Like Seamus Heaney in his poem “Making Strange,” in which he plays the gracious yet self-conscious tour guide for a visitor to his native rural County Derry, Delanty proves to be both “adept and dialect.”

Indeed, he must be truly so in the second stanza which, by way of its particular diction—the language of the bowlers and the spectators themselves—takes the reader right to the action of the road bowls:

00000You would relish each fling’s span

0000000along blackberry boreens and delight

00000in a dinger of a curve throw

0000000as the bowl hurls out of sight,

000000000not to mention the earthy lingo

000000000& antics of gambling fans,

00000giving players thumbs-up or down the banks.

Ringing true to Delanty’s description in “The Fuschia Blaze,” the prefatory poem to Southward, of “my fuschia verse, / struggling to escape / the English garden / & flourish / in a wilder landscape,” the “earthy lingo” of this stanza—the Irish loanword “boreen,” the slangy “dinger,” the expressive “thumbs-up” or “down the banks”—also represents a version of what Heaney has famously celebrated as “the music of what happens.”

But that is not the only “music” in the poem. Employing a “nonce” (that is, just for this occasion) stanza of seven lines rhyming abcbcaa, Delanty reworks the scene of MacDonald’s painting in a form that is, in its own way, expressive of “what happens”—or of what happens next. Just slightly off-kilter by way of its irregular rhyme scheme and just slightly off-key by way of half-rhymes like span-fans-banks, the poem admits that sport—whether road bowling or “baseballing”—is a crucial social diversion from the darkness that lurks just beyond the frame, literal or metaphorical, temporal or spatial. What happens next in the poem may surprise some readers:

00000It’s not just to witness such shenanigans

0000000for themselves, but to be relieved

00000from whatever lurks in our day’s background,

0000000just as the picture’s crowd is freed

000000000of famine & exile darkening the land,

000000000waiting to see where the bowl spins

00000off, a planet out of orbit, and who wins.

But it should not surprise the reader attuned to the fact that Delanty locates the poem’s action in 1847—“Black ’47”—the darkest year of An Gorta Mór, The Great Hunger: the great famine that so decimated Ireland in 1840s. “Famine & exile darkening the land,” indeed.

Nor should this disconcerting “turn” in the poem—this “volta” as it is sometimes referred to in the “lingo” of poetry—surprise the reader attuned to the fact that Greg Delanty wrote “After Viewing The Bowling Match at Castlemary, Cloyne 1847” in the mid-1990s. Like the unpredictable turns in the road that the bowlers must navigate and negotiate, the poem runs utterly true to form in hinting, like Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” before it, that the canvas of history extends far beyond our immediate focus. With hindsight, we might ask how no one foresaw in 1995 the war and disorder lurking in our day’s background, darkening the land in 2005. Now, no less than MacDonald’s spectators in 1847, we wait “to see where the bowl spins / off, a planet out of orbit, and who wins.”

REVIEW OF MACDARA WOODS, ARTICHOKE WINE

2008-10-01T03:01:00.001-04:00

This review of Macdara Woods, Artichoke Wine (Dedalus Press 2006) first appeared in Harvard Review, Number 32 (2007), pp. 203-06.

“An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick.” So W. B. Yeats wrote, now famously, in “Sailing to Byzantium,” the opening poem of arguably his most estimable volume, The Tower (1928). Complaining further, in the title poem, of “Decrepit age that has been tied to me / As to a dog’s tail,” Yeats inscribes indelible images of aging that are hardly mitigated by his more muted description of himself, in “Among School Children,” as “A sixty-year-old smiling public man.”

Touchstones of post-midlife self-awareness, Yeats’s poems echo somewhere in the thematic background of Artichoke Wine, the latest volume from Irish poet Macdara Woods. Born in Dublin in 1942, Woods clearly does not enter his seventh decade smiling: “Here in the darkness / biding my time / with memories of sunlight / and artichoke wine,” he locates himself in the book’s proem—auguring the wistful tone which infuses much of what follows. In fact, its title playing on an Irish euphemism for death, the first poem of the volume proper, “West Going West,” revisits the setting of an incident from almost forty years earlier—“more than several lives ago”—to reflect on lost friends, lost opportunities, lost youth. Recalling how the Bank of Ireland in Kilkee, Co. Clare, had “cashed me a cheque for a fiver / drawn on trust / identity being the poem I recited / while word by word they followed the text,” Woods measures his entropic present against that heady time when he and some fellow members of “the strange imperfect Masonry of poets” were “run out of town by the Guards” after “dancing in the sea one winter here.”

Thematically, entropy predominates throughout the book’s first section. Even his sojourns in “sun-baked” Umbria do not invigorate the poet who recounts in “Cigne: At Sixty” how, while listening to a recording of a traditional Irish tune, he reacted to the Italian electric utilities company having “butchered” trees to make way for power lines:

00000And I cried:
00000for all of us over and over I cried
00000in the shadowless sun

00000And I don’t know yet
00000what it meant or not
00000beyond that I found myself crying

00000Alone in the full of the sun at sixty
00000for I suddenly knew
00000there had never been any road else but this

00000To The Haughs of Cromdale
00000in the sun
00000and the battered stumps of trees

The next couple of sections of the book are hardly less grim in their outlook. Written to be performed with music by contemporary Irish composer Benjamin Dwyer, “In the Ranelagh Gardens September 2002” is a series of vignettes focused on various lonely figures in the public park across the street from the poet’s house: a schoolgirl who resembles an old woman, an elderly man described as “a thin dishevelment // With red moustache / red sun-burnt skin / and floating eyes,” three boys who take cruel pleasure in catching a hook in the belly of a fish. Similar, in that it is intended to complement a performance of Bach’s “Six Solo Suites” for cello, “The Cello Suite” is a more fragmentary, more cryptic and at times more private sequence, at times quite literally requiring some assembly on the reader’s part: “I hear + my father’s + voice . . . / again . . . / and + I am / following + that voice + the ghost.”

Following the six-part “Driving to Charleston,” the first of several critiques of the American invasion of Iraq, the mood of Artichoke Wine moderates somewhat as Woods presents a number of engaging lyric poems ranging from the surreal “Cormorants”—“Someone invited them in / and they sat / perched on the backs of chairs”—to the touching “Kavanagh in Umbria” (with its hint of Patrick Kavanagh’s own touching “Memory of My Father”):

00000I have seen him here in November
00000going home through the dark
00000on the tractor
00000a piece of sacking
00000thrown across his shoulders
00000against the winter fog

These are followed by an evocative three-poem sequence, “Travelling From Delphi,” in which the poet appears to have achieved a certain acceptance with regard to issues of fate and mortality: “and being here // Is now—is unrehearsed for now— / is all there is.”

Is Delphi for Woods the equivalent of Yeats’s Byzantium? The next section of Artichoke Wine is a single poem which, seemingly recasting the thirteenth-century mystic and poet Hadewijch in the Irish context of the Dingle Peninsula, appears to endorse the Yeatsian proposition that aging can be defied only if “Soul clap its hands and sing”:

00000South of Gallarus free of guilt
00000Between the mountains and the sea
00000To be there
00000To be there leaping with life
00000To be dancing before the cross like this
00000In the open-air in your pelt

Leaving the matter open-ended (tellingly, like every other poem in the book this one has no end punctuation), Woods leaves the volume open-ended too with the eighth and final section. Titled “Ceangal”—the Irish word for “recapitulation” but also a poetic term dating at least to the seventeenth century which refers to a “summing up” of themes—this multi-part poem revisits earlier thematic territory: “from too much disillusion / my body starts to turn against itself.” But centered around the poet’s visit to Moscow, the poem closes with a moment of equanimity in “the marvelous Square / two thirty in the morning” that perhaps speaks back to the bleak prospect presented in “West Going West.”

AT HOME ON THE MOUNTAIN WITH BENEDICT KIELY

2008-10-01T03:00:00.000-04:00

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 18, Number 2 (February 2007), p. 18.

Over the past year I have been filling this space with musings on the various ways in which Irish writers—poets in particular—inscribe specific place. But recently my mind and my reading have drifted more toward writers of fiction, especially toward Benedict Kiely and his short stories. Indeed, taking the weight and the measure of Kiely’s Collected Stories, published a few years ago by Godine on this side of the Atlantic, I am struck by how so many of his stories dovetail with the theme of “A Sense of Place,” an essay he wrote a quarter-century ago in which he observed: “the interweaving of love and imagination with locality is something that our ancestors were particularly good at, back to the days of the earliest written records and beyond.”

Strictly speaking, Kiely is referring to the ancient dinnseanchas tradition of engagement with specific locale. Described by philologist Whitley Stokes as “a collection of stories (senchasa), in Middle-Irish prose and verse, about the names of noteworthy places (dind) in Ireland—plains, mountains, ridges, cairns, lakes, rivers, fords, estuaries, islands, and so forth,” the stories themselves, though preserved in manuscripts dating from as late as the fifteenth century, evidently evolve from a deep-rooted social, religious and legal recognition of place in the communal imagination dating from pre-Christian times. Perhaps needless to say, and Kiely himself would grant this readily, the latter-day attachment to place for the individual in Ireland tends to be far more complex, frequently involving a pronounced ambivalence if not outright antipathy toward the hold that place can have on the self.

In fact, the fiction of Benedict Kiely, a writer unabashed in his mostly affectionate attachment to his native territory—“Omagh in the County Tyrone, and . . . the verdant land around that Town,” as he has sketched it in his memoir Drink to the Bird—may be a good case in point for testing the central assertion made by literary critic John Wilson Foster in his essay “The Geography of Irish Fiction”: “The contest between place and self is crucial in Irish fiction.” Observing in Irish short stories and novels a “preoccupation with place as an unseverable aspect of self,” Foster detects as a recurring theme the phenomenon of “place transformed into memory of place and therefore transportable. When this theme is conscious, we have that recurring Irish topophobia, hatred of the place that ensnares the self.” Yet even when this theme is not conscious, he continues, even when a writer seems to be expressing a “love of place,” he or she is really expressing “a love of self which only in the short run contravenes the theme of self-escape. Ultimately, the Irish writer’s concern with place is evidence of a subjectivity he is unwilling or unable to transcend. The richer the imagination the more expansive and decorative the capacity.”

In particular, a story like Kiely’s “Homes on the Mountain” illustrates how a writer of fiction might resolve the tension described by Foster. Recounting a Christmas Day visit to the newly constructed home of the narrator’s Aunt Brigid, returned from Philadelphia to the roughest, wettest slope of Dooish Mountain in County Tyrone, “Homes on the Mountain” acknowledges the hold that nostalgia can have on an individual. For the first-person narrator of the story, twelve years old when the events take place and obsessed with collecting and reading—though not singing from—Irish sentimental songbooks, such nostalgia seems plausible. For his mother it seems unthinkable: “‘Dreamers,’ my mother said. ‘An American apartment on the groundwalls of an old cabin. Living in the past. Up where only a brave man would build a shooting lodge. For all they know or care there could be wolves still on the mountain. Magazines and gewgaws and chairs too low to sit on. With the rheumatism the mountain’ll give them, they’ll never bend their joints to sit down so low.’”

A typically entertaining Kiely tale, filled with humorous anecdotes and candid talk on the part of the characters, “Homes on the Mountain” yet insists that the reader consider several serious undercurrents that run through the narrative. One involves the validating poignancy of the uncle’s dream of building on the old homestead: “When my mother died and my father took us all to the States we didn’t know when we were going away whether to leave the door open or closed. We left it open in case a traveling man might pass, needing shelter. We knocked gaps in the hedges and stone walls so as to give the neighbours’ cattle the benefits of commonage and the land the benefit of the cow dung. But we left the basic lines of the walls so that nobody could forget our names and our claim to this part of the mountain.” As Kiely notes in the chapter devoted to “Exiles” in his book Modern Irish Fiction, “exile begins where life begins,” and thus even the wise pragmatism of the narrator’s mother cannot nullify outright the uncle’s emotional attachment to this otherwise most inhospitable spot on the mountain.

A more disquieting dimension to “Homes on the Mountain,” however, involves the side visit that the narrator and his father and brother make to a second home on the mountain—the unspeakably squalid cabin inhabited by the uncle’s hermit-like cousins John and Thady O’Neill. Recalling the physical squalor of pre-Famine Ireland that Kiely’s fellow Tyroneman William Carleton records in so many of his stories published in the middle of the nineteenth century, this hovel both houses, in the persons of those cousins, and symbolizes the psychosocial squalor that Kiely associates specifically with their remote region of Ireland. Even for the young narrator’s uncle, these cousins embody an inward grotesquerie that exceeds their outward appearance: “‘Aunt Sally’s two sons were there at our American wake,’ said my godmother’s husband. ‘Thady was never quite right in the head and . . . couldn’t let a woman in the market or a salmon in the stream alone. John, the elder brother, was there with Bessy from Cornavara that he wooed for sixty years and never, I’d say, even kissed.’” For the narrator, the visit seems only mildly disconcerting. For his inveterately nostalgic father, ruminating on the stunted love between John and Bessy, the moral of the occasion is ruthlessly manifest: “Something happens to it on these hills. . . . It’s the rain and the mist. And the lack of sunshine and wine.”

Tellingly, while illuminating the tension described by Foster, the duality of Kiely’s vision in this story may in turn be illuminated by a slightly different sort of place-related tension described by Seamus Heaney in his essay “The Sense of Place”: “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.” Having grown up in the town of Omagh before settling in Dublin around the age of twenty, Kiely has maintained throughout his life a deep affection for the surrounding countryside of County Tyrone, including the specific setting of “Homes on the Mountain.” But situated between the backwater villages of Dromore (near which Kiely was born in 1919) and Drumquin (his mother’s birthplace), the barren plot on Dooish inhabited by John and Thady O’Neill is located within an area not only physically isolated from the rest of Ireland but also, as a result, socially, economically, and psychologically isolating for its inhabitants. Kiely knows very well, then, that something happens, indeed, on these hills located in what is known by geographers as the drumlin-drift belt of south Ulster—a range, thirty miles wide, of rolling glacial mounds numbering in the tens of thousands and running east-northeast across the border area between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. As E. Estyn Evans, whose life’s work as geographer was centered on the North of Ireland, observes in his book The Personality of Ireland: Habitat, Heritage and History (1981): “The landscape [of the drumlin country] has a charming intimacy. Roads winding their way through bushy hollows among the little hills bring constantly changing views, but horizons are always near and the vision restricted. One might think of the moulded drumlins as moulding, in turn, the outlook of the farmers who dwell among them.”

Yet, in his book Modern Irish Fiction, published a quarter-century before Foster’s essay, Kiely wrote: “I do not think that the word ‘hostility’ can be used to describe the relations between any Irish writer, expatriate or not, and the four million people living on the island of Ireland. A writer may trace his origins to the peasants on the rocks of Aran, like Liam O’Flaherty, or to the relics of the landed classes, like Elizabeth Bowen, or to the section of Ireland moulded by Trinity College, like L. A. G. Strong, or to Catholic Dublin, like James Joyce; he may abuse the island and stay away from the island but all the time the basic feeling is the nostalgia that has produced a hundred sentimental ballads.” That is ultimately the spirit that prevails in “Homes on the Mountain,” as in the great majority of Kiely’s stories set in Omagh and its surrounding countryside. While Kiely’s own nostalgia may be tempered by ambivalence, the miles and the years that separate him from what he has referred to as “that first, best country that ever is at home” allow him to arrive at a measured and compassionate understanding of the “something” that can happen in that distinctive social and physical milieu.

Interestingly, then, Kiely’s literary relationship with his place may thus be understood in terms of yet another sort of place-related tension, this one described by geographer William J. Smyth in his essay “Explorations of Place”: “Geography is a naive kind of discipline, even a foolish one, since it tries to marry these two perspectives: the outsider-perspective of the map, and the subjective, felt world of place. There is therefore always a tension in the discipline, and particularly in cultural geography, between knowing the world and experiencing it, between scholarly distancing and caring, between truth and love.”