A FURTHER STROLL DOWN HEANEY'S "CANOPIED PAD"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HEANEY'S "BROAGH": THE WORLD MADE WORD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS

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

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

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

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.”