A RARE BIRD SINGING IN MONAGHAN

This piece first appeared in Boston Irish Magazine, Volume 1, Number 3 (Autumn 2020), p. 15.

 Outside of the larger-than-life figure of Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967), County Monaghan has produced only a handful of poets whose work is known and read widely. The most notable of these include Mary O’Donnell and Aidan Rooney. Also a prolific writer of novels and short stories, O’Donnell has published a half-dozen books of poems. Rooney, who teaches at Thayer Academy just south of Boston, has just published his third book, Go There, with Massachusetts-based MadHat Press.

 

Caitríona Ní Chléirchín is thus a rara avis in more ways than one. First of all, she is Monaghan born and bred. More precisely, she hails from Gortmoney, a townland of Emyvale, a village of about 700 residents located on the N2 about halfway between Monaghan Town and Aughnacloy, County Tyrone. The village’s previous claim to literary fame is as the setting for “The Fair of Emyvale,” a melodramatic short story published by Tyrone native William Carleton in The Illustrated London Magazine in 1853. (Carleton lived in the vicinity of Emyvale between 1814 and 1816. Residing with relatives in Derrygola in the parish of Donagh, he passed what he remembers as “the most delightful period of my youth” while attending a “classical school” conducted by his cousin in Glennon in the neighboring parish of Truagh.) Adding to those distinctions, Ní Chléirchín writes in Irish.

 

The author of two books of poems published as Gaeilge—Crithloinnir (2010) and An Bhrídeach Sí (2014)—she recently launched with The Gallery Press a facing-page dual-language volume, The Talk of the Town. Translated by Gallery publisher Peter Fallon, the thirty-five poem selection introduces to English-language readers a poetic voice that is both engaging and intriguing. As the title poem makes clear, Ní Chléirchín writes as a “millennial” woman. Titled “Corgarnach” in Irish, which means “whispering,” the poem laments the plight of a woman—everywoman—who is constantly being scrutinized, evaluated, objectified:

From time to time I just

get tired of being a woman,

the cuts to the chase I’ve to put

up with, and then inattention.

Made to feel self-conscious by the gaze of others (perhaps not just the male gaze), and by the whispering too, she becomes the object of even her own harsh judgment:

I’m tired of how my face

feels, and my fingertips,

my hair, my waist,

my very hips.

 

Yet Ní Chléirchín also shows how poetry with a contemporary sensibility can still stand on the shoulders of a long tradition of poetry written in Irish. That tradition includes dánta grádha—love poems—and there are love poems go leor in The Talk of the Town: poems of lost love and longing, of abandoned love and regret, of new love and of love renewed. Tellingly, the very titles of many of these poems resonate with the spirit of Douglas Hyde’s famous dual-language compilation of dánta grádha originally published in 1893, Love Songs of Connacht: “Drumshark (The Ridge of Love),” “My Man of the Sea,” “When You Go From Me,” “I Went Out to Find You.” Inevitably some of them even deploy tropes that recur in the poems translated by Hyde: in “Tar Liom, a Ghrá,” for example, translated as “Come Away with Me, Darling,” Ní Chléirchín locates the emotion of the poem in a bucolic landscape steeped deep in the pastoral romantic conventions of an earlier time:

 

Come away with me, darling,

out into the fields, into spring

pasture. We’ll make a reed bed

in a hollow and lie there a while

under a sky loud with birds’ singing.

 

In contrast, in “Taom”/“Swell” the speaker is unambiguously contemporary in her dismissal of a former love interest:

 

Don’t come within a mile

of me, nor lay 

a hand near me. Don’t say

a single word to me.

Don’t cry out.

Don’t even throw an eye my way.

 

Ní Chléirchín also includes several poems centered on the loss of her beloved mother, Vonnie. The most overt of these is “Capall Bán”/“The Old Grey Mare,” in which she engages myth in giving her dying mother permission to “cross / the threshold, for to cross / the threshold you’re fated”:

 

That’s the all of it, my dearest,

and the old grey will transport you well

when you go to those Elysian Fields

where a tear has yet to fall.

 

Her mother is also present in the six-poem sequence titled “Trasnú na Teorann”/“Border Crossing” which reflects the proximity of Emyvale to the border with Northern Ireland where she was born. Many readers will recognize the poet’s nod toward Seamus Heaney in Peter Fallon’s literal translation of the opening lines of the first poem: “Whatever you say / say . . .” Describing her mother as “a huddle of worry, a bundle of bother, / and struggling to banish the dread // of the ‘Big Shed’ at the border,” Ní Chléirchín expresses, like Heaney before her, the sense of personal violation that the checkpoint represents. For the poet and her family it is, moreover, a site of cultural violation: “That was no place for laughter, or Irish music or— / indeed—Irish itself. The sweetest sound was silence.”

 

In some ways stylistically anomalous in the overall collection, Ní Chléirchín’s poem remembering a ceremonial reading of poems at the grave of Patrick Kavanagh in Inniskeen actually invites the reader to pay heed to how so many poems in The Talk of the Town are, like Kavanagh’s, grounded in Monaghan, the “land of the little hills.” The Irish name for Emyvale is Scairbh na gCaorach; for Gortmoney it is Gort na Móna. Kavanagh once wrote: “Naming . . . is the love-act and its pledge.” In a single poem, Ní Chléirchín names—actually incants—townlands and villages and parishes intimately familiar to her as she searches for a lost love: Derrygassan, Derryshillagh, Derryhee, Dernashallog, Ternaneill, Blue Bridge, Ballyoisin, Inishdevlin, Donagh, Castle Leslie, Lisboy, Coracrin, Cornacrieve. The reader is with her every loving step of the way.

 

Not surprisingly, Ní Chléirchín’s writing in Irish has earned significant recognition: Crithloinnir won first prize in the Oireachtas competition for new writers in 2010, and An Bhrídeach Sí was joint winner of the prestigious Michael Hartnett Poetry Award in 2014. Affirming “a poet with a mature confident voice,” the judges’ citation for the Hartnett Award noted: “Her mastery of Irish and sense of being at home in both tradition and modernity is evident throughout the book, in poems set in the seventeenth century, poems framed by Gaelic mythology and in intensely personal lyrics. The poems are full of passion and also quiet reflection on life and love and death.” All of this rings true to the rich gathering of poems translated in The Talk of the Town.

POETRY AND GRIEF: JAMES JOYCE'S "TILLY"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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