Sleepless in Argentina

Imagine a hand had reached down from the sky and lifted up Paris, Rome and Madrid, shuffled them and laid them out on a grid by the River Plate delta, and you have some idea of Buenos Aires. I’m here again for the first time in almost a decade and second time around the impressions are just as overwhelming. Nothing quite prepares you for the intensity of the city: the endless roar of the traffic, the teeming pavements, the sense that all fourteen million inhabitants of the Greater Buenos Aires have just poured onto the streets. The grid layout actually increases the din; cars, buses and taxis honk and weave down five lane streets in one way systems. Haussmannesque avenidas stretch for miles crossed by a seemingly endless series of parallel streets.

You move around it as across a chessboard, with two crossing streets as your map reference. I need to get to a bookshop on the other side of the city, where a translation of a selection of my poems is being launched. ‘Scalabrini Ortiz and Santa Fe,’ explains Gerardo, one of the two translators who worked on the book. When I produce the code in the taxi the driver nods and takes off without a further word and twenty minutes later I’m outside the bookshop. Dublin’s a fog, I think, here all is sunny clarity and logic. The taxi is cheap, but even cheaper are the plentiful buses and the subte, the oldest underground in South America.



Like a lot of Latin cities, Buenos Aires is both highly organised and essentially anarchic. You register the bustling modernity, the plentiful WiFi, the latest gadgets, but also the broken pavements, the rubbish, the villas miserias on the outskirts. For the tourist with dollars or euros, besotted by tango or the other excitements of the city, Argentina is cheap once you get there. For the locals, money is tight, salaries meagre and inflation is running, so unofficial sources claim, at 25% and public debt is huge. The biggest controversy while I’m there is President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s plan to nationalise the private pension schemes to help the government’s cashflow problems. And what about the literary economy, I want to know, as we sit in a café eating empanadas, little pastries filled with meat and vegetables. This is after all the country of Borges, Julio Cortázar, Manuel Puig, Alberto Manguel, Juan Gelman and a host of newer voices, and the city is crammed with bookshops.

It also hosts the Buenos Aires International Fair, the largest Spanish-speaking fair in the world, and one of the most important cultural and publishing events in Latin America. Even in times of crisis Argentina has always had an enormous publishing industry, and a very high portion of the literary output is translation. But just as in English, the size of the industry can conceal some of the truth. A good deal of it is owned by giant global corporations not particularly interested in risk-taking. It falls to the smaller independent houses to publish emerging writers or to publish translations of literary fiction or poetry.

Jorge Fondebrider, the other translator of my book, has also just published a translation of Claire Keegan’s Walk the Blue Fields. Claire read from her work to an enthusiastic crowd in the Villa Ocampo just outside the city. ‘I’m pretty proud to say Claire was really understood by the audience here,’ Jorge says. ‘Because of the quality of her work it was important to introduce her among us.’ Translation has always been a vital engine of Argentinian culture. ‘We are a people that built a country with translations. As Borges said, we are, in a way, better Europeans than the Europeans: we don’t need to choose just one tradition, we can have all the different European traditions plus our own.’ Gerardo recently translated Declan Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland and a selection of John McGahern’s stories. ‘Remember that it was here where Joyce was first translated into Spanish, and where Beckett’s plays were staged for the first time.’ However it’s often difficult for publishers here to afford the rights for foreign fiction, and to commission translations. This is where an institution like Ireland Literature Exchange makes a big difference, and pretty much everything from Ireland recently translated has been aided by ILE.

Ideally, of course, translation should work in both directions. As I listen to the poets from all over Latin America reading at the Rosario Poetry Festival, I’m struck again by how much little we see of this work in English, and how much we miss. Sitting at a café table in the small hours later, watching jacaranda leaves fall into the glass and struggling to keep up with the frenetic pace of the conversation, I make another resolution to get back to the Spanish grammar book in the suitcase. Beside it, as an extra incentive, is a copy of Jorge’s anthology of contemporary Argentinian poetry, just published in Santiago. How does he do it? This is the answer, I think as another coffee arrives: a sack of caffeine, soupy summer heat and a thimbleful of sleep.

Shuntaro Tanikawa

Museum
stone axes and the like
lie quietly beyond the glass

constellations rotate endlessly
many of us become extinct
many of us appear

then
comets endlessly miss collision
lots of dishes and the like are broken
Eskimo dogs walk over the South Pole
great tombs are built both east and west
books of poems are often dedicated
recently
the atom’s being smashed to bits
the daughter of a president is singing
such things as these
have been happening

stone axes and the like
lie absurdly quiet behind the glass

Shuntaro Tanikawa

from The Selected Poems of Shuntaro Tanikawa, Translated from the Japanese by Harold Wright. North Point Press, San Francisco 1983.

Charles Reznikoff

The Poems of Charles Reznikoff, 1918 – 1975. Edited by Seamus Cooney, Black Sparrow Books, 444 pp., $21.95

Poetic movements come and go and leave in their wake a few historical traces and a few poets whose practice may have been partially shaped by their allegiance. Few have left as interesting a residue as the set of gestures within twentieth century modernism that have been labelled ‘objectivist’. Whereas Modernism proper was Euro-centric, high culture and Right-leaning, the objectivists were urban, American-oriented, and with the exception of Lorine Niedecker in rural Wisconsin, Jewish New Yorkers. The politics are important because they are very much bound up with the aesthetics. George Oppen was a labour organiser and a Communist and gave up poetry for twenty years in favour of social activism. These poets lived their lives on the margins, outside both of academia and the kind of economically successful life which might have rewarded them socially. Charles Reznikoff had a succession of small jobs; Lorine Niedecker washed floors in a hospital; Oppen worked as a cabinet maker in Mexico for twenty years; Louis Zukovsky had a variety of jobs including a stint working on a history of American handicrafts with the Works Projects Administration.

Zukovsky was the animator of objectivism and his role as a kind of mediator of modernism, an important advocate of Pound and Williams as well as of the objectivists, combined with the intelligence and virtuosity of his poetry, has always ensured him his share of critical attention. Reznikoff on the other hand is less well known in the wider world, though Seamus Cooney’s gathering of nearly sixty years of his work should change this. Reznikoff is the kind of poet who can all too easily slip between the cracks because he was content to mine his own corner of the world, and because the poetry and the aesthetic which underlies it are self-effacing. He is supremely a poet of the city, an observer of its scenes and people, a chronicler of the struggles of immigrant Jews in the new world. The poems are full of the kind of precise detailing that is normally reserved for fiction or memoir; they open themselves up fully to the experiences of others, and keep the poet’s self out of the business. As well as his natural affinities with the objectivist principles he has learned from sources as diverse as Whitman, Pound, Goethe, this may have been partly due to his reading of translations of Chinese and Japanese poetry. In an essay included by Seamus Cooney he quotes a pamphlet on Japanese art,

‘For Zen, in the search for illumination, that is to say, immediate contact with the essence of the universe. . . puts the strongest emphasis on personal effort and forgetfulness of self.’ (his emphasis)

Reznikoff’s natural sympathy with a self-forgetful poetry that restricted itself to the evidence provided by the world is enhanced by his legal training – poetry was always testimony for him – and his love of walking. Reznikoff walked anything up to twenty miles a day every day of his life and it’s no accident that one of his collections is called ‘Going To and Fro and Walking Up and Down’. The New York he saw on his walks fills his poems, but the observation also provided the method: a focus on brief moments in lives and as much as possible releasing the potential of what is seen. This is what he understood by ‘objectivist’.

‘By the term “objectivist”, I suppose a writer may be meant who does not not write directly about his feelings but about what he sees and hears; who is restricted almost to the testimony of a witness in a court of law...’

One aspect of this is a kind of deadpan kindly noticing and recording, as in a poem on Cooper Union Library:

Men and women with open books before them --
and never turn a page: come
merely for warmth
not light.

The poems are also remarkable for the way in which the city is a continuous living and radiant presence for him; nature is always framed by the human machinery of the city, ‘clouds, piled in rows like merchandise’. Streetlamps, subway stations shine in the poems with the pure force of attention, ‘those little islands of existence which Rezi saw with so much love’, as George Oppen put it:

Coming up from the subway stairs, I thought the moon
only another street-light--
a little crooked.
(Jerusalem the Golden, 20)

Walk about the subway station
in a grove of steel pillars;
how their knobs, the rivet-heads--
unlike those of oaks--
are regularly placed;
how barren the ground is
except here and there on the platform
a flat black fungus
that was chewing-gum.
(Jerusalem the Golden, 18)

If he sees the clouds and the lights he also records how ‘the milliners, tacking bright flowers on straw shapes,/say, glancing out of the window,/ It is going to snow.....’ Reznikoff isn’t a soft-hearted urban pastoralist; there’s always someone working, always a keen sense of the life within the city; factory chimneys are his cedars of Lebanon, and livelihoods are often precarious. The early self-published books are full of vignettes of families on the brink of disaster: this is the New York of immigrant pushcart peddlers, garment makers, boarders and broken English. One offers a version of a family story that had large resonance for Reznikoff – the destruction of his grandfather’s poetry. In the poem, after the unnamed business man dies his children find ‘the manuscript so carefully written and rewritten’, scribble on it and tear it up. ‘At night the mother came home and swept it out.’ That vision of an inner life extinguished may well have intensified the poet’s desire to record the life of his city and his people, almost as if that registering and recording might somehow restore the voice of the lost. And it may have been one of the engines behind the sturdy materiality of the poetry, built up layer by layer like a patiently accumulated testimony.

The work is often arranged into groups of poems where the poems are numbered but usually untitled. These groups often have desultory titles as if any overt principle of organisation from detract from the democracy of the discrete poems. Thus 'A Fourth Group of Verse' (1921) or 'A Fifth Group of Verse' (1927). The former consists of forty eight short poems, scenes of city life and, indirectly, autobiography. Many are memories of childhood:

When I was four years old my mother led me to the park.
The spring sunshine was not too warm. The street was almost empty.
The witch in my fairy-book came walking along.
She stooped to fish some mouldy grapes out of the gutter.
(3, ‘Beggar Woman’, CR 29)

Five simple sentences in four lines, the childlike perception and certainty of the final two lines... The deadpan method of presentation allows for a rich build up of detail, or urban detail in particular, so that the method allows the city to enter and inhabit the poems in a way a more figurative approach might have prevented. There’s a joy in these accumulations, a material denseness as the city unfolds itself in the mind:

After dinner, Sunday afternoons, we boys would walk slowly
to the lots between the streets and the marshes;
and seated under the pale blue sky would watch the ball game--
in a noisy, joyous crowd, lemonade men out in the fringe tinkling their bells beside their yellow carts.
As we walked back, the city stretched its rows of houses across the lots--
light after light, as the lamplighter went his way and women lit the gas
in kitchens to make supper.

(‘A Fourth Group of Verse’, 17)

The lemonade men with their yellow carts, the stretching rows of houses, the lamplighter and the women in the kitchens....it’s an evocative tableau, all the more so for the absence of evaluative commentary.

Swiftly the dawn became day. I went into the street.
Loudly and cheerfully the sparrows chirped.
The street-lamps were still lit, the sky pale and brightening.
Hidden in trees and on the roofs,
loudly and cheerfully the sparrows chirped.

The resolute cheerfulness of tone is also a kind of protective mechanism. The childhood world evoked is often grim – poverty, violence, uncertainty:

His parents had lost their money. They sold the house and were to move away.
He went up to his room for the last time.
The trunk of the tree, branches and twigs were still.
He thought, The tree is symmetrical. . . and whatever grows . . .
in shape. . . and in change during the years. So is my life . . .
and all lives.
He went down the stairs singing happily.
His father said, “There’s so much trouble – and he sings.”

( ‘A Fourth Group of Verse’, 22)

Going down the stairs singing happily might be a figure for what the poems do a lot of. He is not too interested in going beyond the contingent, or in dwelling too long in any particular part of the canvas. He moves swiftly through his subjects, notebook in hand, working quickly and with complete conviction that his kind of attention will yield its own rewards.
His city is a perpetual theatre, where anything can happen, and poetry is always within reach:

What are you doing in our street among the automobiles, horse?
How are your cousins, the centaur and the unicorn?

or

Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies
a girder, still itself among the rubbish.
(‘Jerusalem the Golden’, 69)

He stops at the point where a lot of poems might think of beginning, and though the poems are worked and economical they are not concerned with their own perfection; he's quite content to scatter his poems and let the best of them survive if they can

Of all that I have written
you say: "How much was poorly said."
But look!
The oak has many acorns
that a single oak might live.
(Just Before the Sun Goes Down, 1)

Maybe one of the most attractive aspects of his work is precisely his preparedess to let it be, to let the city come alive in his alert, amused and humane seeing of it. His habit of constant seeing, constant attentiveness produces an unmissable poetry of the city and this book should ensure that a decent grove of it will live.

Turning the world off early

Have been thinking a lot about the 'objectivists' recently: George Oppen, Louis Zukovsky, Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, Lorine Niedecker, and am working on a review of The Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918-1975 edited by Seamus Cooney, a book I can’t recommend highly enough. The review is for a Belfast magazine but I intend to post a more expanded version here, if I ever finish it. In the meantime, I can’t help quoting from Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works, edited by Jenny Penberthy, which the long-suffering postman has just brought to the door. They’re all from ‘New Goose’, like much of her work a series of small poems ‘separated by stars to save paper’. We should all be so frugal of paper and gesture:

For sun and moon and radio
farmers pay dearly;
their natural resource: turn
the world off early.

*

Mr. Van Ess bought 14 washcloths?
Fourteen washrags, Ed Van Ess?
Must be going to give em
to the church, I guess.

He drinks, you know. The day we moved
he came into the kitchen stewed,
mixes things up for my sister Grace –
put the spices in the wrong place.

*

The clothesline post is set
yet no totem-carvings distinguish the Niedecker tribe
from the rest; every seventh day they wash:
worship sun; fear rain, their neighbor’s eyes;
raise their hands from ground to sky,
and hang or fall by the whiteness of their all.

*

I think of a tree
to make it
last.

PN 08

Festival time again. The thirteenth Poetry Now Festival takes place in Dún Laoghaire from 3 to 6 April ‘and this year it once more brings together poets of many nationalities – Irish, English, American, Jamacian, Italian, Iranian – and many styles, many languages and many concerns, for what promises to be a deeply stimulating and satisfying four days. Workshops, talks, debates and The Irish Times and Strong Awards will complement the programme of readings by a gathering of exceptional Irish and international poets.’ Poets taking part include Bernard O’Donoghue, Antonella Anedda, Jamie McKendrick, Seamus Heaney, C.D. Wright, Alan Gillis, Meghan O’Rourke, Daljit Nagra, George Szirtes, Henri Cole and Mimi Khalvati. Before the festival proper gets going there’s a panel discussion, ‘The Quarrel With Ourselves’ – Who Reads Poetry, Anyway?, in association with Poetry Ireland chaired by Michael Cronin with guests Peter Fallon, Meghan O’Rourke, Alice Lyons, Mary Shine Thompson, Maurice Scully and The Cat Flap. I’m greatly in favour of panel discussions and anything else that gets us away from the liturgical solemnity of the poetry reading but I admit to a certain dread of this one only because the subject as advertised is one of those automatic topics that festival machines and radio station computers routinely spit out to exercise the populace. What is poetry at all at all and who needs it in anyway? This is possibly unfair. The questions to be addressed are:

Who reads poetry? For whom is poetry published? Of whom do poetry audiences in Ireland, and elsewhere, consist? How important to the life of poetry is the existence of strong poetry criticism, and what is the state of play in Irish criticism at the moment? What’s needed in the Irish poetry scene? What’s working? What’s alive, and what’s in need of change? Join these artists and thinkers as they put the poetry scene through its paces, and feel free to put a question or two their way.

There’s probably only one answerable question in there, and that’s the one about criticism. Poetry criticism is essential to the life of poetry in the same way that every other kind of art criticism is important to the art concerned. Otherwise, everyone’s a poet and no-one is a poet. Otherwise, that is, there is a culture of complacency in which no makes judgements of any kind. There’s plenty of that already, plenty of bland reviewing which is content to describe rather than evaluate. There is little enough real criticism and few enough outlets for it. What do we need? More critics, more real criticism, more journals, websites, more vigour. And less worry about audience, readership, the mass market, all that blather.

The Munster Republic

I received the following from the Munster Literature Centre today:

The brilliance of poets emerging from Northern Ireland in the last century, their dual-nationality, the colour of their background and the attention and authority of the only serious contemporary Irish poetry critic of the time (Edna Longley) led to an imbalanced projection of Irish poetry to the wider world.

With the Troubles in the past the achievements of poets from the southern quarter of the island are now coming sharply into focus.

The Munster Literature Centre is calling for academic papers written in English on the subject of Contemporary Munster Poets. The resulting work will be published in book form late 2009. The papers may focus on individual poets, perceived schools or any other aspect to do with contemporary Munster poets. The papers may deal with poets writing in English, Irish or both together.

From June 2008 as many Cork poets (Maurice Riordan, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Bernard O'Donoghue) will feature on the Faber publishing list as Ulster poets (Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin).

The University College Cork group of Innti poets (Liam O Muirthile, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Michael Davitt, Gabriel Rosenstock, Louis de Paor and Colm Breathnach) are widely acknowledged as having revitalised poetry in the Irish language in the last thirty years. Through translation their work has had an influence which has reached beyond the Irish language literary community.

A contemporaneous group in UCC writing in English, described by Thomas Dillon Redshaw, as "that remarkable generation" consisted of Maurice Riordan, Gregory O'Donoghue, Gerry Murphy, Theo Dorgan,Thomas McCarthy, Sean Dunne and Greg Delanty.

A grouping of senior, influential Munster poets would include Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Patrick Galvin, Michael Hartnett, Desmond O'Grady, Sean Lysaght, Brendan Kennelly, John Ennis, Paul Durcan (who lived in , worked in and wrote about Munster for almost twenty years).

Other Munster poets significant for the achievement of their work or for their potential for academic attention would be Bernard O'Donoghue, Peter Sirr, Aidan Murphy, Roz Cowman, Aine Miller, Ciaran O'Driscoll, John Liddy, Paddy Bushe, Dennis O'Driscoll, Michael Coady, Robert Welch, Catherine Phil MacCarthy, Gabriel Fitzmaurice, Michael Fanning, William Wall, Rosemary Canavan, James Harpur, Augustus Young, Trevor Joyce, Frank Golden, Michael Fanning, Eugene O'Connell, Padraig J. Daly

A younger generation just getting into their publishing stride would include John Sexton, Eileen Sheehan, Billy Ramsell, Leanne O'Sullivan, Patrick Cotter, Liz O'Donoghue, John McAuliffe, Matthew Geden.

Papers should be submitted in hard copy by October 31st 2008 to:

the Contemporary Munster Poetry Criticism Project,
The Munster Literature Centre,
Frank O'Connor House,
84 Douglas Street,
Cork,
Ireland.

Maybe it’s my sceptical nature but I’ve never understood the case for ‘Munster’ as some kind of autonomous cultural entity, so the argument above, that we should exchange one kind of parochialism for another, doesn’t hold much attraction. Other than the rugby team, does Munster resonate as a distinctive place with a culture or a literary sensibility radically different from Leinster or Connacht? Do any of the old provinces really hold a value for us other than as lines on a historical map? Munster does have a historical resonance, of course, but even that is fragmented. Do you mean Tuadh Mumhan (North Munster), Deas Mumhan (South Munster), Ur Mumhan (East Munster), Iar Mumhan (West Munster), Ernaibh Muman (the Ernai tribes portion of Munster), or Deisi Mumhan (the Deisi tribe’s portion of Munster), or the kingdoms of Thomond, Desmond and Ormond into which they were eventually subsumed? All of these had their defenders and their competing voices but few would have pledged loyalty to the larger entity. Perhaps the case for Munster would be less strenuously articulated if it didn’t have Cork in it. It’s certainly hard not to feel that in the argument above Munster is essentially another name for Cork. No-one could argue against the distinctiveness of Cork but again, when it comes to literature, is it the Corkness of Maurice Riordan, Gregory O’Donoghue, Gerry Murphy, Theo Dorgan, that really matters, or the Waterfordness of Sean Dunne or the Waterfordness cum Corkness of Thomas McCarthy?


And even if an irrefutable case could be made for Cork as the central factor in the sensibility of these writers, can we really talk usefully about the Ennisness of a poet or the Thurlesness of another? And is there a line of shared heritage and impulse that could be drawn from Killarney to Clonmel or from Nenagh to Dungarvan? Trevor Joyce may live in Cork but you would be hard put to reconstruct its streets from his poems. Though I’m listed as a Munster poet myself, I feel as if I’ve been picked by the wrong team. I was, it is true, born in Waterford, but both of my parents came from the West of Ireland and we left the place in the late sixties. I’ve been back twice on brief visits since. It’s a childhood place for me, and one that I remember quite intensely but I couldn’t pretend to a Waterford, or a Munster, sensibility on the strength of it. Dublin, on the other hand, is a constant companion, obsession, and provider of spiritual nourishment, not least because I’ve lived in it, with one long gap, for forty years. And even then I wouldn’t think of myself as a Dublin writer, but more as someone who writes in the English language with all kinds of wires snaking out into all kinds of English and other language traditions. I value hugely a lot of writers on the list above and yet I would never think of them as essentially Munster writers and would never look to them for expressions of Munsterness. I'm not even sure I recognise the Durcan who writes 'about Munster'. On the other hand I follow Munster’s exploits in the Heineken cup with a fluttering heart whereas Leinster never gets the pulse going. Maybe it’s the shirts. . . , the passion, the call of the ancestors...is fada liom oíche fhírfhliuch. . .wait, I feel a Munster moment coming on. . . .

Music for Viols

(Tobias Hume’s Good Againe)

Good again
this night, this late
to hear that tune and fall
again, the slow dark drag,
texture
of thickly branched trees
swaying above water,
of sound moving
from the farthest pit
to pour down.
God and the devil
must play the viol.
The door of the world
swings open
on Hume’s excited figure.
After sadness, hunger,
royal blindness
to the great shame of this land
and those that do not help me
after a bellyful of snails
and the sniping of lutenists
good again to stand
with the night
in Jordi’s hands
and listen
and walk in
as far as the tune will go.

Wolves in the garden: Michael Krüger

Went to the launch in the Goethe Institut of Das elfte Gebot/The Eleventh Commandment/An tAonú Aithne Déag, a selection of poems by Michael Krüger, another in the series of tri-lingual editions of German poetry, handsomely produced by Coiscéim, and translated into English by Hans-Christian Oeser and into Irish by Gabriel Rosenstock. Previous outings in this series have included Günter Kunert and Hilde Domin. Kruger is active as a publisher, critic and novelist, but is best known in Germany as a poet. Carcanet brought us Diderot’s Cat, with translations by Richard Dove, in 1993.

Introducing him, Chris Oeser calls our attention to his ‘highly developed sense of time’. The poems ‘serve as snapshots, as photographs freezing a moment in time'.

It may be an intensely private moment such as locking up a holiday home for winter or coming across a set of old keys, it may be a social encounter with three beggars or with a saint in a cathedral, or there may be allusions to the weight of history, to the burden of the past: unaccounted victims under a blanket of snow, a train that pulls coffins through the valley. In that sense it is a poetry of history rather than a poetry of geography

They’re the poems of a traveller, poems of places rather than of place; ‘he seems to travel through many landscapes and yet none because they preserve their anonymity.’ Chris also talks about another aspect of his work, its quietness. Most of these poems, he says, ‘breathe quietly’, which is ‘not to say that they breathe easily’. They’re full of ‘the sinister, the menacing, the eerie’.

You see a fire leaning towards you, a wind is in search of fire, a fire pits its strength against the dark. Where landscape occurs, it seems to be threatened or threatening. Has place become contaminated? A cloud of melancholy hangs over his descriptions of nature. Nature is not innocent, it is either something neglected or something unattainable or something torn. Wolves in a suburban garden might be an image for a modern reality show on tv but at the same time there are wolves in a suburban garden.

Maybe because they operate with a clarity of line and language and strong images, the translations work effectively. Here, for instance, is ‘Cello Suite’

Cellosuite

Vom Fenster aus
sehe ich die Bahn kommen,
ein rostiges Insekt
mit geweiteten Augen.
Wie leicht sie die Särge
durchs sonnige Tal zieht!
Einundzwanzig, zweiundzwanzig ...
Sind sie gefüllt oder leer?
Jetzt läßt sie zischend Dampf ab,
der sanft zu mir her zieht
wie eine undeutliche Botschaft.
Ich drehe das Radio lauter,
eine Cellosuite, im Hintergrund
der keuchende Atem
des Musikers, deutlich zu hören.


Cello Suite

From my window
I see the train approach,
a rusty insect
with widened eyes.
How easily it pulls the coffins
through the sunny valley!
Twenty-one, twenty two. . .
Are they full or empty?
Now it hisses, letting off steam,
which gently drifts towards me
like some vague message.
I turn up the radio,
a Cello Suite, in the background
the wheezing breath
of the musician, clearly audible.

Sraith do dhordveidhil

Feicim óm fhuinneog
an traein ag teacht,
feithid mheirgeach
na súl mór.
Nach éasca mar a iompraíonn sí na cónraí
trí ghleann na gréine!
Fiche is a haon, fiche is a dó. . .
an folamh nó lán iad?
Sioscadh anois uaithi, ag ligean leis an ngal
a shnámhann go séimh chugam
mar theachtaireacht éiginnte.
Ardaím an raidió,
Sraith do Dhordveidhil, sa chúlra
i gclos do chách
anáil chársánach an cheoltóra.

This is typical of how the poems work – or at least the short poems. The constraint of publishing a trilingual book is that it necessarily means the emphasis is on the shorter poems. The poems here tend to develop a single strand of thought and image; they’re a kind of inspired note-taking, and are full of unobtrusive surprise. The real world, acutely observed, is inclined to wobble like houses in an Amsterdam canal:

When my friend looks out the window,
the city doubles.
At dusk the classics step
from their shelves and start working,
a dog serves them cheese and wine.
And at night an angel sweeps with great care
the pavement between water and front door,
as though impelled to clean up one of the four rivers
to Paradise.
(‘A visit to Amsterdam’)

Another kind of wobble happens in ‘A visit to the graveyard’ as the poet looks into an open grave

Lumpy clay, snails,
wood and a few bones, nothing
to frighten us. Had I expected more?
As a child I wished to know what disappears
together with the dead, never again
to surface, the sacred things of life.
I walk on, my shadow of its own
accord searching for other corpses,
teetering like a sleepwalker
on the green ridge between the graves.

There are also a number of poems for voices: ‘What the gardener says’, ‘What the philosopher says’, ‘What the taxi-river says’, ‘What Marx says’ etc, though these didn’t work as well for me. They’re a bit too slick, or maybe it’s that they announce themselves too clearly. I like the poems that creep up on you a bit more stealthily and then enact their mild surprise:

Wolves now live in our garden.
Choked with emotion we watch them
lick their bloody paws.
Their stench spreads like gas.

One has a duck in its claws, another
has two blackbirds. Hapless creatures.
We ask nature for its counsel
but the sun takes umbrage,

and the rain has decamped to the centre.
Hungry beasts. Their eyes aglow
like ink and blood. At night they lie
under the apple tree and noisily

grind their teeth.

(Reality Show)

For anyone who’s wondering, by the way, the eleventh commandment is

Du sollst
nicht sterben, bitte

Thou shalt
not die,
please

Ná
faigh bás,
led thoil


Michael Krüger, Das elfte Gebot/The Eleventh Commandment/An tAonú Aithne Déag, Ausgewählte Gedichte/Selected Poems/Rogha Dánta

Translated into English by Hans-Christian Oeser
Gabriel Rosenstock a d’aistrigh go Gaeilge

Coiscéim, 12 euro

To have eyes

There are so many voices that flourish outside the main streams of poetry publication and reputation making. By pure accident, more often than not, you happen on a voice embedded in its own sustaining system of small presses and fugitive pamphlets, and realise, with a certain despairing bafflement at the invisibility of so much that is good, the lifetime's quiet achievement behind it. I was much taken with a poem by Geoffrey Holloway, taken from David Morley's site.

Double Vision: Spring

The cat among the grasses nodding as it sniffs —
like a new-bathed infant shaping for a kiss.
The swans opulent, their bulrush-furry throats
ringed, rippling, with filamented light.
Shadows that are swallow-blue, yet brittle-clear,
that match the trespass of chrysanthemums released
by lancing heels of divers whanged from trees —
and all along the towpath the spun rod,
the dainty float cavorting in the sun.
To have eyes. To see.

The stagnant salmon like a crippled submarine
leprous in the shallows by the dripping arch —
a bone-white mouth insensitively working,
a quiet stammer, hung with sentences of death.
What was colour, kick and phallic exultation,
that shook the stream with the torpedoes of a myth,
laid-up like David for a chit of useless warmth,
like sunken David (that prodigious king)
for a stone tribute, a buck’s delinquent sling.
To have eyes. To see.

The attentiveness of the writing is immediately attractive, added to the rhythm -- a rhythm wedded to the specificity of the language. The lines are full of information delivered in concrete Anglo Saxon particulars. The language too combines a kind of traditional keen noticing of nature with an urgent modern metaphorising -- 'The stagnant salmon like a crippled submarine/leprous in the shallows...', the 'bone-white mouth' 'hung with sentences of death', the stream shaken with 'the torpedoes of a myth'. There's a lot going on in a short space, in a verb-less presentational present: a kind of rapt but complex apprehension. Holloway is not a poet I'm familiar with, so it's good to be introduced to him. He was born in Birmingham in 1918 and died in 1997. He was, according to Morley, 'one of the leading spirits of the group called the New Lakes Poets that included – among others – Norman Nicholson, Dorothy Nimmo, Jacob Polley, Peter Rafferty, David Scott, Christopher Pilling, Neil Curry, Patricia Pogson, William Scammell, M.R. Peacocke and, for three years, myself.'

Morley has edited the Collected Poems, just published by the small press, Arrowhead Press and makes a good case for him:

What was always consistently right in his work was tone. This was all his own, and his integrity of feeling and response was the heart of it. His many subjects included the memory of war, the consolation and difficulty of love, and his alert responses to the natural world. With W.S. Graham, his exact contemporary, he was one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth century British poetry, with a genuinely gifted ear for the music and the movement of language.

He published twelve collections of poetry, including the book that established his reputation, Rhine Jump, a Poetry Book Society Choice in 1974.

Rhine Jump is an astonishing book which still yields a huge energy and alertness in its language. Subject-wise, it feels like a massive gamble made by a poet who did not wish to speak much about his war experience, but could no longer resist the ghosts trying to speak through him. The honesty and humility in its tone makes the book very distinctive and necessary within our own time. It is still one of the best places to start reading him.

The Collected Poems of Geoffrey Holloway, edited and introduced by David Morley. Arrowhead Press