The Cat Flap

An Paróiste Míorúilteach

2011-09-26T14:06:00.000+01:00

O'Brien Press are about to publish An Paróiste Míorúilteach/The Miraculous Parish, a dual-language selection of Máire Mhac an tSaoi's poems edited by Louis de Paor, with translations by myself, Celia de Fréine, Louis de Paor, Gabriel Fitzmaurice, James Gleasure, Aidan Higgins, Valentine Iremonger, Biddy Jenkinson, Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Eiléan Ní Chuileannáin and Douglas Sealy. It comes with an illuminating introduction by Louis de Paor. Here's a taster, first the original, then my own translation.

Cian á thógaint díom

Do mheabhair is mó anois a bhraithim uaim –
Ní cuí dhom feasta cumann rúin an tsúsa –
Cleamhnas na hintinne, ná téann i ndísc,
A d’fhág an t-éasc im lár, an créacht ná dúnann.

An mó de bhlianaibh scartha dhúinn go beacht
Roimh lasadh im cheann don láchtaint seo taibhríodh dom?
Téann díom, ach staonfad fós den gcomhaireamh seasc,
Altaím an uain is ní cheistím an faoiseamh.

Milse ár gcomhluadair d’fhill orm trém néall,
Cling do chuileachtan leanann tréis na físe,
Do leath ár sonas tharainn mar an t-aer.
Bheith beo in éineacht, fiú gan cnaipe ’scaoileadh.

Do cheannfhionn dílis seirgthe i gcré
An t-éitheach; is an fíor? An aisling ghlé.

Sorrow lifts from me

More than anything, it’s your mind I feel the loss of now.
The love between the sheets has had its day
But the bond of mind, which never fades
Is what tears me, is the wound that never heals.

How many years exactly since we parted
Before this brightening kindled like a waking dream?
I can’t remember, and will not count them, but
Give thanks for the moment and not question its peace.

The sweetness of our company came back to me in the
dream,
The chime of your pleasure still sounds in the room,
Our joy spread round us like the air.
Even if no button is undone, just to be alive together.

This is the lie: your fair head withered in clay.
And the truth? The clear vision in the brightening day.

The freshness of what happens

2011-08-23T20:47:00.002+01:00

Reading Pearse Hutchinson:Review of collection of essays on PH edited by Philip Coleman and Maria Johnston, published by Irish Academic Press.

Education by Stone: João Cabral de Melo Neto

2011-08-11T15:41:00.000+01:00

Two poems, taken from the recent The FSG Book of Latin American Poetry

O Fim Do Mundo

No fim de um mundo melancólico
os homens lêem jornais.
Homens indiferentes a comer laranjas
que ardem como o sol.

Me deram uma maçã para lembrar
a morte. Sei que cidades telegrafam
pedindo querosene. O véu que olhei voar
caiu no deserto.

O poema final ninguém escreverá
desse mundo particular de doze horas.
Em vez de juízo final a mim me preocupa
o sonho final.

The End of the World

At the end of a melancholy world
men read the newspapers.
Men indifferent to eating oranges
that flame like the sun.

They gave me an apple to remind me
of death. I know that cities telegraph
asking for kerosene. The veil I saw flying
fell in the desert.

No one will write the final poem
about this particular twelve o’clock world.
Instead of the last judgememt, what worries me
is the final dream.

Translated by James Wright

A educação pela pedra

Uma educação pela pedra: por lições;
para aprender da pedra, freqüentá-la;
captar sua voz inenfática, impessoal
[pela de dicção ela começa as aulas].
A lição de moral, sua resistência fria
ao que flui e a fluir, a ser maleada;
a de poética, sua carnadura concreta;
a de economia, seu adensar-se compacta:
lições da pedra [de fora para dentro,
cartilha muda], para quem soletrá-la.

*

Outra educação pela pedra: no Sertão
[de dentro para fora, e pré-didática].
No Sertão a pedra não sabe lecionar,
e se lecionasse, não ensinaria nada;
lá não se aprende a pedra: lá a pedra,
uma pedra de nascença, entranha a alma.

Education by Stone

An education by stone: through lessons,
to learn from the stone: to go to it often,
to catch its level, impersonal voice
(by its choice of words it begins its classes).
The lesson in morals, the stone's cold reistance
to flow, to flowing, to being hammered:
the lesson in poetics, its concrete flesh:
in economics, how to grow dense compactly;
lessons from the stone, (from without to within,
dumb primer), for the routine speller of spells.

Another education by stone: in the backlands
(from within to without and pre-didactic place).
In the backlands stone does not know how to lecture,
and, even if it did would teach nothing:
you don't learn the stone, there: there, the stone,
born stone, penetrates the soul.

Translated by James Wright

This morning thanks to The Book Depository came through the door Education by Stone, Selected Poems, Translated by Richard Zenith (Archipelago, 2005), which I'm looking forward to reading. João Cabral de Melo Neto (1920-1999) is one of the most interesting Brazilan poets of the twentieth century and has the same hard thinginess as Francis Ponge, as can be seen from the poem above. I'll post again on him when I've had a chance to study Zenith's versions. In the meantime, a couple of links for the curious:

Wikipedia entry

Some poems in English

Elbow Room

2011-08-10T19:27:00.001+01:00

A letter brings me to my teenage father,
unpicks his bones and calls him back
from his week of boarder’s rations, his years
of darkness and silence, to where he sits
in the depths of winter in his cousins’ kitchen
and wolfs his Sunday lunch.

What does he say? He lifts a fork and vanishes
until now, how many winters
later, and his father, too, lifted and returned
to drive his hackney down the narrow roads
flat capped and with his elbow out the window
so close I can reach my hand across –

as if that casual elbow opened a portal,
poked through time to graze the city air
or as if I might somehow reach in to raise
these always resisting bones, always
unfinishable journeys. How much can you stretch
from lunch to dinner, from headstone to hearth

and back again? But the engine is running
in the unkillable car, my grandfather changes up
as he leaves the bend
and accelerates from the letter.
Around the corner, my father drains his cup,
pushes back his chair. After lunch

comes nothing, unmemory, unwritten.
I can follow them to nowhere, to where
the engine rusts and the broken years
lie in fields, and when the traffic stalls
I can open the window
and rest my arm on the door, let my elbow

graze the zone, let the altered day come in.

Valerio Magrelli

2011-08-09T10:41:00.012+01:00

Age of the duck-hare: the poetry of Valerio Magrelli

published in Agenda Vol 45 No.4 / Vol 46 No. 1, May 2011

Valerio Magrelli is one of the brightest stars of Italian poetry, widely acclaimed since the appearance of his first collection Ora Serrata Tesserae when he was twenty three. The title of that collection gives a hint of the kind of poet he is — it’s the irregular, serrated demarcation between the retina and the circumferential tissue inside the eye. So specialist is the title that when he went to the optician some months after the book came out, the optician remarked ‘I didn’t realise we were colleagues, I see you’ve written a book . . .’

The scientific term directs us to a poetry preoccupied with visual perception of the world, and the forensic attention applied simultaneously to the gaze. The blank page is ‘like the cornea of an eye’ where the poet ‘embroider(s)/an iris and in the iris etch(es)/the deep gorge of the retina’:

A gaze then
sprouts from the page
and a chasm gapes
in this yellow notebook.

It’s a reflexive poetry, concerned with its own gesture as much as with what it perceives and records. The poems are animated by a careful, precise and logical attentiveness which at the same time recognises that close attention can be a deception. In an early poem not translated by Anthony Molino or Jamie McKendrick he describes his eyes as pencils which inscribe on the brain indistinct and confused images. Yet paradoxically, if the world is imperfectly grasped the act of attention is itself a kind of clarification; there is poetry in the myopic gaze:

La miopia si fa quindi poesia,
dovendosi avvicinare al mondo
per separarlo dalla luce.
Anche il tempo subisce questo rallentamento:
I gesti si perdono,
I saluti non vengono colti.
L’unica cosa che si profila nitida
è la prodigiosa difficoltà della visione.

(Myopia makes poetry therefore/having to approach the world/to separate it from the light./Time also endures this slowing down:/gestures are lost, greetings aren’t gathered./The only thing which is clear/is the prodigious difficulty of seeing.)

Writing, he reminds us, is not a mirror ‘but rather/a shower-screen’s frosted glass/-behind which, real enough,/but darkly, a body/is discerned. . .’ The rest of that poem points to a paradox where apparent stasis and monotony cohabit with writerly fecundity:

Dieci poesie scritte in un mese
non è molto anche se questa
sarebbe l’undicesima.
Neanche i temi poi sono diversi
anzi c’è un solo tema
ed ha per tema il tema, come adesso.

Ten poems this month
not much, even if this one
does make eleven.
The themes too aren’t all that different
in fact, there’s only one theme,
the theme itself. Again.
(Translated by Anthony Molino)

There’s a certain Woody Allenish comedy of the inwardly directed gaze about this, the anxiously self-aware writer with a sense of the absurd yet an equal determination to pursue the apparently small-scale in the knowledge that, in the end, it’s the quality of the attention that matters.

Reading a translation, especially a monolingual one like McKendrick’s, it can be easy to forget about the relationship the original has with its own tradition and language, but a great deal of Magelli’s effect in Italian is the degree to which it’s embedded in Italian poetry and relates easily and often playfully with that tradition. A poem like ‘A te DNA della poesia’ stitches Dante into poetry’s DNA as a comic anagram and reminds us the extent to which a contemporary poet’s style and resourcefulness are bedded in the tradition of Italian poetry.

The first translations of Magrelli in English to be published in book form were by Anthony Molino, and now he is joined by Jamie McKendrick, whose selection from four books, The Embrace, has recently been published by Faber. Molino called his selections from the first two books Nearsights, the neologism being an attempt to describe ‘the effort to see, to probe, perceive, and communicate the world in a new light.’ The effort to see is also the effort to register the seeing, and the result can be ‘To write as if/to translate/something written in another tongue’ or, in McKendrick’s closer version. ‘To write as if this/were a work of translation,/something already penned in another language.’

One of the remarkable aspects of the first collection is the primacy it gives to the notebook in which the poems are written, so that it comes to have a life of its own, its existence a statement of intent as well as a constant invitation:

It’s not a glass of water that I keep
beside the bed
but this notebook.
Sometimes I sign words there in the dark
and the following day finds them
dumbstruck and battered by the light.
(McKendrick)

It is ‘a shield/a trench, a periscope, a loophole.’ Like the pen it is a permanent fixture, a constantly alert instrument of apprehension:

The pen should never leave
the hand that writes.
With time it grows into a bone, a finger.
Fingerlike, it scratches, clutches, points.
It’s a branch of thought
and yields its own fruits,
offers shelter and shade.
(McKendrick)

This is a long way from Seamus Heaney’s pen as spade to dig out the lore and truth of memory. Magrelli’s pen is not like anything, it is an extension of mind. Part of the reflexiveness of the poems is the transformation of the physical paraphernalia of writing into a world in itself; the page becomes ‘a room left unoccupied’. Into this room the poet carries broken chairs or journals, whatever is cast off or ‘cashiered from use’. The page or the poem becomes the last refuge of the discarded, ‘the last port of call for things/before sinking beneath the house’s horizon/in the clear light of their own sunset.’

Sometimes it’s as if the poet wanted to sail as close to inconsequence as he can, slowing the world to a stasis where he can subject it to a myopic stare, almost as if he seeks the doldrums where ‘the page lies becalmed’, and states of calm inaction:

Domani mattina mi farò una doccia
nient’altro è certo che questo.
Un futuro d’acqua e di talco
in cui non succederà nulla e nessuno
basserà a questa porta. . .

I will shower tomorrow morning.
Besides that, nothing’s certain.
A future of water and talc
where nothing will happen and no one
will knock on this door.
(Molino)

His second collections Nature E Venature (Nature and Veinings) pursues the same quietist inquisition. One poem imagines the aftermath of gazing:

Ho spesso immaginato che gli sguardi
soppravivano all’atto del vedere
come fossero aste,
tragitti misurati, lance
in una battaglia.
Allora penso che dentro una stanza
appena abbandonata
simili tratti debbano restare
qualche tempo sospesi ed incrociati
nell’equilibrio del loro disegno
intatti e sovrapposti come i legni
dello shangai.

I’ve often imagined that looks
outlive the act of seeing
as though they were poles
with measurable trajectories, lances
hurled in a battle.
Then I think that in a room
just left lines
of this kind must stay
for some time poised
criss-cross, cross-hatched,
upholding their structure
like pick-up sticks.
(McKendrick)

The poems are a bit like the pick-up sticks left across each other, delicate remnants of an act of inquiry. It’s not surprising that the poetry should also proclaim its affection for the discarded, the unimportant, ‘all things bust/and putrefied’. Likewise ‘Gestures that go astray/appeal to me…’ The human world tends to be kept at a distance, acknowledged through technology that’s intimate and distant like the telephone, ‘la fontana di voci’, ‘a shower/where the water never changes/but the drops/differ every time. . .’(Molino). In a typical gesture, one love poem evokes the lover in terms of the digits of her phone number.

The double three,
then the nine that comes third
recall something in your face.
When in search of you
I have to draw up your figure,
I have to spawn the seven ciphers
that are analogues of your name
until the combination safe
of your living voice
unlocks itself.
(McKendrick)

The communication itself is haunted by static that ‘rucks our voices’ and the poet finds himself suspended above the conversation hearing ‘the tongue of an ancient creature/from the underworld’ calling him. A later poem finds him again haunted by the voices from another room which seem to follow him, making him the soundbox for stories he is not implicated in. This sense of his own removal from the scene is explicitly developed in ‘Removals Man’ where a metaphor for translation also suggests the relocation of the self.

Magrelli likes to set himself a new challenge with each collection: where the first explores states of stasis and concentration, the second considers more scattered, fragmentary states and the third, Esercizi di tiptologia (Typtological Exercises), 1992, is more consciously experimental and includes prose and translations. Typtology, in case we didn’t know, is the theory that departed souls communicate with the living by tapping. Maybe the tapping works both ways since the acts of writing and translating might also be seen as communication with the dead. Jamie McKendrick translates a dozen of these poems in The Embrace, including the title poem, and they’re among the most striking and impressive in the book. The opening poem, a teasing reflection on the inevitable contagion of matter, is a sly triumph

That matter engenders contagion
if interfered with in its deepest fibres
cut out from its mother like a veal calf
like the pig from its own heart
screaming at the sight of its torn entrails;

That this destruction generates
the same energy that blazes out
when society turns on itself, the temple’s veil torn
and the king’s head axed from the body of the state
until the faith healer becomes the wound;

That the hearth’s embrace is radiation,
nature’s pyre, which unravels
helplessly before the smiling company
so as to effect the slightest increase
of the surrounding temperature;

That the form of every production implies
breaking and entry, fission, a final leavetaking,
and that history is the act of combustion
and the Earth a tender stockpile of firewood
left out to dry in the sun,

is hard to credit, is it not?
(McKendrick)

McKendrick doesn’t include the prose pieces that are an integral part of Esercizi di tiptpologia but they’re in Antony Molino’s second book of Magrelli translations, The Contagion of Matter, and they add greatly to understanding how this poet’s imagination works. They have a Ponge like forensic attention to the object in hand, whether cigarettes, the suburbs of Rome, or his water polo adventures. His water polo piece is dedicated to Nanni Moretti, another enthusiast of the sport, and we might remember that Magrelli makes an appearance as a dermatologist in Moretti’s Caro Diario, a film whose mordant humour his poetry has much in common with.

One piece considers the plaster casts for Henry Moore’s sculptures in a Toronto art museum. The casts seem more convincing, more authentic than the bronze realisations. The spirit of creation lives in the originating material, much as the spirit of poetry might be said to live somewhere in the space between conception and completion.

Some poets gravitate naturally towards, or are animated by the possibilities of an over arching structure. Magrelli’s next book, Didascalie per la lettura di un giornale (Instructions for reading a newspaper), is a single long poem whose sections correspond to the sections of a newspaper, with titles like ‘Date’, ‘Price’, ‘Bar Code’, ‘Review Page’, ‘Children’s Corner’. It is not the individual content of these pages that interests Magrelli, so much as the random arrangement of the world into a set of concerns granted a significance beyond their station by the imprimatur of money and lasting for twenty four hour before their Cinderella-like reversion ‘into a pumpkin, expired news,/money out of circulation, wastepaper.’ The most recent book represented in Jamie McKendrick’s selection is Disturbi del sistema binario (Disruptions of the Binary System). The poems in McKendrick’s selection are from the final sequence which derives from Wittgenstein’s ambiguous drawing of the ‘duckrabbit’, a which can be seen as a duck or as a rabbit (a hare for Magrelli) and is therefore a figure for the ambiguity with which the world presents itself to us, or with which we perceive it. It allows Magrelli to riff on one of his favourite themes, doubleness or duplicity, and the nature of perception, which have been a constant since Ora Serrata Retinae. The last poem here is an apparent leavetaking of language, hinging on the notion that double vision sabotages ‘the dream of a shared language’ and that what’s left is a troubled legacy:

Forked creatures, immune to the word
loomed before me,
and were invulnerable to the truth.
I had entered the age of the duck-hare,
the era of iron, of silence.

Magrelli is clearly determined to renew his work in further, edgier explorations. This might make him seem a schematic writer, but, as McKendrick notes in his introduction, whatever the framework in which each successive book operates, there is a fundamental cohesion in the poems, and an unmistakeable stamp of concerns and personality which comes through the work of both translators. Quizzical, sceptical, mordant, unsettling, playful and deadly serious, the poems seem to issue fitfully, like sudden impulses long incubated, and their force grows in the accumulation, and in the reader’s repeated encounter with them. Maybe their success has something to do with their lack of self-satisfaction, the fact that they perpetually acknowledge that their medium is slippery. ‘I should like to render in poetry/the equivalent of perspective in painting’,

To give a poem the depth of a rabbit
escaping through the fields and make it
distant whilst already
it speeds away from the one who’s watching
and veers toward the frame
becoming smaller all the time
and never budging an inch.
The countryside observes
and disposes itself around the creature,
around a point that’s vanishing.
(‘Vanishing Point’, translated by Jamie McKendrick)

(Books referred to in this essay: Valerio Magrelli, The Embrace: Selected Poems, translated by Jamie McKendrick, Faber and Faber, 2009 (published in the US by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux as Vanishing Points); Nearsights: Selected Poems by Valerio Magrelli, edited and translated by Anthony Molino, Graywolf Press, 1991;Valerio Magrelli, The Contagion of Matter, translated by Anthony Molino, Holmes and Meier, 2000.)

Falling

2011-08-08T13:00:00.002+01:00

Back from the blogging dead. Has The Cat Flap been filled with cement? someone asked. Pretty much, for the last few months, but it will now be re-activated. To begin with, a piece published in the Dublin Review for Winter 2010-11. The piece led to a documentary on RTE Radio, produced by Bernadette Comerford, available for download here

Poems, prose and who knows what else to follow...

When I started falling, I didn’t think much of it. I took it as something the body naturally did, a way of testing itself, maybe, or a kind of trick. I’d get up in the morning and go down to the bathroom on the first landing, splash water on my face, and immediately lose consciousness. A few seconds later I’d find myself on the red lino of the bathroom, haul myself up, and go back to the sink. And then it would happen again, and again I’d pick myself up from the floor and return to the sink. (I might not have been so quick to return if I’d known that water was one of the triggers of the falling, or rather the alchemy that took place between water and light as I washed my face.) To me, falling was just part of the morning ritual. Occasionally I reported it to my mother, but the notion must have seemed too silly to register, just the kind of thing a boy could be relied on to make up. So I went on falling, giving myself a few bruises every morning, lurching backwards into the day.

Continual Visit

2010-10-28T16:00:00.018+01:00

From Drop Box

Somehow a wilderness grows. The grasses
are full of small animals, the nights so absolute
you could haul yourself through blackness to the stars
and stream down like a stray god on the meadow.

The lake shifts and startles, a vixen cries from her lair.
The cottage veers and shakes and makes
like a mad thing for the trees. If there is a dog
he is barking now, shocked head pummelling air.

If there are foxes they are running, if the dead
have spilled from their fields they are here now
running headlong into the night. They are lost
and their gods with them, running down the narrow
lanes, leaping into hedgerows and ditches, mingling
with ash branches, rushes, the sleeping machines
in their sheds.

Sequence continues in The Manchester Review

Click here for the rest of the issue

Lines from a Victorian Photographer

2010-09-03T13:34:00.015+01:00

(Paul Martin, Yarmouth, 1892)

She lies in the sand as if she’d risen from it,
as if the sand had dreamed her dress
and elaborated
her pinned up hair, her sculpted hat.

He leans over her
dark-suited, composed
having stepped outside his century
as if for a moment and travelled down

still bowler-hatted and immaculately shod,
his umbrella still perfectly rolled
and lying now beside her
to await the outcome.

[]

He has conjured her maybe
though not so much as she has taken him.
The sand is in every fold of her dress,
she lies in the sand, the sand lies in her

and she is smiling: there is nothing of him
she doesn’t comprehend, the brim of his hat
knows more than he does
and travels farther.

[]

Around them a world moves,
someone else’s,
a procession of dark dresses escorting children,
boats conquering the foreshore,

a solitary chair
that has somehow wandered out
to take the air and suitably refreshed will return
to its great affairs.

[]

Now they have fallen deeper,
they have disappeared into the mantelpieces
nightstands and abandoned chests, they are gazing out
like cathedrals of themselves

where the light took hold of them,
raised them up, wiped them down
and disposed them for the future
but missed

their true flourishing
where disbelieving the arrangement they tumbled
out of the frame to attempt
instead a fallen kiss, a dishevelment.

Into the Deep Street

2010-08-02T19:39:00.003+01:00

Into the Deep Street: Seven Modern French Poets 1938-2008. Edited and translated by Jennie Feldman and Stephen Romer. Anvil, 2009, 335 pp. 17.80 euro

with thanks to Poetry Ireland Review 101, where this piece first appeared.

How do you go about presenting a selection of French poets to an English-language readership? One method might be to try for a generous inclusivity, hospitable to the full range of what is on offer. Another might be to isolate a trend, a set of affinities between poets, and represent that. This anthology takes the second approach, bringing together Jean Follain, Henri Thomas, Philippe Jaccottet, Jacques Réda, Paul de Roux, Guy Goffette, and Gilles Ortlieb. The idea is that this is the line of Follain, a loose notion of elective affinity rather than a school or tradition. Follain’s brief, intense poems are a fixed point around which many of the poems here constellate themselves. The constituent parts of a Follain poem are concrete, material but they serve very different ends than they might in another poet’s sensibility, or in a poem in English. Very often Follain seems to sever the link between one part of a poem and the next, so that a lot of the reading work is to establish the connection between the various parts. There is also the importance accorded to memory, a memory from which, often, all context has been removed, leaving a frieze of details mysterious in their isolation. Follain’s was also an imagination haunted by the first world war – especially evident in a poem like ‘Life’ or the final poem given here, ‘The War’. In the latter the child’s eye view of the moment of departure of his father for the front is stark and moving:

A few drops of coffee laced with alcohol hung on his drooping moustache, his naked heart was bleeding, he asked the child’s forgiveness for unfair bouts of anger, an entire and incredible lover coming to light; an hour later the winter sun had shone, putting bright touches on birds’ plumage and the bayonets of columns of men: they were marching down the frozen road.

Follain might be too elusive, too distinctively particular a poet to spawn a school, but the poets here might be said to share with him a modesty of means, a tendency towards compressed forms, a surface clarity and a preference for the material over the abstract or idealised. A clue to his influence on later generations of poets might lie in the remark by Jacques Réda quoted in Romer’s introduction, on Follain’s ‘magical art of contiguity, his ability to set a current running between objects in juxtaposition, in the absence of any single governing metaphor.’ Apart from Follain, the other presiding influence is Réda, who published many of them in the Nouvelle Revue Française and whose interests in jazz and the possibilities of prose for the poetic imagination are also shared by this group. One of the formal interests of this collection is precisely the easy continuity between poetry and prose. As Romer puts it: ‘The poets here switch from one to the other rather as a musician might switch from a flute to a clarinet...’ Prose here means multiple genres: the selections include prose from novels, notebooks or carnets, as well as prose poems. It’s the kind of fluidity that can regard Jacques Réda’s Les Ruines de Paris, a wonderfully inventive and restless set of responses to Paris, as a collection of poems, though its English translation, part of Reaktion Books topographic series, is presented as straight prose.

However they are lineated, the different works of these poets have their own strong internal unity. Unlike the prose excursions of poets in English, the journals, novels or other prose of these poets fit comfortably within a single aesthetic range. This is not entirely surprising, in that French publishing is hospitable to more adventurous or genre-bending prose than its more commercially focused English counterpart.

The notebook, by now a well established form in its own right as well as the foundation upon which many of the poems are built, is accorded an especially privileged place in the selections. If this suggests both an interest in process, the carnet as a serial engagement both with the primary material and the mediation by which the apprehension of that material is transformed, it also means that a great deal of the impetus in these poets is provided by keen attention to what is close at hand –

I observe the day through the window. This will turn out to be the most constant of my activities. (Paul de Roux, Au jour le jour, 3: Carnets 1985-89)

Seated at the same table as me is that character I always meet in the cafés on the Boul’Mich, ever since I’ve been taking that sad and weary walk from the Observatoire to the Seine. He is remarkable for the red hair that flows down his back and runs over each shoulder, part of it joining his beard in front which is equally red and unkempt. . . (Henry Thomas, Carnets 1934-1948)

Getting used to the new noises: the heels upstairs, the door down below, the neighbour’s piano, the blinds opposite, the grunts coming from a nearby gym at the end of the day. Moving from flat to flat, from district to district, as if to outwit the different storeys of the self. (Gilles Ortlieb, ‘Moving’, Carnets de ronde, 2004)

Before everything goes the way it came, for all of it will go, and all good things come to an end, as they say; before this journey we’ve shared is over for Partance and me, I’ll say something about her in simple words that will also go one day, like everything else. Describing is an act of love, to quote a poet.
The interior is modest, like a cockpit, four metres by two, though as I’ve said, I’m not good at figures, and enthusiasm doesn’t help. Let’s say three by one-and-a-half, give or take a decimetre. In any case, I wouldn’t wish for more. On the orchard side, a narrow seat for afternoon rests; on the meadows side, two more with cushions, and a folding table that brings them together to make a single comfortable bed. In the middle of the side wall, opposite the door, an aluminium sink with shelves above it. I’ll put some books there, the essential ones, not more than about ten, for something to dream on at leisure. (Guy Goffette, Partance, v)

The contingent can be grounds for a kind of comedy of self-awareness as well as a love affair with the manipulation of the observed world into language, or, in the case of Jaccottet, the basis for a scrupulous examination of the natural world which is also necessarily a scrutiny of the examination itself. If that sounds problematic it’s because it is; the tightrope walk between the observing consciousness and the consciousness of the observing is always precarious. The more self-conscious the scrutiny, the more the world, and the poem, shrivel and disappear. The sense that language disguises the world underlies lines like ‘From now let our life be told to you by birds..’ (‘Letter of 26 June’) yet it never dissuades the poet from the effort. Jaccotet’s scrutiny can produce the lightness, and light-heartedness of

Walking by the meadow today heartens me, cheers me.
It’s full of poppies in among the wild grasses.
Red, red! It’s not fire, certainly not blood. Much too cheerful, too slight for that.
Don’t they look like so many little flags barely attached to their poles, cockades that a breath of wind might carry off? or bits of silk paper tossed to the wind to invite you to a fête, the festival of May?

The extract from ‘The Word Joy’ provides a striking image for the poet’s struggle: he is ‘like someone digging through mist/in search of what slips away from mist,/having heard footsteps just further on/and words exchanged by passers by. . .’ In another prose piece, ‘Early Spring in Provence’, an austere landscape furnishes a further image of what Jaccottet wants from writing: ‘No luxury, no excess, no cushioning, nothing that dissembles or distorts: earth alone, from which all emerges, and into which all will return.’

This could function as a description of the collective aesthetic of the poets here, as well as a reminder that, for all that the title of the anthology suggests that ‘the city street is the place where the inner tension and outer vision of the poets seem chiefly to collide’, a good deal of the poetry is enacted far from what Jaccottet has called ‘l’ébranlement des villes’: Follain’s Normandy, Jaccotet’s studied concentration on the landscape of the Drôme, Guy Goffette’s Lorraine belge, Gilles Ortlieb’s Luxembourg and Lorraine.

The tendency to separate themselves from the metropolitan, as well as from the mainstream, can be read an indicator of a certain independence of spirit – Romer cites their sauvagerie or a solitariness of feeling which all seven share. Part of that cultivated solitariness is a gentle but consistent undercutting of the importance of self. The self, maybe, is like the small drama in Henri Thomas’s poem of that title which recounts the loss of a notebook on a march; it ends up ‘in the mud/black and formless’, and is accompanied by other small dramas, birds coming down ‘to peek at oats and droppings’ and pale puddles reflecting ‘without illusion/a pale November in Lorraine’. The poet’s conclusion –

and in a barn I think
about everything, and shrug.

– perfectly enacts the dissolution of the self into everything around it. The gesture is replicated in ‘Vain Rampart’ as the poet sits beside a mother and her child. Again, nothing happens and exactly that becomes the site of the self’s merging with everything around it:

in a while the chestnut trees will flower,
the three of us deep in the day,
and how many others. . .
Vain rampart
of the self
when you crumble
it feels so good
in the light.

Guy Goffette’s breakthrough volume was Éloge pour une cuisine de province (1988) and the poems taken from it here testify to a resolute belief in the significance of the small drama, the remembered provincial childhood, a neighbour’s ladder

The neighbour is dead but the ladder
still leans against the tree that with the sun
sinks deep into the firm flesh
of apples and the young raiders’ throats.

His poetry is playful, subtle and deeply interested in the releasing possibilities of strict forms. His ode to his caravan is a celebration of a certain kind of solitariness ‘I will be humble and learn with her, from the inside, how to weather the cape of illusions and. . .catch up with life as glimpsed in that childhood garden.’ Like him, Gilles Ortlieb seeks out the company of small gestures and studied concentration: the act ‘of running the back/of the spoon across the rim of the plate or soup bowl/so it won’t drip on its way to the mouth. . .’ , observing disused/blast-pipes from the furnaces’ or ‘The mist [that] has concealed the mist that hides the three lights level with the water at the café Jean le Pauvre.’ Objects come into sharp focus as they are relished for their material unshakability, as in his ode ‘to the small enamel mug edged in blue/and its metal that burns if you seize it/distractedly by the sides. . .’

Many of these poets have been translated into English before. Selections of Follain’s poems have been translated by W.S. Merwin and Heather McHugh. Jennie Feldman has published an excellent translation of Réda’s early books; Marilyn Hacker has published a book length selection of Goffette. Derek Mahon and others have translated Jaccottet. It’s probably true to say that the nature of this strand of poetry in French lends itself well to translation in English. If the impulses seems very recognisable it is not least because many of the poets are very taken with poetry in English. Réda has translated Frost, among other Anglophone poets. Goffette has expressed his admiration for poets like Auden, Larkin, Frost, for what Marliyn Hacker identifies in her preface to her translations of his poems as the specificity and concreteness of English language poetry. English poetry appeals to him, he has explained, ‘because of its grip on reality’. Hacker also identifies Seamus Heaney as a reference point for Anglophone readers, citing, among the things they share, ‘a solidity of place, and of objects, with an emphasis on the perceived material thing’.

One of the key figures in the anthology is Jacques Réda, both as an encourager and as a brilliantly adventurous poet. His achievement is too protean to be easily condensed into an anthology selection. The earlier work, available in English in Jennie Feldman’s translations from the first three books, is densely textured and richly musical.Feldman quotes his insistence that poetry, if it is to survive, must have ‘rhythm, or better still, le swing.’ He is a serious jazz fan and there is a jazzy unpredictability to his work:

To my left, the city that was a maze of stone
is now an airy monument of ash or dust
sinking without a sound beneath the weight of mist
and reappearing further off, but fainter,
like something dreamt in a fever-tossed sleep,
between the long groping hands of bridges.
And on I go among other shapes unravelling
on snowy embankments, towards gardens with no end.
(‘Pont des Arts’)

Paris is what he writes with, providing subject and technique. The poems are often grounded in the city which he explores obsessively, traversing vast tracts of it on foot or on his Solex, especially in The Ruins of Paris, which is one of the major works of recent French poetry. He reinvents the tradition of the flaneur, prowling the streets, noting and observing enough to release the stream of images and reflections that are the real core. His city is, therefore, free of cliché; he sets himself afloat to drink in the sense data of the streets and deploy it for his own ends.

The one brief sample here gives a flavour but the curious reader will want to seek out Mark Treharne’s translation of the book. The selection from his work includes wonderful moments from his wanderings in both city and countryside. whether setting out to discover the source of the Seine or catching someone’s eye as his moped slows in traffic, his reports from ‘infinitesimal drop[s] of time’ are unmissable.

Most things in this anthology are worked from a concentrated alertness to the subject in hand, from stumbling against the immediate, to paraphrase Paul de Roux. The quality of attention might be familiar to English readers, but it is the way the attention is deployed that constantly strikes, the unusual cast of the minds processing the immediate. It isn’t, of course the whole story of contemporary French poetry, or even an exhaustive version of this strand – it would have been interesting to have Claire Malroux, another Follain admirer and another poet deeply influenced by Anglophone poetry. But as a window into the work of seven interesting poets this bilingual selection is invaluable. The translations themselves are subtle and resourceful. Jennie Feldman characterises their aim as trying to recreate the ‘acoustic inevitability’ of the original and she contributes a very useful essay on the detail of the translation challenges. Both translators have flexed enough creative muscle to make convincing English poems out of the originals, but the dual-language format allows the reader to let the two poetries talk to each other across the spine. Feldman ends her piece on the translation with an image from Paul de Roux of the ‘cold and heavy bricks’ of words that are chosen and piled on top of each other: ‘In metamorphosis, the wall takes flight, each brick suddenly winged.’ Her hope is that translation might provide a like metamorphosis, and acquire wings, and this book certainly provides ample evidence of flight.

Weeds in the Forum

2010-05-19T00:40:00.001+01:00

Have been torturing myself on the rack of prose, so this poem by José Emilio Pacheco seemed particularly apt. Taken from Inside Out, Selected Poetry and Translations by Alastair Reid (Polygon, 2008)

Roman conversation

In Rome that poet told me:
You cannot imagine how it saddens me to see you
writing ephemeral prose in magazines.

There are weeds in the Forum. The wind
anoints the pollen with dust.

Under the great marble sun, Rome changes
from ocher to yellow,
to sepia, to bronze.

Everywhere something is breaking down.
Our times are cracking.
It is summer
and you cannot walk through Rome.
So much grandeur enslaved. Chariots
charge against both men and cities.

Companies and phalanxes and legions,
missiles or coffins,
scrap iron,
ruins which will be ruins.

Grasses grow,
fortuitous seeds in the marble.
And garbage in the unremembering streets:
tin cans, paper, scrap.
The consumer's cycle: affluence
is measured by its garbage.

It is hot. We keep on walking.
I have no wish to answer
or to ask myself
if anything written today
will make a mark
any deeper than the pollen in the ruins.

Possibly our verses will last as long
as a 69 Ford
(and certainly not as long as a Volkswagen).

Translated by Alastair Reid

Why translation matters

2010-05-17T10:46:00.002+01:00

Michael Hofmann argues for the importance of translation, reviewing Why Translation Matters by Edith Grossman

Thanks to Jorge Fondebrider for sending the link to Richard Howard's New York Times review of the same book

Dead Poets' Society

2010-05-10T12:19:00.004+01:00

Jorge Luis Borges

To a minor poet of the anthology

Where are the days
that were yours on earth, that mingled
joy and sorrow and were the universe for you?

The river of years
has lost them; you’re a word in an index.

The gods gave others immortal fame:
of you, dark friend, all we know
is that one evening you heard the nightingale.

Among the asphodels of the underworld
your proud shade
might think the gods harsh.

But the days are a tangle of paltry needs
and is there a blessing richer than the ash
of which oblivion’s made?

For others the gods kindled
the relentless light of fame, which pokes in every crevice
and finds out every flaw,
fame which ends up shrivelling
the rose it treasures.

They were kinder to you, brother:
in the ecstasy of a dusk which will never darken
you listen still to Theocritus’s nightingale.

'The river of years' is a bit of a shortcut, translation by omission. The original is 'El río numerable de los años' but I couldn't think what to do with 'numerable'. W.S. Merwin, in his version of this poem, translates those lines as

The river of years has lost them
from its numbered current

which is one way. He also translates the title, which in Spanish is 'A un poeta menor de la antología' as 'To a Minor Poet of the Greek Anthology', which is no doubt what Borges was referring to. I left it non-specific. It might as well be The Penguin Book of Hittite or Irish Verse. Anyway, I liked the poem. Reminds me too of Wilbur's 'To the Etruscan Poets':

Dream fluently, still brothers, who when young
Took with your mother's milk the mother tongue,

In which pure matrix, joining world and mind,
You strove to leave some line of verse behind

Like still fresh tracks across a field of snow,
Not reckoning that all could melt and go.

Ecclesiastes

2010-04-09T11:55:00.000+01:00

by Tymoteusz Karpowicz

there is a time for opening the eye and closing the bed
time for donning a shirt and shedding sleep
time for drowsy soap and half-awaked skin
time for the hair-brush and for sparks in the hair
time for trouser legs time for shoe-laces for buttons
for laddered stockings for the slipper’s blindness
time for the fork and for the knife times for sausages and boiled eggs
time for the tram time for the conductress time for the policeman
time for good morning and time for goodbye
time for carrots peas and parsley
for tomato soup and shepherd’s pie
time for trussing chicken and releasing forbidden speeds of thought
time for a cinema ticket or a ticket to nowhere
to a river perhaps perhaps perhaps to a cloud
there is finally a time of closed eyelids and the open bed
time for the past present and future
praesans historicum and pluaquamperfectum
time perfect and imperfect
time from wall to wall

published in The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry
Edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris, Ecco, 2010.

Two more by Follain

2010-02-10T12:40:00.001Z

Two poems by Jean Follain

Signs for Travellers

Travellers from the great spaces
when you see a girl
twisting in sumptuous hands
the black vastness of her hair
and when moreover
you see
near a dark baker’s
a horse lying near death
by these signs you will know
that you have come among men.

(Translated by W.S. Merwin, from Transparence of the World: Jean Follain, Copper Canyon Press, 2003)

The Red Apple

Tintoretto painted his dead daughter
carriages were moving in the distance
the painter died in turn
today long rails
girdle the earth
and carve it up
the Renaissance resists
in the chiaroscuro of museums
voices break
often even the silence
seems exhausted
but the red apple remains.

(Translated by Stephen Romer in Into the Deep Street, Seven Modern French Poets 1938-2008, Edited and translated by Stephen Romer and Jennie Feldman, Anvil Press, 2009)

Dazzling nails

2010-02-06T22:18:00.000Z

A free-ish version of Follain's 'Quincaillerie'.

Hardware Store
after Jean Follain

In a country hardware store
men come to buy
screwdrivers and wrenches
their hair is grey their hair is red
neatly flattened or flying wild.
A bluish air fills the serious spaces,
into its iron tang women set loose
the scent
of themselves.
Just to touch the spotless bolts and drills
is to feel the irresistible
weight of the world.

The hardware store floats towards the stars
selling, until no-one wants for them,
nail after dazzling nail.

The Metaphysical Tramdriver: Reading Luciano Erba

2009-10-28T12:03:00.003Z

The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems. Luciano Erba, translated by Peter Robinson. Princeton University Press, 2007. 288 pp. $17.95 / £12.50

with thanks to Poetry Ireland Review, where this piece first appeared.

The poetry traditions of different cultures intersect pretty randomly at the best of times. Poets will, if they can, peer over the fence of language to see what the neighbours are up to, or rely on the services of translators to bring them the news. Sheer happenstance often determines what gets translated: what happens to interest a given translator at a given time, what publisher is prepared to publish the result. Italian poetry has, in fact, been pretty well served in English. Of twentieth century poets, Montale, Ungaretti, Saba, Pavese, Zanzotto, Bertolucci, Luzi are all available in fine recent translations. Catherine O’Brien’s anthology The Green Flame is still an excellent starting point for an exploration of contemporary Italian poetry, as is Jamie McKendrick’s monolingual Faber anthology. But the immediately useful context for Luciano Erba is Peter Robinson and Marcus Perryman’s translations of Vittorio Sereni published in 2006 by the University of Chicago Press. Indeed Peter Robinson tells us that the first words of Erba’s that he read were in a poem by Sereni which cited two lines from his early poem ‘Tabula Rasa?’.

Sereni, like Erba a Milanese poet, was one of the most significant figures of post-war Italian poetry and one of the defining poets of the so-called linea lombarda or Lombard line, a term originating in an anthology edited by Luciano Anceschi in 1952. The linea lombarda is taken to mean a certain kind of lyric sobriety, a poetry of reality, of things, of the quotidian and often marginal; metropolitan in tone and often subject-matter, anti-idealistic or disenchanted, unillusioned. None of these will apply equally to the various poets associated with it and like all such terms it’s more useful as a shorthand than a true analysis. Erba’s own view of the usefulness of movements can be gauged from his poem ‘Linea Lombarda’:

Prejudices, commonplaces I adore
I like to think that there are
always girls with clogs in Holland
that they play the mandolin at Naples
that just a bit anxious you await me
when I change between Lambrate and Garibaldi.

Lambrate and Garibaldi are train stations in Milan; from the romantic clichés of Holland and Naples to the bathos of the poet changing trains is itself an entirely characteristic journey through shades of irony.

Probably the most defining characteristic of Luciano Erba is detachment – less a political position than a function of his sensibility. Fastidious, delicately ironic, he doesn’t fit comfortably into any category. Italian critics have observed the traces of Montale and Sereni but also his distance from the hermeticism of the 40s, as from post-war neorealism. They cite his ‘natural lightness of touch’ and preference for highly concrete details, as well as his subtle and apparently even-tempered music. In his introductory essay Robinson emphasises his anomalous position in the post-war context: ‘In a cultural context where all is "political," detachment of a French nineteenth-century bohemian kind, of a Gautier or Baudelaire, can be crudely construed as reactionary.’

France and French poetry are important to Erba – he has translated Michaux, Ponge, Reverdy and Blaise Cendrars among others. One of his early poems is dedicated to Philippe Jaccottet who, like Erba, is a highly visual and material poet whose poems are, in his translator Derek Mahon’s words ‘recognizably circumstantial, and empirical in their relation to the “real world”’. The earliest poems here display a talent and sensibility already fully formed. Erba strikes his distinctive note and announces the temperament as well as the typical concerns of the work. He seems to have a very secure sense of where he is in relation to the tradition and the contemporary scene – but also he has a clear confidence in his own procedures. Only certain things tempt him into speech and very often they are things which are concealed, submerged, at the margins of experience:

The vignette in the old illustrated book
never noticed under its tissue paper
all the times I’d turned its pages
revealed to me another city
that climbs and stretches along a river
under a night-blue sky.
From the roofs men look at stars
which seem like kites
women appear on high loggias
while on the far bank of the river
a traveler ties his horse to a tree-trunk:
he too has discovered the city.
(‘Another City’)

A typical Erba poem of this period begins in offhand manner, and with a few quick brushstrokes blocks in specific details and a mysterious situation.

Tabula Rasa?

It’s any evening
crossed by half-empty trams
moving to quench their thirst for wind.
You see me advance as you know
in districts without memory?
I’ve a cream tie, an old
weight of desires
I await only the death
of every thing that had to touch me.

The specific details – the half-empty trams, the cream tie, seem to struggle to press some vivid reality on a scene the poet seems to have half vanished from. The dandyish tone seems itself to function as a kind of self-removal. The relationship with the world seems to operate within ironising distances. We are always conscious of the poet arranging his composition and placing himself as a self-aware character in his own dramas. Sometimes the poems present themselves as snatches of conversation offered without preamble or context. They are often as much about what is excluded as what is present, relishing their silences as much as their articulations, and the concrete details can be deceptive – they don’t so much tie us to a world as signal an attitude; they are knowing, subtle, highly conscious of themselves as artifacts and of their relationship with the tradition. The early poems evoke, or seem to evoke, a world of orderly comfort, of panama hats, fathers in white linen suits, cream ties and elaborate hats and women in fresh blouses:

Your white blouse, Carlina,
who ironed it with such care?
( ‘After the Holidays’)

Your latest blouse, Mercedes
of mercerized cotton. . .

It is ‘the beautiful country’ of memory, all iconic detail sufficient unto itself, the world as a series of meticulous friezes. It’s tricky to decipher the precise tone of these poems, and transferring their nuances is probably the single most challenging translation task. Their mixture of irony and longing give them a simultaneous intimacy and distance; their ambition seems to be, as in ‘In the Ivory Tower’ to ‘tell long stories of things/we’ve to leave behind.’ Yet Erba’s manner of telling is as much as about concealment and suggestion:

To tell and describe: medals
clouds tapestries skies
ciphers that are born in the hair
lamed zayin aleph
to D on June morning.

The notes inform us that D is a person and that the hair falling across her forehead somehow evoked the Hebrew letters. It’s a signal, maybe, that telling and describing function as elements in a highly individual erotics of perception.

Peter Robinson includes an essay by Erba at the end of the book, ‘On Tradition and Discovery’, which emphasises his distance from the various established modes of thinking about poetry and ‘isms’ in general and argues for ‘authentic simplicity’ and the ‘importance of objects’:

Whether you’re dealing with enlarged details, or with Gulliverized scales, even if we’d better not speak of gracious miniatures. I recover in this way the vision of adolescence, at least so I believe. It is in the comparison with the little, in the discovery of what had always escaped the attention, that I encounter the most diverse and unexpected surprises of being...

It may well be that Erba’s is ‘a poetry of objects’, as Robinson notes in his translator’s preface and that ‘Like other Milanese poets with whom he is associated, he avoids the dangers of high afflatus by sticking to the details of circumstantial existence’ but it is the manner in which the objects and the circumstances are disposed that really defines the poetry, and the apparent materiality can be as much a hindrance as a benefit for the translator. The objects and the poetry exist in a mind space that is both very distinctive and deeply embedded in the Italian poetic tradition, and the particular weight of the objects or poems can be hard to gauge. And it is a poetry ‘that lives in its intimate expressive detail. ‘The brevity and ‘lightness’ of the poems also pose their own challenges: ‘The translator has such a small canvas on which to effect an equivalent coordination of parts, and to find a recognizably similar lyrical gesture as that performed by the poem itself.’

There is, though, a temperamental affinity between Erba’s mandarin modesty and the expressive range of English. The English poems which Robinson has made out of Erba’s originals sit well in the tradition of English language poetry. The ‘lyrical gesture’ of the Italian seems to work as efficiently and as tellingly in English. This may be due to the tonal range Erba deploys; he is as much a poet of tone as of objects, and to enjoy him you have to tune in to his particular range. Once attuned, there’s much to enjoy. Some of the earlier poems here are as fine as anything he later achieved. One of the most striking is ‘Senza Risposta’ (Without Reply) a love poem or doubt poem, questioning yet still cool and poised:

Ti ha portata novembre. Quanti mesi
dell’anno durerà la dolceamara
vicenda di due sguardi, di due voci?

November has brought you. How many months
of the year will the bitter-sweet
affair of two looks, of two voices endure?

In the original the repetition of the idea of the woman ‘portata da novembre’ has a powerful rhetorical effect maybe not quite replicated in English

non sono
che un uomo tra mille e centomila
ma non sei
che una donna portata da novembre
e un mese dona e un altro ci saccheggia.

....I’m only
a man among thousands and hundreds of thousands
but you’re only
a woman that November brings
and one month grants and another plunders from us.

Poems like these don’t seek any other purpose than themselves, and they resist definitive closure. They find their urgency in a kind of spareness and wit. The expedition of ‘Book of Hours’ ends with a separation in the city ‘amid building-site quartz and mica’ ; the poet and his companion return home ‘pursued at our heels by life/as by a friendly dog that catches up with us.’

These early poems were written in the fifties, a period of much experimentation in Italian poetry. Seventeen years separate the publication of Il male minore (The Lesser Evil) and his next collection, Il prato più verde (The Greener Meadow) so it may well be that Erba felt himself very much out of step with the poetic currents of his era – that he was too Frenchified, too middle-class, too much the self-aware ironiser.

In ‘On Tradition and Discovery’ he also affirms his attraction to ‘indefinite space’, ‘undecided regions, uncertain places, non-places’. Something in Erba’s imagination comes alive in these interstitial regions. In ‘Closing a Trunk Once More’ an unused object, a hat found in a trunk and replaced once more, is the impetus. The poet is literally suspended between the worlds of earth and sky in ‘I Live Thirty Metres Above the Ground’, where he imagines what happened in the air he now occupies

crossed over centuries back
perhaps by a flight of herons
with below it all the falconry
of the Torrianis, the Erbas even. . .

The in-betweenness is also a reflection of the middle class identification most explicitly portrayed in ‘Without A Compass’

According to Darwin I’d not be of the fittest
according to Malthus not even born
according to Lombroso I’ll end bad anyway
and not to mention Marx, me, petit bourgeois
running for it. . .

Robinson comments acutely on how a poem like this ‘outflanks the sorts of class-based political criticism that Erba’s work had received at the hands of Franco Fortini and others. Yet nevertheless, "petit bourgeois" is exactly the experience with which Erba’s poetry might fictively identify itself, because that is a class in ambivalent transit between two more unequivocally valorized social positions.’ It’s certainly true that Erba returns again and again to emblems of bourgeois life – the obsessive attentiveness to clothing, the expensive ‘raphael album’ in which his ‘blondest daughter’ draws, or the fine furniture in ‘Relocation’ which offers a solitary consolation to the relocated gazer. When the rest of the city moves for the bars on a foggy evening

you head for the foggy blue sign
of a furniture shop display
where you look at the damask beds
the pettineuses the buffé the contrabuffé
then go home and stand a long time at the mirror.

It’s an equivocal poetry, a poetry of indefiniteness which holds the world at bay, and yet paradoxically this allows the world to press itself all the more powerfully on his senses when he does admit it. Some of the finest of the poems from the 1977 collection Il prato più verde (The Greener Meadow) are the poems written for his daughters, including that collection’s title poem, where all of the details combine to a form a kind of incantatory naming, as if the act of naming, of marshalling the evidence of the real could amount to a spell against disenchantment or metaphysical despair.

There are several other poems in this vein, such as ‘The Goodbyes’, and ‘Seven and a Half’, all economic and controlled gestures making much of the most unexpected and unpromising materials, and all seeming to observe life from a bemused height, and finding their energy in the zone between belief and disbelief. Maybe his most chara
cteristic poem is ‘The Metaphysical Tramdriver’ from his 1989 collection L’ippopotamo (The Hippopotamus):

Sometimes the dream returns where it happens
I’m maneuvring a tram without rails
through fields of potatoes and green figs
the wheels don’t sink in the crops
I avoid bird-scarers and huts
go to meet September, towards October
the passengers are my own dead.
At waking there comes back the ancient doubt
if this life weren’t a chance event
and our own just a poor monologue
of homemade questions and answers.
I believe, don’t believe, when believing I’d like
to take to the beyond with me a bit of the here
even the scar that marks my leg
and keeps me company.
Sure, and so? another voice in excelsis
appears to say.
Another?

This ‘Credo, non credo’ defines very well the Erba enterprise, a scepticism which secures itself in the tangible – though it’s entirely typical that for Erba the tangible should be represented by a companionable scar.

The translations are very close to the originals and often deliberately flat – as if the intent is to move them as little as possible into an English language comfort zone. They very much defer to the originals on the left hand pages, and probably assume the readers will direct themselves to those. This might explain a certain awkwardness of phrasing sometimes where the English leans a bit too heavily on the Italian and the transition from poem in Italian to poem in English doesn’t full come off. In this sense the best way to enjoy this selection is stereophonically, moving from the Italian to the English and back again. The closeness is Robinson’s stated aim in his ‘Translator’s Preface’ : ‘I prefer translations that stick as closely as to their originals as possible, but which nevertheless aim to read as poems in their new language.’ More often than not he succeeds very well in finding an ‘equivalent gesture’ in English for what Erba does in his own language. He gives us a body of intriguing and challenging work that adds considerably to our sense of the tonal range of post-war Italian poetry.

The Thing Is

2009-09-24T15:38:00.003+01:00

Shameless self-promotion

The launch will take place in Waterstone's Dublin on Thursday, 15 October, 6 pm, along with Vona Groarke, Tom French , Kerry Hardie and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.

Any excuse to get a viol on the cover. The particular excuse in this case is provided by Captain Tobias Hume, mercenary soldier and composer for the viol.

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.

Writing the bare bones

2009-08-27T14:43:00.003+01:00

Collected Poems, by Michael Smith, Shearsman Books, 242pp, £12.95

MICHAEL SMITH has a well-deserved reputation as a prolific and engaging translator of poetry, with versions of Vallejo, Hernandez, Claudio Rodriguez, Lorca and many others to his name.

He is also well known for his work as a publisher with the influential New Writers’ Press and as an advocate of the Irish modernist tradition.

Prolific translators can often find their own work overshadowed by the work they negotiate across the linguistic borders, so it’s good to be reminded of what Smith has achieved in his own right. The poems gathered here cover all the work Smith wants to preserve from seven previous collections, but what’s striking is how much of a piece they are. The essential elements of both style and subject matter were set in place at an early stage and he has stuck pretty consistently to them.

The poetry is spare, avoiding any kind of formal or rhetorical flourish; it’s a bare-bones aesthetic and it suits the cool regard of these poems.

Observation is one of their key drivers, and very often they focus on the city of Dublin; characteristically he’s prowling the “Old rotten heart of the city” and “pondering time’s evil” where “In the shadow of the cathedral” “the dogs of want scavenge/amid excrement and the wormy legs of children”.

Read more

Walking into Poetry

2009-08-26T14:15:00.000+01:00

I’ve always liked the idea of walking into a poem. Certain kinds of poets walk their way into their poems. They take walks and compose poems out of what they see, as in the case of Charles Reznikoff in his walks around New York, or they use walks to work out a poem, finding in the physical rhythm of the walk an inner rhythm that releases the imagination. I think of Jacques Réda out for his daily fix of asphalt in the vingtième, whose whole aesthetic is constructed out of his explorations of the spaces around him, or of a poet like Thomas A Clark who also walks very deliberately into poetry, whose daily practice of walking is the reason and impetus for the work. And this is where the notion becomes interesting. It's not simply that a poet engages in an activity, goes hill-climbing or flyfishing or haunting second hand bookshops, but that there's a synthesis between the activity and the deepest intentions of the poetry. What follows is in part an exploration of what it means to walk into poetry.

‘Standing Still and Walking in Strath Nethy: An Interview with Thomas A Clark’ by Alec Finlay (Edinburgh Review 94, Autumn 1995) begins with a quotation from Mandelstam speculating on the relationship between walking and prosody:

The question occurs to me - and quite seriously - how many shoe soles, how many ox-hide soles Alighieri wore out in the course of his poetic work, wandering about on the goat paths of Italy. The Inferno and especially the Purgatorio glorify the human gait, the measure and rhythm of walking, the foot and its shape. The step, linked to the breathing and saturated with thought: this Dante understands is the beginning of prosody.
Osip Mandelstam, THE NOISES OF TIME, trans. by Clarence Brown

This, though, is the least interesting aspect of the subject, as Clark is quick to point out – ‘I'm not really sure that the rhythm of walking gets into the poems much at all'. What interests Clark and affects his practice is how the walk can remove his mind from its normal routines and provide a separate, defined physical space, ‘a time in parenthesis, a contemplative time’.

You walk out of your usual context, into a more open relation with things. Hopefully, you arrive at a clarity, an immediacy of perception, and you lend attention to that, stay with whatever is happening, internally as well as externally, instead of being displaced into the past or future, instead of being caught up in an attitude.

(‘Standing Still and Walking in Strath Nethy: An Interview with Thomas A Clark’)

A walk, in this sense, is a stepping outside of the self; it is necessarily a journey, a movement away from routine into perception. There's a link here between walking and immediacy: the poet who walks keeps his eyes open, and senses alert. There is a relationship between what is seen and what is written down, the poetry is in the encounter. Clark’s poems are in fact ‘more about standing still than about walking’, and this stillness is at the heart of walking into a poem. He makes a distinction between a walk and a journey:

Early one morning, any morning, we can set out, with the least possible baggage, and discover the world.

It is quite possible to refuse all the coercion, violence, property, triviality, to simply walk away.

That something exists outside ourselves and our preoccupations, so near, so readily available, is our greatest blessing.

Walking is the human way of getting about.

Always everywhere, people have walked, veining the earth with paths, visible and invisible, symmetrical or meandering.
.....
A journey implies a destination, so many miles to be consumed, while a walk is its own measure, complete at every point along the way.

The pace of a walk will determine the number and variety of things to be encountered, from the broad outlines of a mountain range to a tit's nest among the lichen, and the quality of attention that will be brought to bear upon them.
from ‘In Praise of Walking’

If walking becomes an exceptional activity it loses flavour; it is the ordinariness and dailiness that interests Clark. To have any meaning it needs to be constant and unencumbered.

In walking you should travel light, carry as little as possible. It’s a simplification of the kind used in philosophy or science. By a process of distancing, or selecting, you mark out an area of enquiry. It seems to be the case that as you leave behind your everyday consciousness you come closer to things, to natural objects and their particular ways of being.
(Standing Still and Walking in Strath Nethy: An Interview with Thomas A Clark)

Pleasure, perception, lightness. To read the prose poems of Distance and Proximity is to be conscious of their silence: physically, in that the pieces are a series of short declarations surrounded by white space but also because their response to the world is that of a mind that has been cleansed of thought or self or the myriad of accompanying noises we surround ourselves with. Clark’s verses and prose poems are trying to find a way of inhabiting the world with the lightest human print possible, as in the opening line of ‘Jouissance’: ‘The first of all pleasures is that things exist in and for themselves.’

Clark’s walking is a deliberate, unhurried activity. It’s not a frenetic rush through the landscape. It doesn’t attempt to be comprehensive or particularly active. Nor is there any attempt to insert the self into the natural world through anthropomorphic fantasy or Wordsworthian egotistical sublime. There’s no Hughesian fever for a kind of total description, with all the resources of the language deployed for empathetic alignment with nature in its force and ferocity. What there is instead is a meditative sparsity, a minimalist paring down of things to their essential aspects. The language is presentational rather than analaytic and the human relationship with nature isn’t so much problematised as gently foregrounded. Clark’s relationship with the natural world is essentially celebratory. ‘It’s important to realise that both the poems and the walks are in answer to a movement of desire – for clear air, silence, responsiveness, in the midst of a life, no different from anybody’s life, in which these are largely absent.’ (Standing Still interview)

The poems do note and observe but the mode isn’t descriptive and the rapture is kept well in check .This may come partly from the sense that the poems don’t set themselves any agendas in advance – their commitment to a kind of contingent discovery means that the poems tend to function in a zone of calm alertness. It may also have something to do with the fact that Clark has ‘always kept a distance from the idea that the writer is someone who knows or feels something special which is expressed in the writing’. Part of the freedom, and the quietude, of the lines stems from that sense of having ‘nothing to say’. Nothing, that is, which is predetermined; the attempt instead is to let the world, observed and attended to, inscribe itself on the poet’s mind:

as I walked out early
into the order of things
the world was up before me
as I stepped out bravely
the very camber of the road
turned me to its purpose
it was on a morning early
I put design behind me
hear us and deliver us
to the hazard of the road
in all the anonymous places
where the couch grass grows
watch over us and keep us
to the temper of the road

from ‘Sixteen Sonnets’

These lines are typical – the world up before him, allowing himself to be led by the road, putting ‘design’ behind him and putting his faith squarely in the contingent and in the small, unnoticed places. They move and observe and recall and are at the same time a studied declaration of poetic intent, as explicitly concerned with the singing as with the song, and even if the inclination and ambition of the work is to let the world have its say – ‘I’d always want to attempt to see things in themselves, from their side, to take le parti pris des choses’ – the poems exist in the space between the perceiver and the perceived and are quite at home in the self-consciousness of the relationship.

somewhere in the poem
a stag should enter
but the stag is lost at
a crossroad of sunbeams
what the poem weaves
the forest will unravel

(Sixteen Sonnets)

Clark is a poet of place, or rather, of specific places. These are occasionally named or identifiable – Scottish landscape is important for him – but he’s not really interested in the particular lore of a place; even placenames can be ‘too historically or socially determined for my purpose, too tied to habitation’. He is instead more interested in ‘on the one hand, a geological or geographic spread, a landscape, or on the other hand, with a much smaller sense of place, a place in a hedge, or under a rock.’ The poems are encounters with land and sea-scapes which are specific yet exemplary. Wherever he is, whatever he is looking at, the result is a poetry of benign encounter, of the intelligence quietly apprehending the world.

it is a time to speak
to say that the light
this afternoon is lovely
and that all the small
expedients we manage
within the light are lovely
the most fragile devices
what else do we need
not the glitter nor the music
nor the overcrowded air
we need each other
and a space in which to speak
to say that the light
this afternoon is lovely

(A Rumour over Heather)

This ‘space in which to speak’ is where the poetry characteristically takes place

the little decisions
crossing rough ground
is it here or there
I will plant my feet
small crucial decisions
they are never taken
there is only the air
that I tread upon until
some levity or gravity
bears me to the earth

(Byrony Burn)

Walking into poetry for Clark implies a whole series of decisions: about subject matter, form, publication and distribution; it is the expression of a complete aesthetic. This is part of the attraction of the work, the sense that it is all of a piece, that all of the parts connect. It accounts too for the uniformity of the work, the sense that no one piece draws undue attention to itself, no one line seems more privileged than another.

The sequence is the favoured mode, though his deployment of it calls for a looser term. The kind of sequences or gatherings that Clark writes distribute their parts evenly and neutrally in a democratic ordering where each self-sufficient unit carries equal weight. The parts or even the lines seem interchangeable. This is also because their movement isn’t linear, impelled forward by argument or seeking definitive resolution – each step of the journey is important, as in these examples from The Path to the Sea

the seal in the cold water
rises to a clarity
of curiosity, a lapping
of silver, a lapping of grey

(from ‘Forest without Trees’

behind cloud
a mountain’s
implied weight

(from Rills and Tussocks)

The poems want to give themselves up to the small journey. Sometimes, with their second person address, these ‘path’ poems read like instructions or guides for the journey:

trust the tangled path
the sea at your elbow
it will lead you through
complex information
meadow-grass and bent-grass
to a fine sea-view

in among the grasses
are the manifold
spaces little places
where intention is
no longer gathered
but ramified dispersed

(from ‘The High Path’)

The final lines of The Path to the Sea avoid any kind of finality, they are another injunction to take a small, repeatable journey:

on a clear day
unfasten the gate
and take the path
over the machair
through the daisies
down to the sea

(from ‘Turning’)

All of this adds up to a poetry of deliberate and, for Clarke, liberating limitation. If the work is attentive to the marginal and ‘the overlooked places’ he also cultivates his own distance from the metropolitan mainstream (if there is such a creature) and from the normal channels of poetry distribution and commerce. These channels are in any case so marginal in the culture that a further distancing from them is an act of willed isolation – but mitigated, as are all of today’s marginal positions, by the use of the internet. Clarke runs an interesting and entirely characteristic site (http://www.thomasaclark.co.uk). It’s characteristic in the sense that it defuses many of the expectations of a reader/browser encountering a site. At the time of writing it presents a blue screen with the poet’s name which, when clicked, presents an image of a wall with the word AURORA. There are no instructions, frames, side panels, links or any of the usual cluttering paraphernalia of websites. Nor is there any way except to navigate except by going forward. If you click on the wall you are presented with the following lines

when you walk by the sea
the light shifts on on the water

and then subsequently, two lines on each page:

attention comes and goes
when you walk by the sea

when you walk by the sea
it waits by your shoulder

it is the same and not the same
when you walk by the sea

when you walk by the sea
the mist tastes of rosemary

your dimensions are variable
when you walk by the sea

Eventually we learn that the wall in the photograph was designed by Thomas A Clark and Donald Urquhart as part of a regeneration project in the mining village of Dysart. We also learn that before the project was completed the wall was demolished ‘on “safety” grounds, and in response to “public demand”’, so that photographs and the texts are only available to the public through the internet. The site is therefore an act of record and a highly controlled aesthetic space, made in the way a book might be made.

The project and the means of its presentation reminds us of the importance of the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay to Clark. Finlay combined poetry and sculpture in his famous garden in the Pentland Hills, Little Sparta, and resisted the convention that books were the only means of distributing poetry. Finlay’s interest in the poem as material object is echoed in Clark’s practice of publishing poems as cards, or in home-produced limited editions – he set up his own press, Moschatel Press, with his wife the artist Laurie Clark, using a small press they were given as a wedding present. Indeed, about a third of his biographical note in The Path to the Sea is devoted to the press: ‘At first a vehicle for small publications by Ian Hamilton Finlay, Cid Corman, Jonathan Williams and others, it soon developed into a means of formal investigation within his own poetry, treating the book as imaginative space, the page as a framing device or as quiet around an image or a phrase, the turning of pages as revelation or delay.’

Finlay’s work offered Clark an example of ‘a very careful, small, meticulous making’ and it’s a way of making he has continued to profit from and develop into a subtle, rewarding instrument.

Books discussed: Thomas A Clark, The Path to the Sea, Arc, 2005; Distance and Proximity, Pocketbooks, 2001; The Tempers of Hazard (with Barry MacSweeney and Chris Torrance), Paladin, 1993. See also Thomas Clark’s website at http://www.thomasaclark.co.uk

Putting a price on culture

2009-08-14T12:44:00.002+01:00

ON ST PATRICK’S DAY this year the Taoiseach presented US president Barack Obama and vice president Joe Biden with limited editions of Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf and The Cure at Troy with inscriptions by the poet. In his dedication to Obama, Seamus Heaney quotes from the poem’s introduction of the character of Beowulf as “a man who comes in an hour of need . . . there was no one else like him alive”. The first lady Michelle Obama was presented with a collection of Eavan Boland’s poems, and her daughters Sasha and Malia were each given a copy of Bairbre McCarthy’s The Keeper of the Crock of Gold. The reception that evening included a reading by poet Paul Muldoon and music by the Shannon Rovers pipe band.

What does this tell us? It indicates, surely, that songs, music and poetry are a valuable currency. Out of the many possible gifts he could have given, the Taoiseach chose to present the president and his family with works of creative imagination, the kind of imagination that is in fact readily associated with Ireland and Irishness, the imagination that fuels films, rock songs, symphonies, theatre as well as novels, short stories and poems.

Read more

Dèia

2009-07-15T15:06:00.008+01:00

In the house
a great silence, the roped-off tables and chairs,
the shirt and hat still on their hook as if at any second
he might come in and reach for them. I’ll be down
at the water’s edge, looking out. . . We were the ghosts
beyond the ropes, peering in
to breathe tunes into a wind-up gramophone,
work the hand-press into the night, infuse
the flags with the tang of bread and oil.
But that clarity, how everything blazed
in the undaunted light of itself. A typewriter
nailed down for all eternity, drafts a whisper from ink
flourishing their imperfections.
In the museum room a looped film of the artist shaving,
shelves of his books; ‘I breed pedigree dogs to feed my cats’.
The place held its breath. In this readiness what could resist?
Touch nothing but listen for the lift-off, the print
of the house on its own waiting, the lucky lope
of the sleek black cat through the ropes, and out.

Luciano Erba

2009-05-18T12:43:00.003+01:00

Pastello

alle piccole
Francesca e Caterina

ma come può un coniglio
fare il prato più verde
una strada ferrata
una stazione di mattoni rossi
nascondersi fra colline di robinie
per farle più spinose e più robinie
sopratutto questo odore di foglie nuove
ma come può?
come è possibile
che tutto un mondo si colori di mattino
se vi tengo per mano

Pastel

to the little ones
Francesca and Caterina

but how can a rabbit
make the meadow greener
a railway line
a red brick station
hide themselves among hills of robinia
to make them more thorny and the more robinia
above all this smell of new leaves
but how can it?
how is it possible
that a whole world grow colored with morning
if I hold you two by the hand

from The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems, Luciano Erba, Translated by Peter Robinson, Princeton University Press, 2006

Heaney at 70

2009-04-22T13:10:00.003+01:00

RTE's Heaney at 70 site

My own introduction to the box set of the Collected Poems

Irish Times special feature

Excellent review by Barra O Seaghdha of Stepping Stones

Thin-skinned dreams: Reading Friederike Mayröcker

2009-04-22T12:54:00.003+01:00

(with thanks to Poetry Ireland Review, where this first appeared)

Friederike Mayröcker, Raving Language: Selected Poems 1946-2006. Translated by Richard Dove. Carcanet, 2007.

Some facts first: Friederike Mayröcker was born in Vienna in 1924, worked as an English teacher from 1946 until 1969, since when she has lived as a freelance writer. She began writing in her teens and was first published in the Viennese avant-garde magazine Plan. From her beginnings as a writer she has been associated with the Wiener Gruppe, figures such as Hans Weigel, Andreas Okopenko, H.C. Artmann and her companion Ernst Jandl, whom she met in 1954. Since giving up her teaching job she has lived, in Jeremy Over’s words in a recent (Autumn 2008) issue of New Books in German, ‘an almost hermetical existence surrounded by unruly mountains of books, papers and notes in a tiny flat in the Zentagasse district of Vienna. . .’ where she ‘started to produce the main body of her extraordinary avant-garde literary work.’

The unruly piles of books and papers are reproduced on the over of Richard Dove’s translations of her work in Raving Language: Selected Poems 1946-2006 (Carcanet, 2007) in a mixed media piece by Linda Waber from 1995. Atelier Friederike Mayröcker is an impression of the kind of romantically fruitful artistic disorder beloved of the public – think of the Bacon Studio in Dublin – but it offers us an image of the working method that might help us if we don’t take it too literally. The piles of papers, painted as generic clutter, may have a perfectly rational coherence for the poet. The space is tiny and the stuff seems to be bursting out of it, as if it can’t be contained; and almost a quarter of the scene is dominated by the buildings of Vienna visible from the poet’s apartment, and that in itself is a useful image: the city spilling in, perpetually available to the avid eye of the poet. Vienna is crucial to Mayröcker; to a great extent she writes with the city. In an interview she has said that she can only write in Vienna, and described how during a six month residency in Berlin she found herself unable to write; she had to go home to Vienna for a weekend in order to write anything.

Avante-garde is a very general and maybe not especially helpful description. Mayröcker’s work is a kind of continuous torrent of freely associative, passionate language in the service of private obsessions; in the service, if you like, of the individual lived life rather than the life of the greater social entity. There is nothing specifically national or political in this work, nothing identifiably sociological. Its methods favour the apparently random: the habitual use of collage techniques which layer seemingly disparate levels of experience. But because it it so clearly rooted in the experimental tradition – she herself singles out the period between 1966 and 1971 as her ‘experimental years’ during which she concentrated mainly on the manipulation of language, on making explicitly concretist and Dadaist poems – her later work has little need of the obvious armoury of alienation and is in fact highly approachable.

The techniques which deflect or distract the reader from some kind of normal autobiographical expectation do in fact cohere – they cohere into what interests the poet, what engages her attention. They have in common a certain pitch of language, a certain emotional intensity. The pitch is influenced by the fact that the poems are often conceived as letters; they have specific addressees. Many are addressed to Jandl after his death in 2000 and the ‘raving language’ or ‘rasende Sprache’ of the title is a language of heightened perception that comes from the intensity of this address:

I’m writing deluded letters which you’ll never receive,
such thin and vulnerable skin-intercourse, this is merciful
weather, the whitethroat’s kiss in the gardens. . this
word in the wire in communion I’m dreaming of you, and
ecstasy itself, this magpie,
have just invented language raving language.

Hallucinatory and ecstatic, these poems seem to invent their own searing idiom. Mayröcker in this aligns herself with the tradition of Hölderlin, an important precursor for her, as indicated by Richard Dove in his excellent introduction to this selection:

...Hölderlin became a key point of reference in the 1970s, and ...she has deliberately adopted – or rather adapted – elements of his late hymnic style. Isolated phrases are taken over lock, stock and barrel. . . .But it is in terms of syntax that the affinity is greatest – Mayröcker’s primitivistic parataxis has a similar ‘Asian’ feel to Hölderlin’s (to cite the eighteenth-century distinction between ‘Asian’, i.e. non-classical, and ‘Attic’, i.e. conventionally neo-classical). In her mouth, parts of speech like aber (but) or nämlich (namely) have a decidedly Hölderlinian feel.

(Introduction, xxi)

Her poem about a visit to the Hölderlin tower in Tübingen begins with the striking image of the poet getting her Hölderlin fix:

Hölderlin’s Tower, River Neckar, In May

this snort of Hölderlin
in the bright-red Hölderlin room/
standing in the corridor
my glance falls on the red flowers in the glass
bordered by petals
shed
nothing else/
the room empty just the vase of flowers
two old chairs --
I open a window
in the garden, you say, the trees
are still the same as in his time
bur we hear a snatch of music the bluish
silverware is glittering

for Valerie Lawitscha

The suggestion of drug-taking is deliberate. In his note on the poem Richard Dove discusses his search for the best English rendition of the noun:

What is certain is that Hölderlin is a drug for this poet. During a conversation in Vienna in February 2005, I asked Mayröcker how she wished ‘eine Prise Hölderlin ’ to be translated – a pinch (as in ‘a pinch of salt’ or ‘a pinch of snuff) or a snort (as in ‘a snort of cocaine’). Her answer was instantaneous: a snort.’
xxviii

Her influences are eclectic, and derived from wide reading. Apart from Hölderlin she cites Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Roland Barthes, Marguerite Duras, Henri Michaux, Beckett and Gertrude Stein, but it's reading itself which is the real influence -- ‘Writing/is applied reading’ one poem announces briskly – and an inevitable spur to imaginative work. Writing about her in a recent New Books in German, Jeremy Over notes the importance of reading :

At Vienna’s Schule für Dichtung (‘Poetry Academy’), she recommended to probably horrified student writers that they read for at least ten hours a day. . .

(Jeremy Over, New Books in German)
http://www.new-books-in-german.com/english/316/220/220/129002/design1.html

The reliance on collage is one application of reading. Books provide an endless source of found material to be deployed and orchestrated. It’s the technique of an inward and remarkably self-contained sensibility.

In the same way that the late, fragmentary Hölderlin appeals, her imagination fastens on fragmentariness as if the rendering of the fragmentary were the only true way to engage with the world. Her poems are shot through with, and driven by a fierce sense of mortality and an accompanying determination to pack in as much of the world as possible. The work is visually rich; she is a very painterly kind of poet -- she has described herself as an ‘Augenmensch’, an ‘eye person’. There’s a kind of ferocity or a fierce anxiety about the way she crowds the visible into her lines; the eye that is in love with the world is acutely aware that everything looked at is vanishing and that its ecstasy is a form of grief:

….. I
only know this life
won’t be coming my way again, not I
my heart is grazing
in mournful pastures

(country rain, july)

A poem like ‘in praise of a fragment’ gets all these concerns in: the random, material world, ‘the thought of transience’, unstoppable joy and a deliberate inconclusiveness that is her particular fidelity to experience:

across the street
at two facing windows
a woman and a man call out
the state of the world to one another /
on the sliding roofs of containers for old glass
the sign with an arrow in three languages
hier öffnen open ouvert /
the thought of transience
gets me howling
while I tread the cobbles
beneath mimosa trees and the oriental
candyfloss wafts through open windows out into freedom /
lilac is blossoming in a small lane /
on rubber soles a youngster
is leaping through sudden May rain /
the young robinia leaves torn down in a nightly storm
are swimming on the surface of a lustrous
puddle / gesticulating
horse-drawn cart

with a pursed lip the apostrophe,

The rapt attention and inclusiveness are a by-product of ‘der Gedanke der Vergänglichkeit’, ‘the thought of transience’ that makes her howl. Inconclusion is the conclusion, and the grammar goes about its own independent business. We can see too in a poem like this how the freedom of the technique is a reined freedom; the method is associative, the laying down of apparently disparate layers, but the different layers reinforce each other, and add to the impact of the poem – an it’s a canny kind of associativeness, the randomness is judiciously selected. The poems are full of these kinds of moments of passing life caught in the sudden ecstatic glare of attention, with the language a headlong rush to capture them before they vanish:

in the effulgence of hair
this effulgence of hair in the window
hair-effulgence, never seen anything like it
reflection of a tail of blonde hair
in the front window of a car
hair-effulgence of a woman who remained invisible
eyes mouth nose chin not to be made out, just the angle
of the hair
blonde hair
(drum) dripping dropping of hair, chimera
in the morning

(effulgence of hair)

with windows flung open on the morning of a radiant
August day such an August day / to drink
the flowing air /still / tell myself I’m alive /still /
and now and here yet finitely
or through the blinding blue sails the finite
swallow

Some of the most attractive and striking poems here are those written about her mother in old age. The stark presentation of her mother’s mental disintegration is accompanied by the poet’s unshakeable sense of the world continuing on its way:

to spit around
the little prayer-mat
babble around throw one’s arms around
as though I were now her mother and she
my child. . . it’s all, she says, getting turned
inside out, she’d
expected more of old age, the world’s
lost its charm

meanwhile February shoots up
in mimosa plumage

(‘on this morning’)

This double or multiple focus is very characteristic of the work. In another of these poems the poet and her mother contemplate a tree outside the hospital window

is that a gingko tree, she says,
there’s something else you can write about
the nun looking after her
comes to her bed and says
do you want to confess and take communion tomorrow
and holds her hand
I say she’s without sin, always has been
the white-stockinged
finches among the leaves

(‘mother, eighty-three, hospital’ )

Through all the work runs the sense of poetry as a kind of continuous conversation – with the self, with writers, artists, friends, and with Ernst Jandl. They have the intimate form of letters – practically every poem has a specific addressee – and this accounts for much of their liveliness. It also accounts for their urgency, both in the sense that the poems move with the speed of letters written at speed, but also in the sense of felt pressure of something needing to be said. There are no half-measures – the rhapsodic pitch is sustained convincingly, informed by a rage against mortality that makes her ‘CLEAVE to this earth’.

At over two hundred pages, Richard Dove’s is a substantial collection but it still amounts, as he reminds us, to only about a quarter of her output. It makes a convincing case in English for this prolific and remarkable poet.

Michael Hartnett Remembered

2009-02-16T10:12:00.002Z

Good piece in today's Irish Times by Michael Smith, Remembering Michael Hartnett

Sandalwood comes to my mind

2009-02-05T15:15:00.004Z

Carl Rakosi
from Excercises in Scriptural Writing

Sandalwood comes to my mind
when I think of you
and the triumph of your shoulders.
Greek chorus girls came to me
in the course of the day
and from a distance
Celtic vestals too,
but you bring me the Holy Land
and the sound of deep themes
in the inner chamber.

I give you praise
in the language
of wells and vineyards.

Your hand recalls
the salty heat of barbarism.
Your mouth is a pouch
for the accents of queens.
Your eyes flow over
with a gentle psalm
like the fawn eyes
of the woodland.

Your black hair
plucks my strings.

In the foggy wilderness
is not your heart
a hermit thrush?

Sleepless in Argentina

2008-11-20T23:59:00.001Z

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

2008-07-08T17:48:00.000+01:00

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

2008-06-22T14:59:00.007+01:00

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?

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

2008-04-17T15:02:00.003+01:00

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

2008-03-24T15:38:00.004Z

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

2008-03-18T20:40:00.013Z

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

2008-03-12T00:28:00.001Z

(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

2008-03-10T21:37:00.007Z

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

2008-02-20T13:11:00.009Z

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

Not an editorial

2007-11-06T14:00:00.000Z

(with permission from Poetry Ireland Newsletter)

Hard to believe I’ve handed in my fifteenth issue of Poetry Ireland Review. How did that happen? The initial idea was to do eight issues as the organisation felt that the Review, at this stage of its journey, would benefit from a longer span of editorship. Eight turned to twelve and then I was asked to hold the fort for another three issues as PI went through some changes of its own, and, all pleas for mercy having fallen on deaf ears, this I agreed to do.

Now that it’s over, what will I miss? Editing a magazine is a strange business, hard to quantify, or even to describe exactly. The activity itself lies somewhere between sloth and panic, and between intent and happenstance. Vague ideas slide around the back of the mind, poets who might be encouraged to submit, themes that might be tackled, writers that might be prevailed upon to deliver a think-piece. What about Wales? Afghanistan? What about Mangan, MacNeice, Mandelstam? Some things are there to be dealt with: the massive pile of submissions, for one. For many editors this is the most daunting aspect of the job. A magazine like PIR, with its national and international remit, attracts a dizzying volume of submissions. Many of these are what I’d call routine despatches – little bundles fired off to every journal that appears on a list, where the poet rarely bothers to read the journal and get a sense of what might be acceptable. Most of the submissions are not publishable – they’re just not interesting enough, not well enough written. Reading them can be a dispiriting chore. And yet there are the real finds, bright poems by unfamiliar writers, good work by established ones, and the small pile of definites begins to grow. You cheer up.

You quickly realise that very many good poets, particularly Irish poets, don’t submit work. You also realise that a lot of poems are well enough written to be publishable – and yet they don’t excite. They do not cause the hair on the back on the neck to stand up. The editorial heart doesn’t stop, nor breath shorten. Their language is inert, the subjects are boring. Poets can often seem to be working a narrow little seam of private experience. They don’t seem to get out much. This seems to be particularly the case with poetry in English. An enormous variety of poetry of every possible hue is written in English but only a pbrokenarticular strain of it ends up, for the most part, on the PI desk. The editor in search of poetic adventure has to labour a little to find it.

PIR is an Irish magazine, but I didn’t take that to mean a magazine of Irish poetry. It’s true that there is a serious effort to assess Irish-published work and to feature work by Irish poets, and these are both built into the fabric of the Review. But – and here comes some good old bias – a large part of me thinks that the whole notion of Irish poetry is fairly boring, a kind of branding exercise for a product few, if put to it, could really define. The currents of poetic influence flow across continents and languages and few poets would seek to confine themselves within national boundaries. The dismaying parochiality of so much of Irish critical and cultural discourse – not least the flawed concept of ‘Irish Studies’ – shouldn’t blind us to the internationalism that is the lifeblood of poetry. Those who assume the exceptionality of Irish poetry will witter on about the lines of influence from Yeats to Heaney to Muldoon and ignore the fact that Montale, Pessoa, Celan, Bonnefoy and a host of other unacknowledged legislators have long since gatecrashed the party. I put a lot of poems in translation into the Review not least because a good part of my everyday reading consists of exactly that, and a magazine may as well be as attentive to the idle browsing of its editor as to his, em, considered interventions. But I actually don’t know any serious practitioners who don’t have an ear cocked to the news from elsewhere, and aren’t excited by what discover from one end of the planet to the other. We are at home in our language and necessarily imprisoned in our own little context, but the spices we cook with are as likely to be imported as home-grown.

Have you no funny stories to entertain us? Editing is an exciting and dangerous business, isn’t it? Did you never get a clatter on the ears or a box on the jaw for your pains? If you haven’t made enough enemies in life, then you need a spell in an editor’s chair to set the balance right. The stock in trade of editing is disappointment. Back in the eighties we paid doleful visits to what we called the Careers and Disappointments Officer to contemplate the bleakness of our futures, and being an editor is a bit like that in that most of those who knock on the door are not going to walk out smiling. I often had to say no to good work because there simply wasn’t room for it, and found very little pleasure in the god-like decision-making aspect of the job. You’re aware of how idiosyncratic personal taste is – and yet your job is to trust your own instincts and not let too much else get in the way. You need to believe that the final result is important: a magazine that can stand on its feet and not be hobbled by platitude, cosiness or corporatism. And then you need to go away and have a drink and forget about it.

I was lucky to have in the background an organisation and individuals fanatic in their devotion to the persistence of this journal, and an assistant editor, Paul Lenehan, whose eye for detail far exceeded mine, and I was equally blessed to have a range of contributors prepared to risk sending poems and to sit up late perfecting reviews and essays. The survival for more than a year of any literary outlet is miraculous, and maybe it’s only professional organisations that can sustain the effort indefinitely. For me it’s great to be able to go and to know PIR will continue to drop through the letterbox every three months. The editor is dead. Long live the editor.

The Old Man Speaks with his Soul

2007-10-10T14:58:00.000+01:00

Went to see the launch last night in the Goethe-Institut of Der Alte Mann by Günter Kunert translated into English by Hans-Christian Oeser and into Irish by Gabriel Rosenstock. The book is part of a series of trilingual poetry collections published by the Irish language house Coiscéim. Kunert is one of Germany’s leading post-war poets. He was born in Berlin in 1929 and as a ‘Mischling’ (of mixed decent – his mother was Jewish) was deemed unfit to finish his secondary schooling or serve in the German army during the war. After the war he lived in the GDR, but after signing a petition in 1976 against the state’s stripping of Wolf Biermann’s citizenship he subsequently lost his party membership, and was allowed to leave the GDR in 1979. As well as poetry he has written short stories, novels, television plays and screenplays. Poetry translations in English include three poems in Michael Hamburger’s German Poetry 1910-1975 (Carcanet, 1976), several poems in Charlotte Melin’s German Poetry in Transition 1945-1990 (University Press of New England, 1999) and three in Michael Hofmann’s The Faber Book of 20th Century Poems (2005). He is also one of four poets represented in Agnes Stein’s Four German Poets (Red Dust, 1979) – the others are Günter Eich, Hilde Domin and Erich Fried.

Brecht was a big influence on Kunert (two of his poems to Brecht are translated by Karen Leeder in her After Brecht: A Celebration, published by Carcanet last year), and this is evident in the pared down, laconic style of the work as well as its scepticism and irony. Here's a well known postwar poem in original and translation which gives a sense of his style:

Über einige Davongekommene

Als der Mensch
Unter der Trümmern
Seines
Bombardierten Hauses
Hervorgezogen wurde,
Schüttelte er sich
Und sagte:
Nie wieder.

Jedenfalls nicht gleich.

About some who survived

As the man
Was dragged from the ruins
Of his bombed out house,
He dusted himself down
And said
Never again.

At least not right away.

And another well known poem, ‘Film Put in Backwards’, in Christopher Middleton’s translation

When I woke
I woke in the breathless black
Of the box.
I heard: the earth
Was opening over me. Clods
Fluttered back
    To the shovel. The
Dear box, with me the dear
Departed, gently rose.
The lid flew up and I
Stood, feeling:
     Three bullets travel
Out of my chest
Into the rifles of soldiers, who
     Marched off, gasping
Out of the air a song
With cam firm steps
     Backwards.

Der Alte Mann spricht mit seiner Seele is a sustained reflection on old age, full of grim humour:

THE OLD MAN
considers his toes. How fast
my nails are growing. Regular
claws. Is that abnormal or
is it biological fact? If only
the same happened to the hair
on your head, you’d have
a mane. Like Beethoven.
But then you’d be deaf!
Ergo: let’s go for the nails.

The translators’ notes at the back are a very useful (and all too rare) feature and show the extent to which the translation challenge is heightened by the allusiveness of the poems; they constantly and often playfully engage with German tradition in a way that can make them difficult to translate. Here are a few lines to illustrate the challenge:

Nikolaus Copernicus, der
polnische Schlawiner, stahl
mit die Zuversicht
ins göttliche Universum. Da steh’
ich nun, ich Armer Tor,
und bin bloß ärmer als zuvor.

Nicholas Copernicus,
that Polish rogue, robbed
me of my trust in a
universe divine. And here
I stand, with all my lore,
poor fool, just poorer than before.

The note to this points out that the final lines in the German directly quote the opening of Goethe’s Faust: ‘Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor,/und bin so klug als wie zuvor !’ – ‘And here I stand, with all my lore,/Poor fool, no wiser than before.’

Here's one of the poems in the original followed by two translations, to give a flavour of this trilingual book.

DER ÄLTE MANN
blättert in seinen Telefonverzeichnis.
Alles Nummern von Toten. Wie
erreiche ich euch, Freunde.
Die Drähte sind gekappt, die
Sargdeckel versiegelt. Meine Stimme
dringt nicht mehr durch
in den ewigen Frieden. Mit
Antworten rechne ich nicht mehr.
Eure Fotos schweigen herzlich.
Als Schatten treffen wir uns
wieder einmal, ohne daß die
einander etwas zu sagen hätten:
Als daß wir uns
im Hades so verlassen fühlen
wie zu Lebzeiten.

THE OLD MAN
leafs through his address book.
All those numbers of the dead. How
can I reach you, friends?
The wires are cut, the
coffin lids sealed. My voice
no longer penetrates
the everlasting peace. No
more do I anticipate replies.
Your photograph keeps a cheery silence.
One day we shall meet again
as shadows with nothing
to say to each other:
Except that in Hades
we feel as abandoned
as we felt when alive.

AN SEANÓIR
is é ag gabháil trína leabhar seoltaí.
Uimhreacha uile na marbh. Conas
teacht oraibh, a chairde?
Gearradh na sreanganna, séalaíodh
na cónraí. Ní thollann
mo ghuthsa a thuilleadh
an tsíocháin shíoraí. Nílim
ag súil le freagraí níos mó.
Is binn bhur ngrianghraif ina dtost.
Casfar ar a chéile arís sinn
lá breá éigin inár scáthanna dúinn
is gan faic le rá againn
ach amháin in Háidéas
go mbraithimid chomh tréigthe
is a bhraitheamar nuair a bhíomar beo.

Günter Kunert, Der Alte Mann/The Old Man/An Seanóir. Translated into English by Hans-Christian Oeser. Gabriel Rosenstock a d’aistrigh go Gaeilge. Coiscéim.

Departing from Ourselves

2007-10-10T14:40:00.000+01:00

(with thanks to The Irish Times, where this first appeared)

W.S. Merwin, Selected Poems. Bloodaxe Books.190pp. UK£9.95

The first poems that W.S. Merwin wrote were hymns for his Presbyterian minister father and in a way the impulse stuck; the poems he has written over a long career are impelled by belief. He is a poet of strong passions, as an environmentalist and pacifist who writes quietly and subtly and often to great effect. He started off with the expected accomplishments of a poet of his generation (he was born in New York in 1927): the smoothly articulated poem, a kind of off-the-peg, generic rhetoric. But then, as did his whole generation, he began to simplify, to look for the essentials that would leave enough to drive a poem but keep it as bare as possible, close to experience but unadorned with grandiosity.

Not that simplicity of form means simplicity of content. Merwin aims always for clarity but his thought is subtle. There are the very effective directly engaged poems like ‘For a Coming Extinction’: ‘Grey whale/Now that we are sending you to The End/That great god/Tell him/That we who follow you invented forgiveness/And forgive nothing...//Tell him/That it is we who are important.’ Or the bitter anger of his anti-Vietnam poem ‘The Asians Dying’: ‘When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains//...Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead/Again again with its pointless sound/When the moon finds them they are the color of everything.’

But there are also the poems which struggle with the limits of the sayable. In an interview in The Irish Times he said that ‘poetry is about what we can’t talk about. It’s about what we can’t express.’ A great deal of Merwin’s work hinges on this sense of what language is not capable of expressing, like the pencil that hides all the ‘words that have never been written/never been spoken/never been taught’, or like the bleak acknowledgement of ‘Elegy’ (not, alas, in this book) which reads in its entirety ‘Who would I show it to’.

He writes about nature without sentimentality, without trying to hold on it and make it signify. He returns frequently to the human remove from the world – there’s often a sense that we’re hardly in the world, hardly know it, but stumble half-blindly towards it, as in ‘Hearing the Names of the Valleys’:

the color of water flows all day and all night
the old man tells me the name of it
and as he says it I forget it

Often too, man is a devouring insect ‘eating the forests/eating the earth and the water//and dying of them/departing from ourselves//leaving you the morning/in its antiquity.’

He has published a large body of work, and is also a distinguished translator of poetry, yet the reputation has been largely an American one. Even if few might see him, as the blurb claims, as ‘the most influential poet of the last half-century’, this fairly slim selection usefully introduces several decades of the work of a significant poet who, when asked what he most looked for in a poem, responded immediately: ‘Surprise’.

The End of the Poem

2007-06-21T20:50:00.000+01:00

Paul Muldoon, The End of the Poem, Oxford Lectures on Poetry. (Faber and Faber, 2007), UK £25.

How do you write about poetry? And when you write about poetry, who are you writing for? Paul Muldoon’s book gathers the fifteen hour long lectures he delivered during his Oxford professorship, so the initial audience would presumably have been largely an academic one. The tone and pitch of these talks reflect that; there’s an elaborate cleverness and often an archness of address as Muldoon plays with the forms of academic discourse. But it’s very much also a book for readers of Muldoon’s poetry: its methods, ifs shifts and feints, its teasing humour, its incessant connection-making, are precisely those of the poems. The poetry lover will segue easily from Horse Latitudes to The End of the Poem and the voice and the territory will be comfortingly familiar. Muldoon’s first decision was to to focus each of these lectures on a single poem, which makes for a pleasing structure, and promises the kind of forensic analysis of particular words in particular places you might expect, and relish, from a practising poet, as well as a practical way of tackling some the ‘ends’ of poetry. It immediately foregrounds the primacy of the poem rather than the poet: these are not to going to be encapsulations of a total oeuvre so much as reflections of a personal choice of a single significant text.

The choices themselves are both expected and surprising. On the one hand a canonical list: Yeats, Hughes, Dickinson, Bishop, Frost, Lowell, Moore, Auden – your average course in a certain kind of twentieth century poetry – and on the other, poems in translation by Pessoa, Montale, Tsvetayeva. The method of close textual analysis of a single poem work less well here, since the attention is, necessarily, on translations rather than originals and Muldoon’s highly culture-specific ruminations don’t easily migrate from English. Translation of its nature imports its targets into the terms of the source culture, but that doesn’t mean we can really see a Montale or a Tsvetayeva in a tradition of English-language perception. But more of that later.

What the focus on single poems does is to shine the torch on very specific parts of the process: a microscopic close reading where the attention is on the individual word. But actually the interest is often more on how the particular lexical choice ramifies outward, relates to other words in other poems. Muldoon’s variety of close attention is about making connections. He is very interested in how poems relate to each other, but it’s a very personal and idiosyncratic sense of connection that drives the essays. His choice of method allows him a leisurely, meandering, serendipitous reflection where one thought leads to another which prompts another in closed circles of associative thinking. The essays don’t so much discuss the poems as circle purposefully around them, from the critical to the biographical to the loosely speculative and ruminative, led by ear or memory or some other prompt to an unexpected destination. The result can be disconcerting in that the poem under discussion often seems to crumble under the weight of rumination and you are left marvelling at the connections rather than any more enlightened about the poem itself.

This is probably to miss the point. This is a book at least as much a tour around the brain and imagination (the brainy imagination?) of Paul Muldoon as it is an engagement with poems. The primary relationship which the reader has in these pages is with the darts and shifts and lateral thinking swagger of the guide. All poetry criticism by poets does this to some extent, but here you have a real sense that the poet is as much discovered as discoverer. You don’t come to these essays to be released into the otherness of other poets so much as be coiled back into the mind that considers them. The book opens with a discussion of Yeats’ ‘All Souls Night’ which moves easily from discussion of sound patterning, ‘the mimesis of the tolling bell in the predominantly spondaic metre of what is now the first line’ to a history of the festival of All Souls Night and its relation to Halloween and Samhain, which was ‘if you recall, the name of the house magazine of the Irish Literary Theatre...’ to an anecdote about a college professor introducing Yeats as the author of ‘Ode to Psyche, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Ode on Melancholy’, which itself introduces the core idea: the relationship between Yeats’ poem ‘All Souls’ Night’ and Keats, underscored in his mind by the fact that one hundred years elapsed between ‘To Autumn’ and the writing of ‘All Souls’ Night’ and that Yeats’s poem was one hundred lines long.

Some of this argument is plausible and interesting, although the certainty of the statements is surprising. Not x may be connected to y, but x proceeds unmistakably from y. This may be part of the game Muldoon plays consistently throughout the book – of turning academic seeming procedures on their head. On the line ‘The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine’, Muldoon, for instance, has ‘no doubt – though some will say I should – that the musk ghosts the muscatel...’

The book is peppered with these sort of certainties or mock-certainties. Another oddly persistent thread is the focus on the secret life of poems where words or ghosts of words or unchosen synonyms of words are codes concealing, as often as not the names of the poets. The occurrence of the word ‘drains’ in Keats’ ‘Ode to A Nightingale’ somehow connects with ‘lees’ and is therefore ‘an indicator of what lies under the surface these lines [by Yeats] which centre on his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees.’ That Nomen est omen becomes one of the subplots of the argument. In Frost’s ‘The Mountain’, for example, we are to take it that ‘The mountain held the town in a shadow’ contains a reference to the name Robert Lee Frost, since you could also render it ‘The town was in the lee of the mountain’, while in ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, ‘woods’ recalls ‘forest’ which is a near anagram of Frost. And not just Frost: Marianne Moore is at it too who, in the word ‘fen’ in

If you will tell my why the fen
appears impossible, I then
will tell you why I think that I
can get across it if I try

is really referring ‘to the reading of her own name as “marsh”, the second sense in which it appears in the OED...’

There’s an illuminating Muldoon moment in the Moore essay: Moore he says, may be worrying that she’s too Moorish ( in the Moors of Spain sense) and then he remembers reading in the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica that ‘ the greatest peculiarity in Moorish architecture is the horse-shoe arch’ and then he comments on his own methodology:

Now, I know that this kind of reading may sometimes seem a little fritillarian (in the dicey sense which underlies both the butterfly and the flower so familiar to this audience), perhaps a little fiddle-headed, but what can I do? I’m sitting at a desk I acquired from the gentleman who looks after surplus furniture at Princeton. His name is Sam Formica. On the desk are two books. One is The Botany of Desire : A Plant’s-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan. The other is Archie G. Walls’s Geometry and Architecture in Islamic Jerusalem.

This sums up the dizzying parade of serendipity that characterises this book and make it a somewhat exhausting read. The sense of the connectedness of texts may be what drives the book but it takes a particular cast of mind to pursue and relish some of these connections which are imagined, intuited, guessed at since they mostly cannot be proven. In his lively discussion of Ted Hughes’ ‘The Literary Life’, which remembers a visit by Hughes and Plath to Marianne Moore in her Brooklyn eyrie, the occurrence of ‘stair’ and ‘nest’ in the opening lines

We climbed Marianne Moore’s narrow stair
To her bower-bird bric-à-brac nest, in Brooklyn

sends him both to Philip Larkin’s ‘The Less Deceived’ (‘...stumbling up the breathless stair/To burst into fulfillment’s desolate attic’) and the stare’s nest in Yeats’ ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’.

Muldoon has extraordinarily highly developed auditory antennae which make him especially alert to the resonance of words, and this coupled with an absorption in the tradition of poetry makes it second nature for him to pursue a word back through its occurrence in other poems – almost as if poetry were an unending series of echoes and poets locked into a sonic cycle that makes every lexical choice seem somehow predetermined. In Muldoon’s sense of it, poems live in perpetual relation to other poems. There’s an interesting moment in the piece on Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘12 O’Clock News’ where he follows an Anglepoise lamp from Bishop to Derek Mahon’s ‘The Globe in North Carolina’, and on to Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children before returning to another version of the lamp in a Bishop short story. Again the trigger for this journey is verbal: it’s the occurrence of ‘poise’ in Mahon’s poem which leads him to Anglepoise. The rub of the word before the rub of the lamp, or the rub of the word as the rub of the lamp.

Mahon and Heaney both appear in this essay in terms of their indebtedness to Bishop. Since all poems echo other poems, it follows that all poets are indebted to other poets and much of Muldoon’s labours are directed at the forensic detection of influence. It’s as if the anxiety of influence had mutated into a near-pathological celebration of influence, or a sense that poems can only really function as the subjects of influence. But ultimately it’s reductive; you end up with a sense of poetry as a closed circle, an area of pure text, a hall of mirrors and echoes. Muldoon’s susceptibility to sound, to seeing patterns and structures of connectedness is in the end too definitively his own to be truly releasing for the reader.

The inter relatedness of all poems is most consciously taken up in the discussion of Montale’s ‘ Eel’, or more specifically, Robert Lowell’s translation of it, which is very much not the same thing. Before analysing and comparing a series of translations of this poem, Muldoon spends a good deal of time demonstrating the radical influence of Lowell’s version on Seamus Heaney. Lowell’s piling up of adjectives in a line like ‘where my carved name quivers,/happy, humble, defeated..’ is echoed in Heaney’s adjectival triadism in ‘lost, unhappy and at home’ and likewise the ‘black lace balcony’ in the second section of ‘The Eel’ – which, as Muldoon points out, is actually another poem Lowell mistook for a continuation of the poem – directly influences the ‘black plunge-line nightdress’ in ‘The Skunk’, the love poem ‘which, as we know, is already indebted to Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’. The problem is that this kind of criticism, for all the certainty with which it is presented, is just as likely to be a mile wide of the mark as it is to hit home. Seamus Heaney may indeed have been pushed around by these lines until he could take no more, but then again he may not have been. The black nightdress may simply have been a black nightdress, rather than a remembered Lowellism. Sometimes you can feel that Muldoon is over-addicted to the drunkenness of things being similar. He quotes these lines from an essay on translation by Octavio Paz

On the one hand, the world is presented to us as a collection of similarities; on the other, as a growing heap of texts, each slightly different from the one that came before it: translations of translations of translations.

It is certainly true that for Muldoon awareness of tradition is stitched into his sensibility, and both criticism and poetry are written within this awareness and often in conscious competition with his forebears; the work pursues a constant dialogue with Seamus Heaney, for instance, and you might wonder how persistent this thread would be if Heaney’s shadow were a little shorter in terms of geography and fame.

Another of the consistent interests in this book is his concern with how the ‘I’ of the poems relates to the actual biographical person, the degree to which the voice is the authentic bearer of news of the self, or is necessarily fictionalised, transformed by the act of writing. Self transformation, self disguise, the multiple dispositions of the self are engines of Muldoon’s poetry, and this is why a figure like Fernando Pessoa, and the heteronyms to whom he allocated his work, is important: ‘That Pessoa wrote in the guise or semblance of so many poets raises that much broader question about the extent to which the personality of any single poet may be thought of as being coterminous with his or her poems. . .’

Pessoa, in these kinds of discussions, can often seem more idea than poet: a handy exemplar of self-division, but he’s really too complex, too sui generis to be representative of anything, and the heteronyms are not so much clinically differentiated selves as aspects of the one unstable, xx Pessoa self. What he wrote under his own name or in the guise of a ‘semi-heternoym’ like Bernardo Soares are all fictions of instabilty, all manifestations of ‘the wound-up little train’ of the heart. In a letter in 1935 Pessoa explains that Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis and Bernardo Soares all proceed from different states of mind

How do I write in the name of these three? Caeiro, through sheer and unexpected inspiration, without knowing or even suspecting that I’m going to write in his name. Ricardo Reis, after an abstract meditation which suddenly takes concrete shape in an ode. Campos, when I feel a sudden impulse to write and don’t know what. (My semi-heteronym, who in many ways resembles Álvaro de Campos, always appears when I’m sleepy or drowsy, so that my qualities of inhibition and rational thought are suspended...
(To Adolfo Casais Monteiro – 13 January 1935, Zenith, 474)

In the same letter Pessoa also differentiates between a heteronym and a semi-heteronym. Bernardo Soares is a semi-heteronym ‘because his personality, though not my own, doesn’t differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it.’

Pessoas’s heteronyms are an extreme version of what all poets do, and the greatest fiction of all is surely the notion that there is a single stable ‘I’ underlying anything written. ‘To fake is to know oneself’ (Fingir-se é conhecer-se), Pessoa wrote on another occasion, and that’s surely what is intended in the opening lines of ‘Autopsychography’, the poem which Muldoon discusses, given here in the translation by Edward Honig and Susan M. Brown

The poet is a faker. He
Fakes it so completely,
He even fakes he's suffering
The pain he's really feeling.

And those of us who read his writing
Fully feel while reading
Not that pain of his that's double,
But one completely fictional.

So on its tracks goes round and round,
To entertain the reason,
That wound-up little train
We call the heart of man.

Muldoon is actually less interested in Pessoa’s self-divisions than he is in applying his associative procedure to individual words, almost as if Portuguese and English inhabited the same linguistic continuum. Referring to the Portuguese text of the last quatrain of ‘Autopsychography’

E assim nas calhas de roda
Gira, a entreter a razão,
Esse comboio de corda
Que se chama coração.

Muldoon observes:

The use of the word gira at the pivotal point of the second line is a telling one, surely, since the first version of Yeats’s A Vision had been published in 1927, and would have been read enthusiastically by an occultist like Pessoa, particularly one with an interest in the “gyres” of history, in the automatic writing of Georgie Hyde-Lees, in Yeats’s theory of the mask.

How likely is it that the use of the perfectly commonplace Portuguese verb girar (to turn, rotate) was determined by a recherché word like ‘gyre’ in English? Muldoon seems to be applying the sonic values of English to Portuguese and extrapolating from that, but this is Pessoa viewed from outside, through the necessarily falsifying microscope of another language, in which, again, cara (face) seems conclusively related to Alberto Caeiro, ‘whose name also conjured up carneiro meaning both “sheep”. . . and “burial niche”. None of these lexical speculations tell us anything of real interest about the poetry. The forensic analysis of versions of Montale or Marina Tsvetayeva are too too much caught up in the webs of English language traditions to bring us close to the core of those poets.

In the end I came away from this book admiring its idiosyncratic brilliance but longing for the wider view; longing to escape from the associative labyrinth, from words, which may be an odd thing to say. Maybe what I’m really saying is that for me the close-up view can actually be distorting – and can only really work in conjunction with the wide angle shot of the work as a whole.

Strokestown Poetry Festival

2007-04-20T17:14:00.000+01:00

Ireland’s friendliest poetry festival will again animate the small, attractive town of Strokestown, Co Roscommon this May Bank Holiday Weekend. I suppose I would say that, since I'm this year's Director. Packed into three intense days, the festival mixes well known with emerging poets, features readings in English, Irish and Scottish Gaelic from the poets shortlisted for the Strokestown Poetry Prizes, as well as including satiric verse and a pub poetry competition. This year’s guest readers include founder and editorial director of Carcanet Press, Michael Schmidt, who will read from his new book, The Resurrection of the Body, and another poet-publisher, Pat Boran, director of Dedalus Press and a well known poet and broadcaster. Audiences will also have a chance to hear Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Eva Bourke, Gerry Muphy, Moya Cannon ,Scottish Gaelic poet Meg Bateman and current Galway Writer in Residence Michael O’Loughlin. The acclaimed Gaelic Hit Factory with poet Louis de Paor and singer-songwriter John Spillane will also be appearing at this year’s festival, and local Strokestown man Tommy Murray will entertain audiences with a selection of favourite popular poems, in what has become a traditional event at the festival.

Among the highlights of the festival are the announcement of the Prizes: the Duais Cholmcille, sponsored by Colmcille, the organisation that promotes links between Gaelic Ireland and Scotland and the Strokestown International Poetry Prize. Both of these competitions offer prizes of €4,000, €2,000 and €1,000. The shortlisted poems, by poets from around the world, and all the festival details are available on the website.

The brown paper bags stuffed with backhanders of €500, €200 and €100 are waiting for the authors of the wittiest political or topical satires who will read their work at one of the most popular events of the weekend. This year’s judge is John Waters, who shortly after the festival will be travelling to Helsinki to see how his song fares in the Eurovision Song Contest.

John Riley

2007-03-17T20:44:00.001Z

John Riley’s early death — he was murdered by two muggers at the age of forty-one — combined with a history of publication by small presses and a talent that doesn’t lend itself to easy categorisation have tended to keep his work on the margins, admired by the few but generally unknown. This is a pity, because Riley was one of the finest poets of his generation. In his lifetime he published three collections, Ancient and Modern with Grosseteste Press, which he founded with Tim Longville in 1966, What Reason Was, and That is Today, published by Pig Press in 1978, the year of his death. The now out of print Collected Works (Grosseteste Press) came out in 1980. Carcanet published his Selected Poems, edited by Michael Grant, in 1995.

I had always been impressed by the few poems I came across in anthologies like A Various Art, edited by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville. The impression I had of an extraordinarily gifted poet was borne out by the Selected Poems. I first came across this in The Secret Bookshop in Wicklow Street and owned it for about an hour before I left it somewhere. I was so taken with the poems I had scanned in the shop that I spent a forlorn couple of hours retracing my steps in an effort to find it. Some time later I wrote to Carcanet, who informed me that all copies of the poems had perished in the IRA bomb explosion. A little while after that a small parcel from Manchester arrived in my letterbox; a copy had turned up, slightly damaged, and they had sent it on free of charge.

What I like about Riley’s work is a wonderful musical clarity, a rhetoric which is at once backward-looking, tradition-nurtured, clearly English and at the same time distinctly modern, and the restless, searching intelligence that informs every line. That restlessness is evident in the formal experimentation that characterises the poems; each volume is riskier than the preceding, the poems more formally adventurous but always direct and always susceptible to the physical, the sensual, the immediate, the “great excitement among footnotes/away from the iron text”.

A good part of Riley’s manner stems from a talent that seems often divided against itself, that resists even as it embraces the lyric consolations. The love poems, and there are a lot of these, show this clearly. In fact his adoption of the love lyric as habitual means of expression also marks him out both from the ironies of the Movement style and its successors, and from the kind of distancing strategies of the Cambridge school with which he’s associated and in whose anthologies he appears. What I also like is the sense of double focus; in any poem there is the attention to the specific occasion but also where that intersects with the wider reality. He uses the lyric as a probe, as in this fragment from a poem whose title announces two large ambitions, at least one of which has been abandoned:

A stillness encompassing movement.
With enormous beauty still to answer to.

Blackness seeps through the closed door, douses the lamp.
It is a longing for the same world, and a different world.

(‘The World Itself, the Long Poem Foundered’)

The poem that first drew me to John Riley was ‘Second Fragment’, which I read in A Various Art. What attracted me, apart from the obvious formal grace, was the subtle way the poem survives its two opposing impulses, one lyric and celebratory, reaching for a kind of primal pastoral language, the other a sharp undercutting of that impulse, reaching for blunt instruments to disrupt the flow and a neutral, business-like phrasing.

Second Fragment

I put out the light and listen to the rain
Example taken from history— she loved

The rain: but that won’t do for she loves it still
And perhaps awake as I she lies at home

And listens to the rain that once beat on Rome
Or fell gently on the Galilean hills

This time of year is so beautiful
One can almost abandon oneself to it

It is the indifference of believers
That dismays, not the existence of others

We renew ourselves completely how often —
Daily we slit dumb throats and watch the blood run

I put out the light and listened to the rain
Hear how it falls: I wonder if love falls so

This poem ranges with a kind of calm restlessness from the specifics of its occasion across time, moods and subjects — love, faith, indifference, sacrifice, renewal, love again — yet there is a remarkable inevitability about the poem’s progress through its own disjunctions that is achieved by the delicate movement of the lines. A kind of impatience enters the poem in the second line and immediately interrupts the lyric poise of ‘I put out the light and listen to the rain’, a memory, abruptly recalled and brusquely set forth, of an absent lover. But the poem at this point resists the impulse to elegise or memorialise, though it makes effective capital out of the refusal. Something starts to happen in the poem after the double break between the second and third lines, the stop after ‘rain’ and the subsequent correction of the third line. The poem henceforth is a tug of war between its opposing modes, between

for she loves it still
And perhaps awake as I she lies at home

And listens to the rain that once beat on Rome
Or fell gently on the Galilean hills

and

This time of year is so beautiful
One can almost abandon oneself to it

It is the indifference of believers
That dismays, not the existence of others

or between ‘fall’, ‘fell gently’, ‘still’, the repeated ‘rain’ and the ‘dumb throats’ and the blood; or, again, between the ‘one’ that can almost abandon himself and the ‘I’ that begins and ends the poem. In fourteen lines the poets manages four personal pronouns: ‘I’, ‘she’, ‘we’, ‘one’ , five if we count the implied you (singular or plural) who is addressed in ‘Hear how it falls’.

The early poems are full of this play between the instinctive and the ratiocinative, the lyric and the counter-lyric, the ancient and the modern, to use the terms of the title of the first collection. In a sense, Riley is able to have the best of all possible worlds — the instrument he chooses can play all the old tunes, but can also produce a critical counterpoint. Argument and music shore each other up.

Ancient and Modern

Away from the house the snow falls slanting,
And trees almost in leaf in yesterday's sun
Put on today an elegant new shape,
A complex, streamlined growth. Did you ever see

The maidenhair (some few survive), a pre-
Historic tree? Limpid leaf, irregularity,
A touching intent to grow come what may
With perhaps insifficient means: a pleasure

To look on. As who shall see in winter leisure
Compassionate history take lucid measure
Of our too-obvious nourishment of hate,
And love that can't pass for understanding.

This is a poetry determined to play the traditional keyboard, to write from inside the tradition; in a sense it's anonymous, the lines could have been written by any number of poets.The following lines, from ‘This Time of Year’, strike me as more original, closer to the confidence of ‘Second Fragment’:

I stop to admire
The sky through an arch of branches
And thinking to go higher
Am caught in this gesture of pleasure

Appreciate the sagging hayrick
Its antiquated cottage form
Destined to keep cattle warm
Through winter

How much deeper must the days bite yet
There is a region where it doesn't matter
In the receding sky
Our gestures point to it

The poems have an immediate surface attractiveness that pulls the reader in. Sometimes, as in ‘Love Poem’, it’s an arresting sense of phrase and a sense of serious play. It's a poetry you want to say aloud:

Why shouldn't men blossom in the wilderness?
Hermits of course have their delights: they die

From weariness, renouncing every world.
This other death of ours need too much music —

Can you come out to play coming out
You've always been reluctant towards and I

Don't think too highly of myself for asking you. . .

If I had to pick a single poem with which to be consigned to the wilderness it would be ‘Poem’ (for Rilke in Switzerland) both for what it says and the sound it makes.

Poem
for Rilke in Switzerland

I have brought it to my heart to be a still point
Of praise for the powers which move towards me as I
To them, through the dimensions a tree opens up,

Or a window, or a mirror. Creatures fell
Silent, then returned my stare.
Or a window, or a mirror. The shock of re-

Turning to myself after a long journey,
With music, has made me cry, cry out — angels
And history through the heart's attention grow transparent.

Few poems could sustain a closing line like this, but I think Riley's rhetoric allows it.

Thomas Kinsella’s Dublins

2007-03-15T18:19:00.000Z

There are established personal places
that receive our lives’ heat
and adapt in their mass, like stone.

(Thomas Kinsella, from ‘Personal Places’)

It’s a critical commonplace that Irish writers are wedded to place, that their imaginations are awakened by the lure of specific territories: think of Joyce’s Dublin or Patrick MacCabe’s small town Ireland. Or think how Seamus Heaney’s recent District and Circle circles and remaps terrain familiar from forty years of previous work. Or again, how Roy Fisher’s poems grow out of Birmingham. ‘Birmingham’s what I think with,’ he once said, and it’s true of many poets that their places are part of their thinking apparatus, their essential imaginative equipment. It would be impossible to even think of Kavanagh without thinking of the places that were his subject. Sligo, Iniskeen, Barrytown, Raglan Road are planted squarely on the Irish literary map along with Eccles St and the Martello tower in Sandycove, yet not every writer uses place this overtly or identifiably – for some place is an underground stream pulsing deeply but mysteriously and only occasionally breaking the surface to course across the social, political and civic. For poets place is always as much a mindscape as it is a landscape.

Thomas Kinsella, whose own work is itself like an underground stream running out of sight of contemporary poetry, is like this. There are few bus tours to the area from Bow Lane to Basin Lane where he grew up and where so much of his work is set. Even if it is within sight of the Brewery, his Dublin will sell few beers, and doesn’t enter the Ireland that gets onto tea-towels or aeroplane headrests. And indeed, from the outset of his career he was seen as a poet who somehow transcended place, as if he were too magisterial for the mortar of the real. For me part of the thrill of the closing lines of ‘Baggot Street Deserta’, ‘My quarter-inch of cigarette/Goes flaring down to Baggot Street’ may have come from the fact that I could picture that trajectory, that I had been in Baggot Street and stubbed out cigarettes on the pavement, but for John Jordan in an early review there was ‘little or nothing in his verse (‘Baggot Street Deserta’ could as well be ‘King’s Road Deserta’ ) to suggest involvement with the city.’ This is both true and not true; it’s true in the sense that there is no overt memorialising of the city in the work, no comforting topographical identification, no sense of the city as city in the epic sense of Joyce’s Dublin, but it misses the poet’s intense and multi-faceted relationship with several Dublins: the city of his childhood with its narrow streets and dark yards; the Georgian city of his young adulthood, and the mangled boom-town with its ‘Invisible speculators, urinal architects,/and the Corporation flourishing their documents/in potent compliant dance...’

Had Kinsella been a different kind of poet and written more directly about his Dublins, he might have mapped them onto our consciousness. But by the time he turned his imagination on his city in earnest, his style had shifted from the crystalline clarities of his earlier work to a suggestive indirection, as he began to explore his own origins; many of the poems in the volume which marks a turning point in his career, New Poems 1973, are extraordinarily detailed recollections of his childhood, with a deliberate troubled intensity of focus that slows time down and creates a series of friezes as in ‘A Hand of Solo’, ‘Ancestor’, ‘Tear’ or ‘Hen Woman’

There was a tiny movement at my feet,
tiny and mechanical; I looked down.
A beetle like a bronze leaf
was inching across the cement...

there is no end to that which,
not understood, may yet be noted
and hoarded in the imagination. . .

These and later poems of dawning consciousness and ‘blood and family’ and were both preternaturally clear in their sharply focused attention on details of places and people and at the same time slightly blurred, their back stories withheld, their architectonics complicated. To read them is to be plunged without preamble or introduction into their immediate, urgent world. ‘I was going to say something/and stopped.’ (‘Ancestor’)

or

I was sent in to see her.
A fringe of jet drops
chattered at my ear
as I went in through the hangings.

I was swallowed in chambery dusk...

They’re also strangely self-sufficient – they confound the usual expectation of resolution and closure and are open-ended, the dynamic intensely personal. What stops them from sinking into unmediated privacy is the force of their realisation as verbal objects. The paradox of Kinsella’s work is that it often uses very personal material with the flinty objectivity of a Tribunal report. It is part of the process to which the poet subjects his material in order to extract the essentials. The challenge for readers as they follow the poet on his journey to the interior is to learn how to read a poet who resists the usual comforts. Eamon Grennan has said his poems must be experienced rather than understood, and Dennis O’Driscoll once likened reading him to adjusting to the dark in a cinema: ‘you do gradually become accustomed to the kind of atmosphere and the kind of light that you’re working in.’

Our sense of Kinsella, and Kinsella’s Dublin, is greatly amplified by a new book, Thomas Kinsella: A Dublin Documentary, published by O’Brien Press, which presents twenty key Kinsella poems alongside comments, family photographs, prints and other material. The book places Kinsella solidly in his Dublin context and charts the growth of his self-awareness as man and poet. Much of what would have been inferred about the life is now explicit. It fills in gaps, names names: the Kinsellas and the Casserlys and their lives in Inchicore and Kilmainham, a brief spell in Manchester and the family’s return to a Dublin ‘of displacement and unemployment, and short stays in strange houses’. It fleshes out the gallery of strong, definite characters that people the poems: the ‘Boss’ Casserly, Grandfather Kinsella the repairer of shoes and their formidable wives, both of whom ran small shops in their houses:

It was in a world dominated by these people that I remember many things of importance happening to me for the first time. And it is in their world that I came to terms with these things as best I could, and later set my attempts at understanding.

A great deal of Kinsella’s poetic energy still streams from these places and people and that growing self-awareness. Many familiar poems now appear accompanied by family photographs or laconic comments, such as the following after ‘Hen Woman’ : ‘A scene ridiculous in its content, but of early awareness of self and process: of details insisting on their survival, regardless of any immediate significance’. ‘All of these poems,’ he reminds us after ‘38 Phoenix Street’, ‘whatever their differences, have a feature in common: a tendency to look inward for material – into family or self.’

Kinsella’s work in the Land Commission and later the Department of Finance at a time of rapid economic expansion gave another dimension to his work but also further reinforced his steely methodology as a poet. His days began with a walk into Government Buildings and a view of the vista that would give his own Peppercanister Press its name when he began issuing his work in carefully worked sequences, applying the same thoroughgoing control to the process of publication as he applied to the material itself. The Department helped him, he says here, ‘towards viewing things directly. Staying with the relevant data, and transmitting them complete.’

The relevant data, for Kinsella, include the full span of human experience and the huge variety of response the human spirit and psyche has evolved to process it. This means that you can never separate the public from the private Kinsella, you can’t say here is the Dublin of personal memory and here is the public entity, or here is the public and here the private voice. The nature of his pursuit is to find a way of writing which incorporates all of these and moves, often disconcertingly, from one to the other, from Robert Emmet on the scaffold to a Malton print of Thomas St in 1792 and on to the murmur of personal recollection.

The bus tours may not be about to start, but Thomas Kinsella here gives us a valuable key to understanding some of the ‘established personal places’ that continue to absorb and radiate his imagination’s heat.

With acknowledgements to The Irish Times, where this piece first appeared

Hugo Claus

2007-03-08T18:38:00.000Z

Interesting piece by J.M Coetzee in the Guardian on the Flemish writer Hugo Claus. Claus is an extraordinarily prolific novelist and playwright as well as a poet who who has published over 1300 pages of poetry. The Guardian also reprints 'Ten ways of Looking at PB Shelley', one of the poems which Coetzee translated in Landscape with Rowers - An Anthology of Dutch Poetry which came out a couple of years ago. Some of Claus's work is also featured on Poetry International's site here.
A brief review of Greetings can be found at the complete-review.

Selective translations of poetry

Selected poems, 1953-1973. Portree : Aquila Poetry, 1986.
The sign of the hamster. Leuven : Leuvense Schrijversaktie (European Series 65), 1986.
Greetings - Selected poems. New York: Harcourt Brace, 2005.
Landscape with Rowers - Anthology of Dutch Poetry. Edited and translated by J.M. Coetzee. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

In the graveyard

2007-03-03T18:36:00.000Z

I'm putting this up for a couple of weeks as people have been looking for it. It seems to be on the list for a poetry speaking competition. The book can be tricky to get outside Dublin (though you can try Gallery Press if you want to feel virtuous and buy a copy). Just don't forget, if you win the competition you'll have to send me a large amount of money.

In the graveyard

They lived and died in the same place.
The same names occurring, same big skies above.
This close, they must move still in their cottages
and walk their fields, or stand now watching
the mountains purpling in the last sun
and hear the sea turning onto the slope of the beach
its calm, insistent weight. The air’s crowded with them
as they move and watch and listen, no-one
having told them otherwise. And if
absentmindedly they drift back here
to this silent field, they’ll find
the gate locked before them and their names
unreadable on the stones. They’ll walk back towards the village
and climb into their beds, whatever was theirs still theirs.

from Nonetheless, Gallery Press, 2004.

The Overgrown Path

2007-02-23T11:36:00.000Z

Song

Even asleep, you’re everywhere.
You fall through the house,
right down to the small room
where I sit staring at the screen.
Your head rests on a blinking cursor,
there’s a menu for your toes,

you’ve somehow
drifted into the CD drive
and come out as Janacek,
the overgrown path, the barn owl
lifting its wings. You lurk behind my eyes
and broadcast from my bones

but even miles away, you’re on my tongue,
you’re banging down the door.
Sometimes I wake in dread
that you might have lifted off
like some bright machine
or vanished music, the owl lurking

in the dangerous dark outside.
What if I couldn’t hear you?
As if there were anywhere now
out of reach, as if,
however late it was, or far
I wouldn’t hear you breathing

like a wing-beat in the blood,
a song passed from bone to bone. . .

Poetry Ireland Review 88

2007-02-23T11:10:00.000Z

I have been working on the latest issue of Poetry Ireland Review, no 89, and realised I neglected to give the current issue a mention here, so here goes. Issue 88 has new poems by Kit Fryatt, Paul Batchelor, Liam Ó Muirthile, George Szirtes, Louis de Paor and many others. There’s a Dutch language feature with poems by Rutger Kopland, Dirk van Bastelaere, Hans Faverey and Cees Nooteboom. Eamon Grennan is interviewed by Catherine Phil McCarthy and reviews include David Wheatley on Roy Fisher; Peter Pegnall on Tony Harrison and Michael Foley; Maurice Harmon on Anthony Cronin; Richard Tillinghast on Greg Delanty; Chris Preddle on Paul Muldoon; Maria Johnston on Michael Longley and Peter Robinson on The Bloodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations.

The Orpheus File

2007-02-23T10:45:00.000Z

Some links on Don Paterson's Orpheus (Faber, 2006)

'Translation shows us how poetry works - and reminds us why it matters' Don Paterson's New Stateman piece on translating the Sonnets to Orpheus

Interview with Don Paterson in The Guardian

Adam Philips on Don Paterson's Orpheus in The Guardian

Jeremy Noel-Tod's Telegraph review

Translations of The Sonnets to Orpheus by Howard A. Landman along with links to other translations.

This is from Stephen Cohn's Carcanet Press version

Don't depend on it, but here's the Wikipedia entry on Rilke. Some good links.

Pessoa: The Exhausting Electric Trolley Car

2007-01-18T20:39:00.000Z

All night I have dreamt of tobacco,
of a world filled with smoke
and governed by tobacconists.
I work my way back to you
through generations of cigarettes

rollups tailormades filtered, unfiltered
fat and thin, menthol and acrid
some coloured and some with cards, pictures
a world of dead stars and football players
a world all lips and fingers

I light my way to a dark café
the smoke from my own cigarette ending
in the smoke that billows above your head
that is your life, inhaled then with a flourish
expelled, to entertain the air, to go nowhere.

Tobacco-haunted I wander
through rooms rank with the odour...

For some years now I have been trying on and off to write a poem for and about Álvaro de Campos, trying for lines that would get at the essence of this elusive personality and the body of work created out of it; lines that might also be spoken by a near relative of de Campos, that would be, in the ancient tradition of clumsy homage, approximations of the poet himself, mimetic alignments with his spirit. De Campos is a loose, expansive poet, described by himself as a Whitman with a Greek poet inside. He studied mechanical and then naval engineering in Glasgow, but gave it up. He was taught Latin by his uncle, a priest. He was never seen without a monocle. He wrote an energetic poetry about home, homelessness, placelessness, restlessness, selflessness, in the sense of having no definite self. ‘I’d like to have strong convictions and money’1 he says in ‘Opium Eater’, but ‘I’ve no definite character whatever’. He sees himself as ‘a continual dialogue’, a ‘solemn investigator of useless things’. He likes to strike poses of fin de siècle ennui:

I belong to a type of Portuguese
Who since discovering India
Has been unemployed. Death’s a certainty.
I’ve thought about this a great deal.

The condition described in de Campos’s poems is of a generous lyric intelligence energised by the lack of precisely those qualities we usually expect from a poet. He apprehends the world but he lets it wash over him without any attempt to wreak order on it. He is a havoc of negative capability. ‘Nothing holds me to anything./I want fifty things at once’ he half laments, half boasts in ‘Lisbon Revisited’, and he goes on to construct his aesthetic out of nothing, and out of undifferentiated and multidirectional longing. Not even dreams supply conviction : ‘Even my dreams felt false as I dreamed them’. His favourite action is inaction: what he does best is smoke cigarettes, and tobacco has a privileged place in his image stock. Nunca fiz mais do que fumar a vida (I have never done anything but smoke life away). The cigarette is oblivion and deliciously savoured wastefulness, ‘the freedom from all speculation’. Self-knowledge begins for de Campos in self-extinction:

I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist.
I’m the space between what I’d like to be and what others made of me.
Or half that space, because there’s life there too...
So that’s what I finally am...
Turn off the light, close the door, stop shuffling your slippers out there in the
hall.
Just let me be at ease and all by myself in my room.
It’s a cheap world.

Álvaro de Campos, the breezy, self-extinguishing Portuguese modernist walking his thin line somewhere between Whitman and Surrealism, has a particular fascination for me because, of course, he doesn’t exist. Or does he? Certainly not in the sense that we here do, with our blobs of fleshly apparatus. He is one of the heteronyms of the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, along with Ricardo Reis and Alberto Caeiro. Pessoa’s creation of these entirely distinctive poets, each engaging with the other’s work so that collectively they amount in effect to a literary movement, is one of the great leaps of the modern poetic imagination, and it perfectly dramatises one of the central dilemmas of poetry from the latter decades of the nineteenth century through the fraught ground of modernism to our own day.

That dilemma might be summed up as an increasing uncertainty about an increasingly complex set of responses to the positioning of the ‘I’ in poetry: the dissolution of the Romantic sense of self into a room full of competing selves. Rimbaud’s ‘ ‘Je’ est un autre’ is the first step on the journey that leads to the linked but separate achievements of the four imaginary Portuguese poets, of which Pessoa himself must be counted one. To say that the ‘I’ is other is to recognise the necessary fictionality of the writing persona, to define the shift from an empirical to a poetic self that takes place as soon as anyone sits down to write a poem. The fact that a great deal of poetry acts as if that shift were not there shouldn’t persuade us that there is such a thing as an innocent primal empirical self moving seamlessly from the lived life to the written life. Yet much of the most exciting, the most genuinely engaging poetry of our century proceeds from a recognition and even embracing of the fluid, dissolving self. Part of what I want to argue in this essay is that in many respects and for a variety of reasons we are witnessing a return to a more limitingly personalised concept of what it is to be a poet and that many poets are no longer interested in taking the risk of forgetting who they are.

‘To pretend is to know oneself’ Pessoa said, and his whole life was spent in a trance of pretence. Self-extinction and self-creation were the two parallel drives which impelled him, as they did the heteronyms. For Pessoa, in fact self-extinction and self-creation were one and the same thing. He created his first heteronym at the age of six, the Chevalier de Pas, ‘from whom I wrote letters to myself’. The grammar of that phrase suggests the degree to which self division was instinctive to Pessoa. The fact that the only books published in his lifetime were of his English poems points up another kind of division — Pessoa was taken to Durban as a child and educated at an English-speaking school. Poetically he was a latecomer to his own language.

I want to go back to the day Pessoa called ‘the triumphant day of {his} life.’ It was the 8th of March, 1914 and after some attempts at creating a complicated bucolic poet he walked over to a high desk and wrote, standing up,

some thirty poems, one after another, in a kind of ecstasy, the nature of which I am unable to define. It was the triumphant day of my life, and never will I have another like it. I began with the title, The Keeper of Sheep. What followed was the appearance of someone in me whom I named, from then on, Alberto Caeiro. Forgive me the absurdity of the sentence: In me there appeared my master.2

Pessoa describes a process which is as remarkable for the order in which the events took place as for the events themselves. Once he had created Alberto Caeiro he immediately wrote the six poems of the sequence ‘Oblique Rain’ by Fernando Pessoa. ‘It was the return of Fernando Pessoa/ Alberto Caeiro to Fernando Pessoa himself. Or better, it was the reaction of Fernando Pessoa against his nonexistence as Alberto Caeiro.’ It took an act of creative self-obliteration to release the entity that was the poet Fernando Pessoa, to present him so completely with the possibility of his own extinction that he could either vanish from himself or struggle to leave his own imprint on the page. What Pessoa describes here is a reversal of the order we might expect: of the poet’s inventions taking flight from an established poetic presence. It is unusual to witness the invention preceding the self-creation; it is unusual to watch, as we watch Pessoa here, a poet go to the outer reach of the territories within which the self exists, and recognises its own existence, and then return intact, as, remarkably, his own disciple.

What are the implications of that reversal? What does it tell us about the way in which the poetic imagination functions? It should at least re-alert us to the way in which the writing of a poem can proceed from the same sort of creative fracture that opens up a work of fiction, and remind us that the same multi-levelled response caused in us by the interplay of narrator, characters and language is available to us when we encounter whatever self is projected in the lines of a poem. It should also, perhaps, make us wary of accepting at face value even — or particularly — the most seemingly transparent ‘I’. Not every poet possesses the set of emotional and psychological imperatives that drove Pessoa to his particular self subdivision. Nor does every poet seek to build an aesthetic from a primal awareness of the multiplicity of possible selves out of which, either individually or simultaneously, contrapuntally, a poem might be written. It might also be said, to shift the argument sideways a little, that Pessoa’s foregrounding of the whole question of self in poetry accords with a European or at any rate a non-anglophone fluidity of approach. If it is hard to imagine Pessoa in English, as I think it is — and discarding for a moment the fact that Pessoa actually began as a poet in English — part of that difficulty of imagination is that English as a language, and more precisely as a literary language, comes freighted with a level of concreteness, and specificity that impinges on the way in which the poet exists in the world.

Let me attempt to clarify this by recourse to those old allies of sloth, simplification and generalisation. Let us imagine, Pessoa-like, two prototypical poets, one anglophone and one a composite European. Frederick Steel and Jorge Bonacordia have met at an international poetry conference and, in an idle moment, have been scanning each other’s work. Frederick is bothered by what he sees as the unaccountable abstraction of Jorge’s poems. It never seems to be quite clear what is going on, or who is being addressed. The visible world seems to be very skeletally embodied in these lines. If there is an undifferentiated tree, or bird or rock that’s about as concrete as it gets. If something specific and recognisable does appear, a carob-tree, a salamander climbing up a wall, it seems to function in an altogether different manner and to engage the poet’s consciousness at a level as subliminal as it is unparaphrasable. Jorge for his part is bemused by the glutinous mass of material information which Frederick Steel’s poems expect him to digest. Several kinds of tree and species of insect are named and evoked in alarming detail. The poems seem to be structured around things that have happened to the poet and his immediate family or to relate feelings and thoughts by means of stories told to allow the poet to reveal himself to us. Jorge feels as if someone has grabbed the lapel of his jacket and is threatening to stay until he has dredged up every last detail of his biography, sprinkled with what he thinks these details mean in the scheme of things. They consider each other blankly from across the table. They plot escape.

This is a cartoon, though after I drew it I came upon an interview with the English poet Stephen Romer where he referred to what he called ‘the post-Mallarméan reflexiveness and theory’ which further differentiates (and alienates) contemporary French poetry from its English counterpart, and remembered a Cambridge Poetry Festival where a French poet declared that an English poet’s poem about a garden was not a poem at all ‘because it didn’t discuss itself enough’.3 I’m tempted back into my own cartoon every time I read a book of poems in English that depends on my receptiveness to the projection of the single persona of the poet’s self and the reliance on a treasure trove of largely unmediated personal information.

Or again when the poet and his/her audience are locked in a relationship that expects the poet to articulate on behalf of some larger societal set of aspirations, to be a messenger or vates. For it is in fact a short leap from the security of the individual self plunged in a self renewing circle of personal concern to the kind of self certainty that can allow a poet to assume a role of public iteration, no matter how complex the relationship between poet and audience. It does seem that anglophone poets are more likely to blur the distinction between the poetic and empirical self and be subject to a set of audience expectations that also depend on that blurring. Anyone who has opened a magazine and seen, for instance, an Irish poet castigated for failing to deal with ‘the situation’ or an English poet because he or she has, regrettably, not experienced an acceptable level of oppression, poverty, censorship and produced a body of work which satisfies the liberal need for moral applause as much as it asserts human decencies, knows the route where that kind of blurring all too often leads. For again, it isn’t a big step from the idea of a poet as a clearly identifiable and pinnable-down entity to a reflexive prescriptiveness of the audience or critic.

Again, this is why most of our discussion of poetry take place on a thematic plane, where it is the poet’s quantifiable ideas and feelings which matter rather than the manner of their expression. On the other hand, to encounter poetry from outside this tradition is to realise the many different modes in which the poetic consciousness can operate. Writing on René Char, Yves Bonnefoy, Henri Michaux and Philippe Jaccotet—translations of whom have recently become available in dual-language editions published by Bloodaxe — Malcolm Bowie commented that all four are ‘writers who uncouthly refuse to be interested in manners and customs, or in the invisible contractual arrangements by which social groups perpetuate themselves. Each one is a monad, and proud of it.’ (TLS, January 27, 1995, p 11). This is not to say that an interest in society’s ‘invisible contractual arrangements’ is an exclusive property of poetry in English, but it does point up an interesting difference in the relationship between poet and reader, and that between the poet and the poetic consciousness.

Nor am I implying that the notion of a depersonalised self in English is new. If I seem to be eliding the achievements of Eliot or Pound or Stevens or the floating indefiniteness of a contemporary figure like Ashbery, it is in part because they are exceptional figures, but also because the radical redefinitions of the self that are central to their poetry have taken rather different forms than those of Pessoa, or, again to take a random sampling, Bonnefoy or Char or Lorand Gaspar or Montale. But the anglophone poets came to the question from a different context and devised quite different escape routes from the tradition of the foregrounded self which they inherited. Eliot was, after all, the famous exponent of poetry as an escape from self, even if he did put the argument in terms which suggested that it was self replacement rather than escape that he had in mind, a replacement necessitated by a host of emotional and intellectual rejections and realignments. The surfaces of Eliot’s poetry fairly glisten with the authority of a style or the style of an authority quite as meticulously arrived at as Pessoa’s transformations. The same might as easily be said of Wallace Stevens or Ashbery. Yet the very distinctiveness of their styles, the unmistakable modulations of the voices that speak their poetry illustrates their remove from the slippery Pessoa. We cannot easily recognise Pessoa, though we might catch the tone of de Campos, or Caeiro or Reis.

Analysing his own condition, Pessoa goes back to Aristotle’s division of poetry into lyric, elegiac, epic and dramatic and argues that despite the usefulness of Aristotle’s scheme, literary genres are not so easily separated out.

On the first level of lyric poetry, the poet who is focused on his feeling, expresses that feeling. If however, he is someone of many different and shifting feelings, his expression will take in a multiplicity of characters unified only by temperament and style.4

Pessoa pursues the levels of lyric poetry up a ladder of increasing depersonalisation and multiplicity. The farther up the ladder the poet progresses the greater is the fracture between the empirical and poetic selves. On the next rung is the poet ‘of varied and fictive feelings, given more to the imaginative than to sentiment and living each mood intellectually rather emotionally.’ Pessoa is describing the progress of what we might call the sympathetic imagination: variety, fiction, intellect assuming primacy over direct lyric apprehension of emotion. The poet on this level expresses himself through multiple characters ‘not united by temperament and style’. Further up again the ladder of depersonalisation or of the imagination —for the two are in fact synonymous for Pessoa — is the poet of shifting moods, giving himself over to each mood so fully that the style varies. On the final rung you have the ultimately depersonalised poet, the poet like Pessoa himself who is ‘various poets, a dramatic poet writing lyric poetry’. Here, each mood becomes a distinctive character with a quite separate style and also — and this is a crucial element in the theory of depersonalisation — ‘with feelings that differ from, even contradict, the feelings of the poet in his living person’. Thus, Pessoa warns us explicitly against identifying any of his heteronyms with himself, and even makes it clear that they express sentiments he himself finds unacceptable. He also licences them to freely contradict themselves. So Pessoa constantly disappears from his own creations, and from himself. How much his work, and his whole personality, depended on this quality of disappearing, of melting into the world, is evidenced by another journal entry:

I have all the qualities for which the romantic poets are admired, even the fault of such qualities by which one really is a romantic poet. I find myself described (in part) in various novels as the protagonist of various plots, but the essential thing about my life, as about my soul, is never to be a protagonist.
I’ve no idea of myself, not even one that consists of a nonidea of myself. I am a nomadic wanderer through my consciousness.5

Each of the heteronyms embodies Pessoa’s depersonalisation and the poetry of each is both a celebration of the objective world and a personal vanishing act. The different oeuvres also manifest various forms of the sympathetic imagination: the imagination that goes out from the poet and centres itself in the world as it impinges on the poet’s senses. Caeiro, the father-figure, is a spiritual shepherd, a pastoral pagan who identifies completely with the seen world. His poetry is a way ‘of being alone’; he is without ‘ambitions or desires’. He has no sense of self out which ambitions and desires can grow. He believes in the world because he sees it and because he doesn’t think about it or make of it a mystic embodiment of some other reality. His whole philosophy is the absence of philosophy. ‘I have no philosophy: I have senses’, he tells us. The Keeper of Sheep does project a kind of anti-religion, a blasphemous subversion of Christianity: his Christ is radically ordinary, a refugee from his own fate who creates himself ‘eternally human and a child’ who teaches Caeiro how to look at things and let them be themselves. Caeiro allows himself to be a mystic ‘only of the body’; he doesn’t know what Nature is and if he occasionally yields to anthropomorphism, having his ‘flowers smile’ and ‘rivers sing’, it is because this is the only way to ‘make deluded men better sense/The truly real existence of flowers and rivers.’ Caeiro lives in a state of creative denial: the very first words he utters to us, the lines which open The Keeper of Sheep, are ‘I have never kept sheep’. His life is a self-conscious pastoral fiction constructed to deny the fictions of philosophies and systems: what he offers is a brusque materialism, most clearly argued in the poem he wrote some years after his death — a poem, that is, which postdates the lifespan accorded him by Pessoa— :

Sometimes I start looking at a poem.
I don’t start thinking, Does it have feeling?
I don’t fuss about calling it my sister.
But I get pleasure out of its being a stone,
Enjoying it because it feels nothing,
Enjoying it because it’s not at all related to me.

Later on he denies the accuracy of a phrase like ‘materialist poet’, and the concluding lines perfectly sum of the fate of the poet burdened and lightened by a sympathetic imagination:

I’m not even a poet: I see.
If what I write has any merit, it’s not in me;
The merit is there, in my verses.
All this is absolutely independent of my will.

The world happens to the poet, it rests on his senses alone and requires nothing of him but his apprehension of it. Caeiro comes out of nothing, according to his disciple Ricardo Reis, ‘more completely out of nothing than any other poet’. He comes without baggage, with his senses for tradition: a perfect tabula rasa , on which the world can inscribe itself. This notion is surely problematic for many of us. Is the poet an empty jug waiting for the world to tumble in and be embraced; waiting for the jug to empty and fill again, accommodating each burst from the tap with the same clear-eyed equable poise? Isn’t this too passive? Don’t we want our poet to engage with the world from the vantage point of some hard won singular vision, to filter it through to us in the light of that individual fire?

Caeiro’s stance is what Ricardo Reis, strict classical/formalist pagan, nonexistent Ricardo Reis called ‘sensationist’, a term which, inevitably, Caeiro resisted. The idea of sensationism is crucial to Pessoa and the role it projects for the poet is deeply against the grain of current practice. It proceeds from the assertion that ‘there is nothing, no reality, but sensation’. Ideas are also sensations, of things not embodied in space and
‘sometimes not even in time’. It’s a step further from William’s concretist ‘no ideas but in things’. Some of Pessoa’s definitions of sensationism make it seem cold-blooded, sterliley perfectionist. The three central tenets, for example, require that art should be ‘supremely construction and that the greatest part of art is that it can ‘visualise and create organised wholes’; that the component parts of the whole should be perfectly realised, as should every constituent of the part. The insistence on perfection hammers home the insistent aestheticism of the system, but it’s an aestheticism that is all things to all men all the time. It is moral and amoral, religious and anti-religious. A sensationist — indeed, according to Pessoa, every ‘cultured and intelligent man’:

has the duty to be an atheist at noon, when the clearness and materiality of the sun eats into all things, and an ultramontane catholic at that precise hour after sunset when the shadows have not yet completed their slow coil round the clear presence of things.6

Pessoa was deadly serious about this: to him a poet full of beliefs and opinions was not a poet at all. He maintained of himself that he had ‘no personality at all except an expressive one’. Yet every mood that came upon him was intense enough to become a distinctive personality. His poet is a shell invaded by one absolute force after another, and the poet’s only duty is to offer total allegiance to the force of the moment: to keep himself open and uncluttered to allow that absolute occupation. This extremity of sympathy affected his daily life too. One of the most remarkable of his journal entries shows him riding in a tram through Lisbon, a perilous experience for him

I’m riding in an electric trolley car and slowly noting, as I habitually do, all the details of the people who pass before me. For me the details are things, voices, phrases. That girl’s dress, as she passes before me, I reduce to the material it is made of, the work that went into making it…And immediately there unfolds before me, like a primer on political economy, the factories and the workers: the factory where the cloth was made, the factory where the silk thread was made of the darker thread they use to embroider the twisted little things into place close to the neck; and I see the sections of the factories, the machines, the workers, the dressmakers.7

And on it goes until he descends from the tram ‘exhausted and somnambulant’, having ‘lived an entire life’.

Pessoa didn’t mean by all of this that the poet should be disengaged from the world of conviction, that he should live in a rarefied atmosphere of poésie pure. His paradoxical resolution was that a poet should lack and at the same time be full of convictions: he is bound to have ‘none and all political opinions’. The two great crimes for the poet, according to Pessoa, are sincerity and insincerity. What he meant by this was that the poet should have the capacity for total belief, total commitment only for the duration of the poem , ‘the length of time…which is necessary for a poem to be conceived and written’. The timeframe of the poem is the only place where the poet must be fully engaged. Outside of that, conviction is irrelevant, a useless encumbrance. We might think, coming to poetry from a different tradition, that the poem should proceed naturally from the life, and the life includes convictions, beliefs, opinions. Pessoa’s thinking is an absolute aestheticism; he comes back again and again to the autonomous republic of the imagination, the poem. In an age when the focus is more and more on the life that precedes the poem, Pessoa’s refusal to be pinned down, his shifts, evasions and elisions, offer an instructive counter-example. His coolness makes sense if we think about how emotion actually operates in a poem. Does it precede the poem, so that the lines are a faithful transcription of already existent feelings? If that were the case the poet would be a simple clerk of the heart. In the successful poem the emotion is generated in the act of writing: the poem is a self-generating system, and the system is triggered by words. Anyone who has tried to write in the rush of powerful emotion knows the distance between sincerity of feeling and an accomplished piece of writing. Very often, the more powerful the emotion the poet brings to the poem, the more likely it is to be crushed by it. The poem which makes a successful emotional appeal to must have a core of ice, must be built on formal attentiveness to language, line-break, diction, syntax technique. This is what Pessoa meant when he made the distinction between sincerity in ordinary life and sincerity in the poem. ‘Translated sincerity’, he said, ‘is the basis of all art’. The poet mediates between the text of the world and the text of the poem, applying the stratagems of a translator to languages that are related but distinct.

----
1 Translations of Pessoa’s poems from Poems of Fernando Pessoa , translated and edited by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown, The Ecco Press, New York, 1986.

2 Fernando Pessoa, Always Astonished, Selected Prose. Translated, edited and introduced by Edwin Honig. City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1988. P 9
3 Poets Talking, Poet of the Month interviews from BBC radio 3, by Clive Wilmer, Carcanet, 1994, p26
4 Always Astonished, , p 69
5 Ibid. pp 116/117
6 Ibid., p 41
7 Ibid. ,p 112/113

Francis Ponge: Siding with things

2007-01-16T18:15:00.000Z

No poet has looked more determinedly or more ferociously at things than Francis Ponge, whose Selected Poems has just been published on this side of the Atlantic by Faber. Le parti pris des choses, or Siding with Things, is a key collection of his, and even a brief scan of his titles will reveal his resolutely thing-centred approach: “Rain”, “Ripe Blackberries”, “The Crate”, “The Candle”, “The Cigarette”, “The Orange”, “The Oyster”. Ponge’s work is written in the form of prose poems, a form that always seems to sit uneasily in English, but is perfectly suited to the chunky materiality of Ponge’s vision. In his poem or proem ‘Memorandum’ he offers a useful statement of “the only interesting principle according to which interesting works can be written, and written well” :

“You have first of all to side with your own spirit, and your own taste. Then take the time, and have the courage, to express all your thoughts on the subject at hand (not just keeping the expressions that seem brilliant or distinctive). Finally you have to say everything simply, not striving for charm, but conviction.”

Ponge is impatient with abstraction and irrelevance, with words that go beyond what’s closest to hand. He wants to let the material sink into his pores and in that sinking to let his spirit reveal itself. A poem which strikingly shows this process at work is ‘Rain’, which, like ‘Memorandum’, works by a power of gathering precision, given here in C.K. Williams’ translation:

The rain I watch fall in the courtyard comes down at quite varying tempos. In the center it’s a fine discontinuous curtain (or net), an implacable but relatively slow downfall of fairly light drops, a lethargic, everlasting precipitation, a concentrated fragment of the atmosphere. Near the left and right walls, heavier, individual drops fall more noisily. Here they seem the size of a grain of wheat, there of a pea, elsewhere almost of a marble. ...

The poetry is in the intensity, the utterly absorbed attentiveness of the gaze Ponge turns on the complex phenomenon of falling rain. The poem builds successive layers of detail from the simple opening observation, and yet there’s nothing simply objective about this. The language is that of rigorous and impersonal scientific inquiry, but the description is located firmly within the human frame; we’re aware from the beginning of the watching poet’s eye, aware too that the language of precision, for all its technical restraint, is also the language of a kind of ecstasy. The deepening complexity grows in the amazed consciousness of the observer. On one level it’s a poem in which nothing happens and which refuses the kind of trajectory from opening to closure that we might expect. On another level, though, it’s filled with event, its own event, and in confining itself to that event it radiates out from it. And look at the distance that is travelled from “The rain I watch in the courtyard comes down at quite varying tempos” to “And then if the sun comes out, all soon vanishes, the brilliant display evaporates: it has rained.” So much energy on such a precarious mechanism. You take what’s there, as it arrives, and you can’t look beyond something until you’ve had a good look at it.

To an extent Ponge’s vision depends on a sleight of hand — the primacy accorded to the world of objects, flora or fauna, and the use of a quasi-scientific language and approach to apprehend them, masks the deeply human need to make sense of the world on an emotional and spiritual level. The poems are full of anxiety, suppressed hopefulness, humour, which are as it were authenticated for their being won from the contemplation of the material. Sometimes the spiritual trajectory of a poem is that of the necessarily doomed effort to define, the fact that once you start, it’s almost impossible to stop:

It isn’t easy to define a pebble.
If you’re satisfied with a simple description you can start out by saying that it’s a form or state of stone halfway between rocks and gravel.
But this already implies a concept of stone that must be validated. So don’t blame me for going even further back than the flood.

What strikes again and again on reading Ponge is the absence of human relationships, the absence, indeed, of other human beings. On the rare occasions when they do appear they are oddly material, disembodied. The only relationship is between the observing consciousness and the usually inanimate objects observed, scrutinised. But these object are the receivers of such a powerful concentration of attention and emotion that they in turn in the poet's — and therefore also in our — imagination press back towards us a human attention. There is therefore a kind of reciprocation. Stones and other objects play tricks on the humans who watch them in order to draw “some general principles” from their contemplation. Ponge’s material vision thus consistently undermines itself as, inevitably it has to. Bread is better eaten than scrutinised, as one poem ruefully concludes.

Ponge derives neither consolation nor terror from his inquiries, merely —but is a big ‘merely’— an intensified relationship with the things of the world. Part of the poetic strategy by which this is achieved is his way of presenting the world in his poems ab initio, unburdened by a tradition of inquiry, as if it had never been properly attended to before and by his self presentation as a kind of Adam constantly waking to a first surprising morning. This selection, excellently translated and introduced, allows us to share the disabused innocence of Ponge’s Eden.

Francis Ponge. Selected Poems. Edited Margaret Guiton, with translations by Margaret Guiton, John Montague and C.K. Williams. Faber and Faber, 220 pp. £9.99 in UK.

Günter Eich: Listening to the rain

2006-11-23T21:39:00.000Z

Günter Eich

The Rain’s Messages
(Botschaften des Regens)

News, that’s meant for me
shaken from rain to rain
scattering across slates and tiles
spreads like a virus, like unwelcome
contraband -

Across the wall the windowpanes
rattle their alphabets
and the rain speaks
in the language I thought
only I could understand -

the rain sends
its despairing bulletins
the rain radios misery
and falls blaming, recriminating
as if of all people
I should be held accountable

Let me say this as clearly as I can
I’m not afraid of the rain
or its accusations
nor of whoever sent them
When the time is right, and only then
I’ll go outside and answer him

version by The Cat Flap

Time of the sun

2006-11-08T18:29:00.000Z

Le regret de la terre
(Jules Supervielle, 1884-1960)

One day we’ll look back on it the time of the sun
when light fell on the smallest twig
on the old woman the astonished girl
when it washed with colour everything it touched
followed the galloping horse and eased when he did

that unforgettable time on earth
when if we dropped something it made a noise
and like connoisseurs we took in the world
our ears caught every nuance of air
and we knew our friends by their footsteps

time we walked out to gather flowers or stones
that time we could never catch hold of a cloud

and it’s all our hands can master now

translation by The Flat Cap

Ernst Jandl: Not a concrete pot

2006-10-29T00:04:00.000+01:00

dingfest

auf einem stuhl
liegt ein hut.
beide
wissen voneinander
nichts.
beide
sind
so dingfest

thingsure

on a chair
lies a hat.
neither
knows anything
of the other.
both
are
so thingsure

Dedalus Press has re-issued Ernst Jandl’s Dingfest/Thingsure, a handsome dual language edition of the poet’s work with translations by Michael Hamburger, which replaces the volume originally published by the same publisher in 1997 as part of its Poetry Europe Series. The book collects the shorter poems of this wide-ranging experimental Austrian poet – a poet whose work, so embedded in the verbal possibilities of the German language, is often regarded as untranslatable. Here, for example, is his famous ‘ottos mops’ (otto’s pug), not included here, a poem which depends wholly on the different qualities of the sound of ‘o’ in German .

ottos mops

ottos mops trotzt
otto: fort mops fort
ottos mops hopst fort
otto: soso

otto holt koks
otto holt obst
otto horcht
otto: mops mops
otto hofft

ottos mops klopft
otto: komm mops komm
ottos mops kommt
ottos mops kotzt
otto: ogottogott

And here is a game translation by Elizabeth MacKiernan, from Ernst Jandl: Reft and Light, Poems, translated from the German by various American poets. Providence (USA): 2000. Both are available on the excellent German poetry site www.lyrikline.de

Lulu’s Pooch

Lulu’s pooch droops
Lulu: Scoot, pooch, scoot!
Lulu’s pooch soon scoots.
Lulu brooms room.

Lulu scoops food.
Lulu spoons roots.
Lulu croons: Pooch, pooch.
Lulu broods.

Lulu’s pooch drools.
Lulu:Poor fool pooch.
Lulu grooms pooch.

Lulu’s pooch poops.
Lulu: Oops.

Jandl would understand the problem, having written many poems in English, one of which, nicely summing up the challenge of writing different kinds of poems and being therefore inconvenient to categorise, Hamburger quotes:

i love concrete
i love pottery
but i’m not
a concrete pot

Hamburger’s selection makes available in English a particular thread of Jandl’s work, ‘short poems of all periods, yet only of the straight kind most congenial to a translator never mistaken for a concrete pot’. These poems are the comic, inventive, performance side of Jandl – the only side this reader knows – and are very attractive in their attention to language, their ‘thing-fixity’ and in the flavour of the sceptical intelligence behind them.

inhalt

um ein gedicht zu machen
habe ich nichts

eine ganze sprache
ein ganzes leben
ein ganzes denken
ein ganzes erinnern

um ein gedicht zu machen
habe ich nichts

gist

for the making of a poem
i have nothing

a whole language
a whole life
a whole thinking
a whole remembering

for the making of a poem
i have nothing.

Dingfest/Thingsure. Ernst Jandl. Translated by Michael Hamburger. Dedalus, 1997, 2006.

Goat song

2006-10-19T18:59:00.000+01:00

Aleksander Wat and Czesław Miłosz

Aleksander Wat
(1900 – 1967)

To a Roman, My Friend

Everything that lies in rubble
reaches tenderly at me:
the ruins of my Warsaw
the ruins of your Rome.

In April ’forty-six
I saw two old goats
searching for some special herbs
in the former Albrecht’s Café
(now overgrown with nettles,
thistles, burdock, spear grass).
Their barefoot shepherdess
in graveyard stillness
stood gaping, a child, under a pathetic column that once adorned
the fourth floor
of the Credit Society building,
where then it was just a fancy ornament
changed today into an orphaned pendicle
on a fragment of charred wall.

On the Aventino I met two goats, roamers of ruins,
and a barefoot shepherdess
staring at faded frescoes.

Thus after man’s glory,
after his acts and disasters
goats arrive. Smelly,
comic and worthy goats
to search among remnants of glory
for medicinal herbs and forage
for earthly nourishment.

Translated from the Polish by Czesław Miłosz and Leonard Nathan

from Aleksander Wat, Selected Poems, translated and edited by Czesław Miłosz and Leonard Nathan, Penguin, 1991.

'More than the usual chaos'

2006-09-30T01:37:00.000+01:00

More than the usual chaos
the raisin box, the onions,
the potatoes, the small cup,
the brick, the drum

each one a solemn offering
searched out and handed over
with such ceremony
I can hardly bear to clear my desk

More than the usual chaos
may such
unlooked for riches
accompany me always

PIR 87

2006-08-31T23:18:00.000+01:00

Dear Sir(r)

It has come to my attention that you purport to publish a poem of mine in PIR. In the manner of subject people everywhere, I wish to grudgingly thank you, and to use the occasion as an excuse to ask for more....
But first I wish to explicitly acknowledge that I now believe that it is possible to be an editor and a human being at the same time. This suspicion had been growing on me for some time, as The Cat Flap could not have been written by a complete bastard. . . I feel I've now traced the sources of my previously unpositive attitude to you: you didn't previously publish my many offerings; you obviously had a serious Montale phase (but who am I to judge: I had a serious Neruda phase; after a while, however, like Catholicism and Communism, it went away, leaving, like them, a certain positive residue; and your, eh, sirrname, operating no doubt at a subliminal and psychological level, caused me to see you as rather aloof, cold, distant, etc.

A brief sample from the Cat Flap's mailbag. The Flap, it has to be said, has never pretended to be a human being, and the labours of editorship have long drained him of whatever vestigial humanity might have slipped between the scales. And all of this preamble is by way of saying there is a new Poetry Ireland Review abroad in the world. PIR 87 features poems by John Greening, CL Dallat, Cathal O'Searcaigh, Maurice Scully, Enda Coyle-Greene and many others. The Crucial Collection series, begun in PIR 86, continues with Medbh McGuckian on Tess Gallagher's Instructions to the Double, Biddy Jenkinson on Dánta Grádha, Gabriel Rosenstock on Santoka Taneda and Mark Granier on Pearse Hutchinson's Watching the Morning Grow. Patrick Crotty contributes an essay on place in Thomas Kinsella, Chris Murray writes about the dramas of Austin Clarke. And in the Reviews section, among others, Terence Brown looks at Seamus Heaney's District and Circle, Gerald Dawe looks at George Mackay Brown's Collected, Aingeal Clare reviews John Kinsella and Jane Yeh, and Michael Cronin celebrates Biddy Jenkinson's latest collection, Oíche Bhealtaine. Dennis O'Driscoll contributes his popular Poetry Pickings – here's a couple to be going on with:

'If each MFA graduate wrote just one good poem a year for ten years, at the end of a decade we would have 24,750 good poems - not to mention 4,500 degree-bearing poets, each of whom was required to write a book-length manuscript in order to graduate. New poems, poets, and manuscripts are added to the inventory every year.'
- Joseph Bednarik, Poets & Writers, May/June 2006

'The fear of straight speaking, the constant, painstaking efforts to metaphorize everything, the ceaseless need to prove you're a poet in every line: these are the anxieties that beset every budding bard. But they are curable, if caught in time.'
- Wislawa Szymborska, quoted in Poetry Foundation online, 19 April 2006

'I didn't have time to write poetry before, but now I have had the time to become a poet.'
- Saddam Hussein, quoted in The Sunday Times, 14 May 2006

'People think they love poetry, but actually they hate it. The average punter feels that poetry is too self-conscious. I'm just grateful that I've been allowed to stay at home and do it. Oh my God. The idea of an office.'
- Hugo Williams, The Observer, 26 March 2006

'What's surprising about many poems from Britain is just how unsurprising they are - how domesticated, how well-behaved - and how closely they adhere to a single register, the poet getting quietly worked up about something in the plainest conversational tone.'

-Andrew Johnston, Best New Zealand Poems 2005, 2006

Fans of this feature might like to know that Bloodaxe has collected a selection of Dennis' pickings as The Bloodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations , which has just come out.

Getting it right

2006-08-07T20:11:00.000+01:00

Another commonplace book entry, offered as encouragement.

Proofs

Death will not correct
a single line of verse
she is no proof-reader
she is no sympathetic
lady editor

a bad metaphor is immortal

a shoddy poet who has died
is a shoddy dead poet

a bore bores after death
a fool keeps up his foolish chatter
from beyond the grave

Tadeusz Rózewicz
translated from the Polish by Adam Czerniawski

The best intentions

2006-07-05T20:03:00.000+01:00

Olav H. Hauge

A Poem Every Day

I want to write a poem every day,
every day.
That should be easy enough.
Browning kept at it, though
he rhymed and
counted beats
with bushy eyebrows.
So, a poem every day.
Something strikes you,
something happens,
something catches your notice.
– I get up. It’s light now.
I’ve the best intentions.
And see the bullfinch rising from the cherry tree,
where he’s stealing my buds.

translated from the Norwegian by Robin Fulton

from Olav H. Hauge, Leaf-Huts and Snow-Houses, Translated by Robin Fulton, Anvil, 2003.

Four of the best

2006-07-05T00:21:00.000+01:00

Bloodaxe has recently started publishing a new series of slim anthologies, each of which features generous selections from four poets. Bloodaxe Poetry Introductions 2, published in June, brings together four major European poets: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Miroslav Holub, Marin Sorescu and Tomas Tranströrmer. Each selection is prefaced by introductory materials – essays, interviews, profiles and commentaries by the poets. Below, as a sampler, is one poem from each of the selections.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Optimistic Little Poem

Now and then it happens
that somebody shouts for help
and somebody else jumps in at once
and absolutely gratis.

Here in the thick of the grossest capitalism
round the corner comes the shining fire brigade
and extinguishes, or suddenly
there’s silver in the beggar’s hat.

Mornings the streets are full
of people hurrying here and there without
daggers in their hands, quite equably
after milk or radishes.

As though in a time of deepest peace.

A splendid sight.

[1999] translated by David Constantine

Miroslav Holub

At last

At last we were masters of our heads,
masters of the city,
masters of our shadows
and our equinox.

Someone fired a shot to celebrate,
but only the kind with a cork
tied to a string.

And then we opened the cages
and ferrets ran out.
Out of the skull ran brown and white
spotted rats.
Out of the heart flew
blood-soaked cuckoos.

Out of the lungs
a condor rose, croaking with rage
because of the way his plumes had been squashed
in the bronchi.

Even a panther showed up,
on the loose from an obsolete circus,
starved, ready to eat
even the Emperor Claudius.

You could hear squeaks in the streets –
the groans and shouts
of expiring fiends.

And at last we were masters
of our new moon.

But we couldn’t step out
of our doorways;
someone might cast
a spell on us.

We might even
be hostage
to ourselves.

[1998] translated by Mirolsav Holub and David Young.

Marin Sorescu

The martyrs

Just the usual lion-fodder, no one
whose name will ever make the calendar,
anonymously rattling into death.

Fed to bestial mud, your bodies are
frail as flowers. The life that you enjoy
will have to be the next one.

To carry off a crucifixion, talent
is required. It takes skill, as well, to plunge a trident
deep in someone’s throat. The goggling
crowd awaits the miracle to follow,

which won’t, of course, take place.
There’s just am ugly pool of blood
where the ripped-to-pieces die. That’s it.
Matinees on Tuesday. Bring a friend.

translated by John Hartley Williams and Hilde Ottschofski (2001)

Tomas Tranströrmer

April and Silence

Spring lies desolate.
The velvet-dark ditch
crawls by my side
without reflections.

The only thing that shines
is yellow flowers.

I am carried in my shadow
like a violin
in its black case.

The only thing I want to say
glitters out of reach
like the silver
in a pawnbroker’s.

[1996]

Translated by Robin Fulton.

In one of the pieces republished here, Tomas Tranströrmer’s acceptance speech of his Neustadt prize, the poet talk about the importance of poetry translation:

Let me sketch two ways of looking at a poem. You can perceive a poem as an expression of the life of the language itself, something organically grown out of the very language in which it is written – in my case, Swedish. A poem written by the Swedish language through me. Impossible to carry over into another language.
Another, and contrary, view is this: the poem as it is presented is a manifestation of another, invisible poem, written in a language behind the common languages. Thus, even the original version is a translation. A transfer into English or Malayalam is merely the invisible poem’s new attempt to come into being. The important thing is what happens between the text and the reader. Does a really committed reader ask if the written version he reads is the original or a translation?

Probably not, is the answer to that question. The reader consumes the text and doesn’t worry about its origins. But the consumption will be greatly aided by the quality of the text – that is, the quality of the translation. How well the translators gathered in this volume have pulled the invisible poems into the light is something you can judge for yourselves as you make your way through this interesting book.

Bloodaxe Poetry Introductions 2, edited by Neil Astley, 96 pp. £7.95 in UK.

Thomas Street Is Happening (just not today)

2006-06-15T12:18:00.000+01:00

14 June 2006

To St Catherine's Park to do a reading for the Thomas Street Is Happening Festival. The brief is to read poems that in some way relate to this area, a project that appeals because I have written quite a few pieces set in this part of the city or in some way inspired by it. For years I lived opposite Christchurch Cathedral and now live down the road in the Tenters. I was, though, a bit wary about reading in St Catherine's Park. Park is probably a bit of an exaggeration; it is in fact the graveyard at the rear of St Catherine's Church in Thomas St, with the entrance in Thomas Court – not by any means a major thoroughfare. I used to drop in with the mutt to give him a bit of greenery until I realised it seemed to be used exclusively by dealers and users. I find it hard to visualise it being packed with poetry lovers on a Wednesday lunchtime. And indeed there is no-one in the park except for one of the organisers and two sound technicians who have brought an impressive bank of equipment in their Dublin City Council truck, which sits in the middle of the park, taking up about a third of it. The podium and mike are set up and waiting. It's five minutes after the advertised time and there's still no-one. A woman comes in and sits at the other end of the park. This is briefly interpreted as the act of an audience member and there is the real possibility of delivering the reading to a single distant auditor, though the sound equipment will safely carry my voice all around the Liberties. The woman, however, proves not to have come in search of poetry and faced with the prospect of enduring some, promptly flees the park.

The users who were evicted when the sound men came to set are out there somewhere, waiting for us to leave. There is some talk of reading to the organiser, or reading, as it were, speculatively, in the hope that people in the area, magnetised by my amplified poems, will pour into the park. Em, don't think so. Eventually the effort is abandoned and the cheerful soundmen – 'it's all the same to us, we get paid anyway' – load up the truck, and we all drift off. Through Pimlico and The Coombe and back home. I close this dismal chapter in the freelance life with a couple of the poems I'd intended to read, a kind of compensatory virtual reading, both featuring Peter Lewis, proctor of Christchurch Cathedral in the mid sixteenth century, some of whose words I've taken from the account ledger he left us.

After a Day in the History of the City

What vagabond bones
and you, too, Ivar the Boneless,
come together now
stench of what plagues
thriving again
and everywhere one turns
places of execution

Who should not prefer
to cross the river
and walk in procession
down the aisle of his own cathedral
with Samuel
Metropolitan of Oxmantown
wanting nothing from him but his title

or say, with Peter Lewis, cathedral proctor
Today came with his men Tady the hellier
to renew the slates
after the heavy snows of Christmas and the frost

(Selected Poems, Gallery Press, 2005)

Cathedral

I dyd byllyd and pyllyd with oke timber
I fyllyd hit the foundacion with roche lyme
The masons paid, the carters paid
the smith, the cooper, the casters of sand

What I really wanted was to stand
for once empty handed
by the vanishing spires and the bells
beautifully dumb, pealing quiet

as we waited, the world rinsed out of us
Stone by stone the city returned
these streets mapped by desire
the light that seemed to flare

from our own skin to press
the district towards us.
As if in a small rain of touch
we stood, and watched it grow

I leaned towards you, provoking
a dark bricked brewery palazzo
you kissed me and caused
black tramlines to loop and veer

When you stopped, they disappeared
So greedy the desire
the whole place seemed to fall
and my spirit, that had been light, was air

(Selected Poems, Gallery Press, 2005)

Taking Bearings: Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle

2006-05-23T19:17:00.000+01:00

District and Circle is Seamus Heaney's twelfth book and it is very much a re-visiting of his own past, a circling and remapping of terrain familiar from forty years of previous work. Few poets are likely to abandon their lifetime's concerns and preoccupation and jump on board some skittish new craft, but what's remarkable about this collection is the extent to which it situates itself in the essential elements of the earlier work – as if the poet wanted to re-ground himself by testing the old sources again and subjecting them to the pressure of experience and craft. In their solidity and immediacy the early poems in the book give the same kind of pleasure as the first Heaney collections, though it’s a pleasure somewhat diluted by familiarity. From the outset Heaney was a poet of extraordinary materiality: the visible world swarmed in to be reconstituted in dense stacks of language – those processions of thickly textured nouns and adjectives, that lust for exactitude, for a language that answered the demands of memory and clanged with the force of hammer on anvil.

District and Circle is full of the physicality and richly textured responsiveness that announced itself forcefully in Death of a Naturalist, charged with the 'thingness' of totemic implements: turnip-snedder, hammer, spade, harrow-pin, 'the weight of the trowel' with its ‘lozenge-shaped/Blade’, the blows of Barney Devlin’s 'midnight anvil'. The poems set themselves to pinning down 'the mass and majesty of the world'; they’re a bit like the remembered railway sleepers in one poem, 'block-built criss-cross and four-squared'. Take a poem like 'Höfn', for example, with its turbo-charged Anglo-Saxon pith:

The three-tongued glacier has begun to melt.
What will we do, they ask, when boulder-milt
Comes wallowing across the delta flats

And the miles-deep shag-ice makes its move?
I saw it, ridged and rock-set, from above,
Undead grey-gristed earth-pelt, aeon-scruff.....

All this 'thingness', this vivid intensity, is lent an extra force by the book's sense of working on the edge, on the boundaries between life and death, between the real and the imagined – or unimaginable, as in 'Anything Can Happen', the poet’s response to 11 September – or between one realm of experience and another, as in the prose pieces which evoke the arrival at the school porch with its 'rows of coathooks nailed up at different heights along the wall', or the arrival of gypsies in the district, 'as if a gate had been left open in the usual life, as if something might get in or get out'. The book is haunted by death; there are elegies for Czeslaw Milosz, Ted Hughes, George Seferis, and the superb 'The Lift' for his sister.
One of the highlights of the collection is the title poem, set, like the opening poem in Station Island in the 'vaulted tunnels' of the London Underground, a place realised in extraordinary concrete detail, intensely alive and yet a visionary underworld to which the poet has descended like Dante or Orpheus to meet 'My father's face glazed in my own waning/And craning' and to be ‘transported/Through galleried earth with them, the only relict/Of all that I belonged to. . .' Like many of the poems in this book, it is hyper-alert to the world's surfaces, and glazes every realised thing with an eerie plangency. Some have seen this as a response to the July 2005 bombings in London but it is really another Heaney underground or underworld poem – as a poet gets on he begins to be 'aware of the underground journey a bit more', as he said in a recent interview. Like almost all of the poems in the book it is as much a journey into his own past, as much as the district as the wider circle. The strap-hanging figure in the underground train, 'well-girded, yet on edge,/Spot-rooted, buoyed, aloof,/Listening to the dwindling noises off' is the poet performing his delicate balancing act on the 'flicker-lit' threshold of past and present, life and death.
We see the same investment in the weight of the real in the poem to which the pieces that make up 'District and Circle' originally belonged, 'The Tollund Man in Springtime', which returns after more than thirty years to one of Heaney’s most famous poems. The original poem concluded with a fatalistic identification with the sacrificial victim; the new take is a denser imagining, the Tollund Man spirited from the man-killing parishes to investigate the world that has revived him, 'the thickened traffic/Swarm at a roundabout five fields away/And transatlantic flights stacked in the blue.' Again it's a poem thick with the world, this ghostly presence like a 'bulrush, head in air, far from its lough' hovering over 'check-out lines, at cash-points, in those queues/Of wired, far-faced smilers.' But the Tollund Man is also a guardian-like figure come to release Heaney from his Parnassian obligations. In an interview in The Telegraph he described him as a kind of releasing revenant: 'He came again to remind me that lyric poetry was OK. The Tollund Man releases me into pleasure… love poems… bits and pieces… little quickies… more personal stuff towards the end. They're more spontaneous.' In a way maybe this is part of the point of a book like District and Circle. Most of it is a consolidating kind of book, the book that someone would write at the latter end of a career, the book of a poet at ease with his material and his craft, reconfirming, re solidifying, remaking that, reminding us of what went before.

If self is a location, so is love:
Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points,
Options, obstinacies, dug heels and distance,
Here and there and now and then, a stance.

(‘The Aerodrome’)

This is a books that takes bearings and markings and stands by them, the poet saying this is my map, these are the co-ordinates, this is its scenery, its psycho-geography, its sustaining comforts. Nothing is left unremembered or unmemorialised. Once that consolidating impulse has been satisfied, maybe the poet will be released out of habitual Heaneyness into a dimension of risk and unease, and maybe this is what is intended by the closing poem, 'The Blackbird of Glanmore' with its echoes of previous Heaney poems and its Janus-like glance at life and death:

The automatic lock
Clunks shut, the blackbird’s panic
Is shortlived, for a second
I’ve a bird’s eye view of myself,
A shadow on raked gravel

In front of my house of life.

Hedge-hop, I am absolute
For you, your ready talkback,
Your each stand-offish comeback,
Your picky, nervy goldbeak –
On the grass when I arrive,

In the ivy when I leave.

Seamus Heaney, District and Circle. Faber and Faber, 2006. 74pp. UK £12.99.

Lost Country: Dunya Mikhail

2006-05-09T09:51:00.000+01:00

I was in Cúirt the other week to give a reading and to enjoy some of the fare on offer. I read with Dunya Mikhail, an Iraqi poet currently based in Michigan. She speaks and writes in three languages: Arabic, English and Aramaic. The Aramaic comes from her Christian background – Aramaic, the language Christ spoke, is the language of the Chaldeans, the Iraqi Christians who pre-date Islam. Mikhail has published five books since the 1980s, and New Directions publishes The War Works Hard , translated from the Arabic by Elizabeth Winslow (winner of a 2004 PEN translation Fund Award). Carcanet will publish it in July of this year. As that title implies Mikhail’s chief subject is war. The poems are blunt and satiric and return obsessively to war and its effects, not surprising for a body of work produced between 1985 and 2004.

Born in 1965, at the juncture of the most atrocious campaign the Baath party waged to trounce the smallest pockets of popular resistance, Dunya Mikhail’s imagination was saturated with horror stories of imprisonment, torture, death, disappearances, massacres, and rape; she was surrounded by uprootedness and endless wars.

(Saadi Simawe, Introduction to The War Works Hard)

Again according to Simawe, her work is fresh and innovative in the Arabic literary tradition: '.... in her poems, the Arabic language is liberated from traditional clichés of idiom and of style...' The following lines are from the title poem, written in Baghdad though not published until after the poet emigrated to the US in 1996:

The war continues working, day and night.
It inspires tyrants
to deliver long speeches,
awards medals to generals
and themes to poets.
It contributes to the industry
of artificial limbs,
provides food for flies,
adds pages to the history books,
achieves equality
between killer and killed...

The poems in The War Works Hard are like this, direct, sardonic, downbeat, stripped of rhetoric or grandiosity. 'War poet' is a hard tag to bear, it tends to excite a fake kind of excited attentivness rather than the genuine attention that all poetry needs. Mikhail is a poet whose subjects happen, because of the sheer pressure of circumstance, to include war and the absence, loss and separation that come from it.

Yesterday I lost a country.
I was in a hurry,
and didn't notice when it fell from me
like a broken branch from a forgetful tree.
Please, if anyone passes by
and stumbles across it,
perhaps in a suitcase
open to the sky.....
....If anyone stumbles across it,
return it to me, please.
Please return it, sir.
Please return it, madam.
It is my country. . .
I was in a hurry
when I lost it yesterday.

The War Works Hard.Translated from the Arabic by Elizabeth Winslow.Introduction by Saadi Simawe. New Directions,2005.

Dunya Mikhai's site

The Charm Factor

2006-05-03T12:05:00.000+01:00

Today the wannabe poet progresses like the academic, the civil servant, the manager, up a series of marked steps to become a member of the fraternity and sorority of Published Poets. The obedience such an ascent requires can be at odds with the very principles of the art. It is an art of speculation not in the old sense but entirely in the new, speculating on the prize, the publisher, the public -- poetry has become as keen to embrace the main chance as the basest prose.

The above is from Michael Schmidt’s lecture ‘What, How Well, Why?’ given at the StAnza festival in Scotland this March. Schmidt, the founder of Carcanet and Professor of Poetry at Glasgow University argues for a critical culture that’s open and receptive as well as rigorous: ‘If we want our poets to develop and grow without pollarding, trellising, pruning, grafting, we need a diverse and vigorous culture of reception.....’ The kind of insularity that routinely dismisses Modernism and post-Modernism ends up privileging the literal and the banal. Down with the poetry cheerleaders, Schmidt argues, poets need ‘to demand a little less solidarity, a little less local backslapping, more debate and engagement, at the same time giving the reader less of a condescending embrace.’

One of the points Michael Schmidt makes is that Britain is ‘a nation of countless poets and a strictly limited number of poetry readers’. However much we might like to delude ourselves (and we do, we do) that is pretty much the situation in this part of the world. The Cat Flap knows many excellent poets who sell three books a year, of which two to circulating libraries. One acquaintance recently produced his annual royalty statement, lamenting: ‘I seem to have sold minus three books last year. How is this possible?’ It is, of course, entirely possible. You think you have sold those three books and all your boats have come in, and then the bookseller returns the things and you’re back in the red again, quashed entirely.

How many readers does a poet need, in any case? Need for what?, you might think. To be considered a viable entity, to be eligible for an IDA grant or a VAT rating or an Aosdána nomination or a productivity audit by the Muses? It’s a question that vexes August Kleinzahler in a recent review in the LRB of The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2005 by Roy Fisher. He begins by quoting John Ash in 1979: ‘In a better world, he would be as widely known and highly praised as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.’ And then continues: ‘This would be a very strange world, and not necessarily a better one. Fisher has never aspired to the sort of readership that Heaney and Hughes enjoy; it’s not clear he has aspired to much of a readership at all.’ Indeed, Kleinzahler makes it sound as if Fisher went out his way to repel all boarders: ‘Astringent in tone, the voice denuded of personality and with all the warmth of a lens, exploratory, restless, difficult: it is poetry almost entirely without charm.’

This begs all kinds of questions: what exactly is charm in poetry and why should we necessarily think it a good thing? Do we have to have the comforting print of a ‘personality’, preferably a ‘warm’ one, before we can investigate a poet’s work? Kleinzahler goes on to consider Fisher’s poetry in some depth, but we’re left feeling that Fisher really should have tried to come a little closer to the reader, should have withheld himself a little less – which would have made him a much different and probably a less interesting poet. But isn’t the consideration of audience a distraction from the main business of writing poetry? Doesn’t the audience come after the event rather than before or during it? It seems to this reader that a lot of poets get the order wrong and write as if the audience were already filing into the room, wanting to be comforted, reassured, ready to applaud at the appropriate cues. Which is what Schmidt is saying too as he writes of the obedience that often attends the successful poetry career. Healthier, maybe, to write for the Unreader, the Absent Reader, than the eager face in the front row. Perhaps we should end with a charmless, reader-repelling Fisher poem:

3rd November 1976

Maybe twenty of us in the late afternoon
are still in discussion. We’re talking
about the Arts Council of Great Britain
and its beliefs about itself. We’re baffled.

We’re in a hired pale clubroom
high over the County Cricket Ground
and we’re a set of darkening heads,
turning and talking and hanging down;

beyond the plate glass, in another system, silent,
the green pitch rears up, all colour,
and differently processed. Across it in olive overalls
three performance artists persistently move
with rakes and rods. The cold sky steepens.
Twilight catches the flats rising out of the trees.

One of our number is abducted
into the picture. A sculptor innocent of bureaucracy
raises his fine head to speak out;
and the window and its world frame him.
He is made clear.

Soiscéal na bhfilí

2006-04-07T15:31:00.000+01:00

Ag breathnú cúpla lá ó shin ar Soisceál Pháraic ar TG4. Cúrsaí filíochta a bhí i gceist, saothar Michael Hartnett ach go háirithe. Ar an bpainéal bhí Liam Carson, Gabriel Rosenstock agus Mary Shine Thompson. Ní mó ná sásta a bhí siad leis an obair, ón méid a chuala Liopa an Chait ar aon nós. Níor bhain sé le filí Innti, níor chuir sé suim sa ghluaiseacht nua filíochta agus é ag bualadh timpeall Teampall Ghleanntáin i gCo Luimní nach ceantar breac-Ghaeltachta fiú amháin é agus é ag féachaint siar ar shean leads sean-aimseartha leathchraiceáilte na seachtú aoise déag sna hoícheanta fada fírfhliucha anfa ar toinn taobh leo a bhainfeadh an ceann díot mura mbeadh do Bhurberry agat agus gan taithí ar bith acu ar an Long Valley agus cailíní Chorcaigh. Bhuel, fair enough, níl an oiread sin spéise agam féin i gcuid mhaith den fhilíocht Ghaeilge a d’fhoilsigh sé nó i bpolaitíocht gheaitsiúil leithéid A Farewell to English, ach ba chéim san aistear iad, bhí sé ag iarraidh traidisiún agus pobal a aimsiú dó féin agus theastaigh an teanga uaidh, theastaigh Ó Rathaille agus Ó Bruadair agus Haicéad uaidh ag an bpointe sin. Theastaigh an guth fíochmhar sin uaidh agus é ag éalú uaidh comhthéacs a linne, uaidh féin, b’fhéidir.

Ach ansin thosaigh GR ag ionsaí na filíochta Béarla chomh maith. Inchicore Haiku? Muise ní haiku in aon chor iad, nach raibh fhios aige go mbaineann na haikus leis na séasúir agus mura bhfuil chuile bhraon báistí agus chuile dhuilleog fhómhair istigh agat sna seacht siolla déag taobh leis na froganna ag plopáil sna linnte, b’fhearr duit fanacht abhaile ag breathnú ar Ní Gaeilgeoir Mé nó ar Desperate Housewives. Chuile sheans nach róbhuartha a bhí Hartnett faoin easpa dúlra sa dán, óir tá an dá chuid ann den teideal agus tábhacht ar leith ag baint le ‘Inchicore.’ Ní raibh sé ag iarraidh an traidisiún Seapánach a shaothrú. Ach ar ndóigh, a dúradar, thosaigh sé ag cleachtadh na foirme sin de bharr go raibh sé ag ól agus nach raibh de fhuinneamh nó de chumas aige tabhairt faoi dánta níos faide. Seo an cineál truflais a thagann as an léirmheastóireacht bheathaisnéiseach. An amhlaidh go raibh Basho chomh tugtha don saké nach raibh sé in ann dul thar trí líne? Tá mé ag léamh eipeagram de chuid Catullus agus Martial i láthair na huaire agus ní chreidfeá boladh an fhíona ar na leathanaigh, míorúilt ar fad gur landáil focal amháin ar an bpár agus na leads amuigh óiche i ndiaidh óiche i mbun ragairne agus scléipe agus chuile short iompraíochta nach bhfuil sé de chead againn a lua i mblog soineanta mar seo.
Níl fhios agam céard tá uathu – úrscéalta i bhfoirm véarsaíochta, b’fhéidir. Comhartha eicínt nach bhfuil an intleacht faoi bhrú an óil nó na ndrugaí. Caithfidh mé fáil réidh anois díreach leis na haikus a bhí do mo choinneáil ó mhaith.....

Monk, step further off

2006-03-28T00:15:00.000+01:00

Went to see Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Bill Manhire and Adam Zagajewski reading at the Poetry Now festival in Dún Laoghaire. Ní Dhomhnaill gave an undertstated but quietly powerful reading, which included her versions in modern Irish of the poems of Gormfhlaith (died 947), the medieval Irish woman poet to whom twenty or so poems are attributed, and even though some of them are dated after her own life, there is a strong tradition of Gormfhlaith as a poet. She was the daughter of the Uí Néill king Flann Sinna and was married to three men, all of whom she outlived: Cormac Mac Cuilenneáin the king-bishop of Cashel, Cerball mac Muireacáin and the Uí Néill king Niall Glúndubh who was killed in battle and for whom she wrote the poem below, ‘Beir a mhanaigh leat an chois’. It’s published in Osborn Bergin’s Irish Bardic Poetry and Thomas Kinsella provides a translation in The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, 1986), which I also give below. I’m not sure if Nuala’s versions have been published but I’m looking forward to reading them. What I heard in Dún Laoghaire was powerful.

Beir a mhanaigh leat an chois,
tóccaibh anos do tháobh Néill:
as rothrom chuireas tú an chré
ar an tú re luighinn féain.

Fada a mhanaigh atáoi thíar,
acc cúr na críadh ar Níall nár;
fada liom é a ccomhraidh dhuinn,
‘snach roichid a bhuinn an clár.

Mac Aodha Finnléith an óil,
ní dom dhéaon atá fa chrois;
sín ar a leabaidh an leac,
beir a mhanaigh leat an chois.

Fa Chloinn Uisnigh dob fearr clú
do bhí Deirdre mur tú anois,
a croidhe ina cliaph gur att -
beir a manaigh leat a ccois.

As me Gormlaith chumas rainn,
deaghinghean Floinn ó Dhúin Rois;
trúagh nach orom atá an leac -
beir a mhanaigh leat an ccois.

‘Monk, step further off.
Move away from Niall’s side.
You settle the clay to heavy
on him with whom I have lain.

You linger here so long
settling the clay on noble Niall:
he seems a long while in the coffin
where his soles don’t reach the boards.

‘Aed Finnliath’s son, of the drinking feasts,
under a cross – it is not my will.
Stretch the slab upon his bed.
Monk, step further off.

Over Uisnech’s famous family
Deirdre stood as I do now,
till her heart swelled in her side.
Monk, step further off.

‘I am Gormfhlaith, maker of verses,
Flann’s noble daughter from Dún Rois.
My grief that slab is not above me!
Monk, step further off.’

I love the proud imperiousness of that ‘beir a mhanaigh leat an chois’ or ‘beir do chos leat, a mhanaigh’ as Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill has it in Modern Irish (mura bhfuil dul amú orm).

The Rain and the Glass

2006-03-23T14:01:00.000Z

Listeners

Listening silence in the glass
The listening rain against.
All in the silent house asleep,
The rain and the glass awake;
All night they listen for a noise
No one is there to make.

All in the silent house asleep,
The rain and the glass awake;
Listening silence in the glass
The listening rain against.
All night they listen for a noise
Their silence cannot break.

These lines were written by Robert Nye at the age of thirteen one afternoon in 1952 after he fell asleep ‘by a window in the front room of the house in an Essex resort where I was living with my parents’. The poem came to him in a dream; ‘It was after this dream that I knew what I had to do for the rest of my life’. The poem is published in The Rain and the Glass which contains all the poems Nye has written since his Collected Poems in 1995 together with his own selection from that volume, and his piece about the book is published in the January 2006 edition of Acumen. Many poets will sympathise with Nye’s sense that ‘the writing of poems is based on a trust in inspiration – it happens – tempered by mistrust for the actual poem when it has been written down.’ For Nye, the poet needs to be ‘a kind of secretary to something more than his or her own little self’.

I’ve quoted the earliest of the poems in the volume; here’s one of the latest, after a sixth century Greek neo-Platonist cited ‘mostly because I like his name':

After Simplicius

Time is a dream and all we do
Will be the same again.
I’ll sit like this and talk with you,
Between my hands this cane.
And we shall kiss again, like this,
Again, and then again.

Again, and then again, like this
We’ll sit, I’ll have this cane
Between my hands, and we shall kiss
And talk, like this, again.
Dear, what I tell you now is true:
Time is a dream and all we do
Will be the same again.

And a final word from Nye, which should also strike a chord with poets: ‘I have spent my life trying to write poems , but the poems gathered in The Rain and the Glass came mostly when I was not.

The Rain and the Glass is published by Greenwich Exchange (8 Balmoral Close, Billericay, Essex, CM11 2LL) and costs £9.95 sterling.

The Bacchae of Baghdad

2006-03-16T10:56:00.000Z

How do you deal with the literature of the distant past? How do you make Greek tragedy comprehensible to a contemporary audience? How do you make the language of Greek drama performable? How distant is the distant past in any case? Is Beowulf nearer to or farther from us than Catullus? Is Homer more or less alien than Táin Bó Cuailgne or the Fiannaíocht? The sensibility shift between our slice of time and the many pasts doesn’t run in a nice vertical line, but loops and veers, sometimes intersecting with our world, sometimes sheering back and sometimes running in parallel. Other than the fact that your car might be more fuel efficient and your software more bloated, there’s no linear progression from era to era in anything that matters. Some art forms, though, don’t travel as easily as others. We might enjoy a jar in The Front Lounge with Catullus but baulk at extended conversation with the author of The Seafarer. We love Sappho now because all those intriguing fragments that constitute our version of her chime with our post-modernist fragmentary sensibility, but that doesn’t mean we’d enjoy dinner with Aeschylus or Euripides. In spite of the fact that Greek drama is regularly adapted for the contemporary stage, we don’t necessarily get it. We haven’t trooped out of Athens on a spring evening for a communal bonding ritual, we have the dimmest notion of the social, political, religious, let alone the literary or dramatic contexts of these plays. Their central concerns are, in many respects, very different from ours. We don’t inhabit the mindscape of fifth century BC Greece and have to work hard for a foothold in it. Ernst Gombrich has the great image of history as a lighted paper falling down a well shaft, and Euripides’s world is pretty far down that shaft.

True, there are fundamental human desires, fundamental ways of ordering civilisations, fundamental conflicts, but I’m not not sure how useful it is marshal contemporary events as parallels for the events in a play like The Bacchae. So what is the play about? It’s a conflict between two irreconcilable positions, neither of which holds much appeal, and neither of which, maybe, we really comprehend. Resentful Dionysus arrives in Thebes with his female Bacchantes, angered that he is not recognised as a god and that Pentheus has been installed as king. Pentheus forbids all Dionysian rites, seeing it as his duty to repel this new and barbaric Asian invasion that threatens Theban order. So, a conflict between a fanatical religious intensity and a ‘rational’ autocracy; between male and female, masculine and feminine. The play carries a heavy sexual charge. Pentheus seems to lust after Dionysus for all that he condemns and scorns him, and his desire to observe the Bacchic rites while dressed as a woman seems to imply a battery of unresolved sexual issues, as we might see it. But if Pentheus doesn’t offer much for an audience to sympathise with or get excited about, what’s so attractive about Dionysus? Licence, freedom, drink, craic, mayhem, but also murder, intolerance, mutilation, general monstrosity. We get to hear a detailed account of the Bacchic rites when the Messenger describes them to Pentheus early on in the play; at first it’s all bucolic sweetness and gushing fountains of wine, but pretty soon the blood’s up and the heifers are being dismembered with bare hands.

In Conall Morrison’s version in the Abbey, the Bacchantes are equated with suicide bombers, and Dionsyus comes on like an Islamic fanatic . Pentheus for his part is got up like an American general and we’re apparently in The Green Zone, ‘a little America embedded in the heart of Baghdad’. The publicity makes it even clearer: ‘Here set in the contemporary surrounds of Baghdad’s Green Zone, The Bacchae of Baghdad is a compelling investigation of the lethal force of political and religious fundamentalism.’ And this is where I begin to stumble. Tempting as it might be to overlay a contemporary parallel on the bones of the play, there is no sense in which either the original or this version applied any kind of analysis to the brutal succession of events presented. Things happen, and then more things happen. The royal house is destroyed, the Dionysian rage prevails. When Cadmus remonstrates with Dionysus at the end, suggesting that gods shouldn’t merely ape the destructive anger of men, Dionysus’s reply is that Zeus willed all this long ago – and that, more or less, is that. The bleak resolution is that everything was foreordained, and one kind of tyranny has supplanted another. Seen like this the play offers a nightmare vision of a world without the possibility of any escape from horror, in which human will plays no part. And that would be one way to play it. But if you’re going to namecheck Guantanamo and Baghdad, if you’re going to particularise the context to that extent, you have to have something meaningful to say about them, you have to engage with their particular realities – otherwise the contemporary reality is merely decorative, a frisson of danger to persuade the audience of the play’s relevance, or to provide something to look during the long speeches. As it is I don’t have the sense that Morrison is that interested in his own chosen context, beyond the opportunity it affords for visual spectacle. And besides, the realities of occupied Iraq are not actually transferable to the conflict between Pentheus and Bacchus. Conflicts don’t necessarily operate on the level of that kind of mythic struggle.

The difficulties of this version, though, go beyond the Iraq references.You have the sense that the bulk of the thinking has gone into the visual spectacle; into costume and choreography: how to deploy the music, how to lower Dionysus from the sky, what to do with the chorus, and so on. The words are secondary – it’s as if The Bacchae was an opera and the words a libretto half taken in. This version is ‘written and directed’ by Conall Morrison, with ‘written’ appearing to mean adapted from previously existing English translations. It would be interesting to know what exactly the relationship is, how this particular version was arrived at. It sounded like a conventional translation: stilted couplets, curiously old fashioned diction [what are you prating of?], the kind of prosaic yet simultaneously self-conscious poetry into which the classics frequently get translated. That is, you felt at all times as if you were, with all the dutifulness that that implies, watching a Greek tragedy. And yet huge chunks of the play consist of long speeches and reports of off-stage events. The language is the prime mover of the play – all the action is in the account of the action. If the language doesn’t grip us from the outset, we’re immediately distanced from the events of the play, we immediately begin to filter them through a literary haze, we become aware of the play as a reading of an ancient classic. The challenge for the adapter is to find a way to release the text from itself, to let it slip free of the long burden of its past.

As I write this I hear the radio advertise The Bacchae of Baghdad as ‘a powerful play for today’ but this is advertiser speak; if it’s to speak to us now, it needs a radical re-visioning. Its central conflict needs to made to speak to our own lives rather to our historical awareness, and dressing it in contemporary allusions isn’t the answer. The language itself needs to be reconstructed to speak to us: it needs to be vigorous, muscular, as dramatically powerful as the original was in its time, in the Tony Harrison’s adaptations of Aeschylus are. It needs, maybe, to be less faithful to the lineaments of the original since that fidelity ends up more often than not translating as piety. The staging of it needs to be re-thought. Our attention begins to wander almost from beginning, from Dionysus’ long opening speech – again, we need to be made forget that we’re watching a two thousand five hundred year old play, we need to be brought right into it before it disappears from us behind a veil of translationese and exoticism. Otherwise we end up in the drama museum.

Sailor's Home

2006-03-11T20:41:00.000Z

How long is it since poetry became public property? Today, poets write with the idea of publishing in our minds, and poetry books are published with the idea of sales in the publisher’s minds (however few!). Even poetry events seem to be organised according to the numbers of tickets that can be sold. The public has become an invisible hand, playing with and controlling the standards of the poetry world, and as such has transformed it into just as dull a field as any other directly commercial endeavour.

The above is from the preface to Sailor’s Home, a miscellany of poetry by Arjen Duinker, W.N. Herbert, Uwe Kolbe, Peter Laugesen, Karine Martel and Yang Lian, published by Shearsman Books . I suppose it’s true that poets write with the idea of publishing, though I’m not sure how primary a concern that is. Most poetry publishing is pretty fugitive. The tiny numbers involved mean that the act of publication is, in a sense, symbolic rather than real, or a kind of virtual reality, and I can think of few publishers whose decisions are influenced by the likelihood of sales, since whether a book will sell eighty copies or two hundred copies is unlikely to have much bearing on the economics of the operation. And again, having organised many myself, I can’t think of any poetry events that are organised on the basis of ticket sales, and can’t see either how the dire invisible hand of the public has any effect on ‘the poetry world’. If poetry is dull it’s because poets are dull; and if it’s brilliant, exciting, captivating it’s the poets are all of those things as they write it.

Still, it’s not hard to see why poets might want to remove themselves from the public domain from time to time, even as they fool themselves into thinking they entered it in the first place. They are after all poorly socialised creatures, and sometimes it’s just plain fun to talk to other oddballs like yourself. Such, crudely summarised, is the thinking behind Sailor’s Wardrobe, which took the form of a private poetry festival held last October in London. Each of the participating poets had to respond to the title, and the results are published in the book. Again from the preface:

The poems in the book do not 'respond' to each other in a narrow sense:each poet has explored his or her own understanding of the title ‘Sailor’s Home’, and arranged their individual forms accordingly. So here there are at least six boats setting sail on different waterways, rivers, lakes – and all seven seas....

Here are two samples:

Mare Silentium
is whaur aa sowels at last dae come
whas life wiz spent upon
thi silent craft o song
tae sail away sae dumb
(Mare Silentium)
we sail awa sae dumb

Layin thi keels o phrase
or sailin skeely through the waves
that waassh ower in crazy praise
until oor time is duin
and we sail tae kingdom come
(Mare Silentium)
we sail tae kingdom come...

(from ‘Shanty of the Sailor’s Moon’ by W.N. Herbert)

Uwe Kolbe
Sailor’s Love

Mit ruhigen Schnitten löste sie
die Reste vom Kerngehäuse
aus jedem der Schnitze
des saftigen Apfels.

Ich legte mich in Ihre Hand
und legte mich in ihre Ruhe.
Ich legte mich fast
in Ihr Leben.

Dann stand sie wieder auf
und griff nach den Klinke
und ging zurück
in die Küchen der Welt.

Sailor’s Love

With calm snips she removed
remnants of the core
from every slice
of the juice-filled apple.

I laid myself down in her hand
laid myself in her calm,
laid myself more or less
in her life.

But then she arose
and reached for the doorknob
and went back out
into the world’s kitchens

(translated by Mick Standen and Joe Tudor)

The rustling of the silk

2006-03-10T15:15:00.001Z

Back after a long absence with three versions of a poem from the Chinese, for our edification, followed by a moral quandary.

The first is Ezra Pound’s.

Liu Ch’e

The rustling of the silk is discontinued,
Dust drifts over the court-yard,
There is no sound of footfall, and the leaves
Scurry into heaps and lie still,
And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them:

A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.

Much has been written about Pound as a translator or mediator of Chinese poetry into English. He didn’t speak Chinese, so his versions don’t have scholarly pretensions. In the Cathay poems he relied on the notes that Ernest Fenollosa compiled in Tokyo, and was quite happy to use the Japanese designation Rihaku for the Chinese poet Li Po. Arthur Waley, whose own translations of Chinese poetry were hugely influential, objected to many of Pound’s versions, though it’s hard to see how his version of, say, ‘The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter’ improves on Pound’s. Pound’s great gift as a poetic mediator was his superb ear. Compare, for instance, the poem above with Waley’s version below.

Li Fu-Jen
by Arthur Waley

The sound of her silk skirt has stopped.
On the marble pavement dust grows.
Her empty room is cold and still,
Fallen leaves are piled against the doors.
Longing for that lovely lady
How can I bring my aching heart to rest?

Waley’s is undoubtedly truer to the original. It doesn’t have Pound’s imagistic addition (‘A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.’) but as a poem in English Pound’s seems to me far superior. ‘The rustling of the silk is discontinued’ is infinitely more suggestive than ‘The sound of her silk skirt has stopped.’ And it’s also stranger, less like a poem in English, less like an English-language locution, a typical canny Poundian ‘foreignisation’. Pound’s prowess as an interpreter is, though, complicated by the fact that many of his translations are less relationships with an original than with other translations. He was a pretty ruthless cannibaliser of previous translations, which he rarely acknowledged, and often went to trouble to conceal. Have a look at the poem below, by the Chinese scholar Herbert Giles, published some year’s before Pound’s version. I’ve marked up the similarities with Pound’s version:
　

Gone
by Herbert A. Giles

The sound of rustling silk is stilled,
With dust the marble courtyard filled;
No footfalls echo on the floor,
Fallen leaves in heaps block up the door...
For she, my pride, my lovely one, is lost,
And I am left, in hopeless anguish tossed.

The use of the passive construction, the lexical similarities, indicate that Pound essentially based his translation on Giles’ version. It adapts it freely and, it must be said, improves it substantially as an effective English poem. Do his methods matter then? Should we we fling the book down in disgust at his theft or applaud his resourcefulness? A very large amount of Pound’s translations contain the corpses of other translations, as any detective work will show. There’s a very good account here which shows that his celebrated ‘Seafarer’ came straight from Cook and Tinker’s Translations from Old English Poetry, published by Ginn & Co in 1902. All’s fair in love and modernism, maybe, though this kind of intertextuality isn’t usually what people have in mind. But why should the magpie plundering and pillaging which was so much part of Pound’s aesthetic and genius baulk at delicately re-arranging and re-orchestrating the work of others? To expect anything else is to expect Pound to be a different kind of poet. Everything he did proceeded from the same impulses, and whether texts are presented as originals or translations or a fusion of the two, they are all fictions, they’re all charged with the same transformative energy. The appropriative genius is all in the difference between ‘The sound of rustling silk is stilled’ and ‘The rustling of the silk is discontinued’.

Looking for Home

2006-01-21T22:45:00.000Z

Liam Carney as Gerry Newman in Homeland

Maybe because the country is small Irish writers very often have a highly self-conscious relationship with it. They feel intimately bound up with the life of the state and feel it incumbent upon them to record its psycho-geography, its socio-economic shifts, its daily preoccupations – almost, at times, as if the imagination were an extension of the chat show, capable of absorbing and rapidly processing the urgent issues of the day and relating these to to how the nation sees itself, how its perception of itself might have altered, how far the nation has fallen from idealised visions of itself. . .Writers everywhere take their subjects where they find them, but somehow it works differently here; writers sometimes seem to be writing to an expectation that they be in some way representative, that their work should be a kind of ongoing Prime Time earnestly investigating the eternal state of chassis of the national soul. I was thinking this the other night as I watched Paul Mercier’s new play, Homeland, in the Abbey.

The play is advertised as a play about money, the search for home,‘a fable of modern times . . . a sweeping tale of wheeling, dealing and urban mythmaking based on the legend of Oisín and Tír na nÓg’. Everything is there: crooked property deals, drugs, immigration, prostitution, abuse, religion, the subjects seeming to multiply exponentially as the play continues. And everything happens in a hurry; the play is a fast car driven through contemporary Ireland, or Irish Times-land, Joe Duffy-land, Marian-Finucane land. The play is a succession of rapidly shifting scenes, all of them acted at the speed limit, new characters introduced and dismissed as the large cast multi-tasks, the situations and events piling up until we struggle to remember what’s at issue in this particular scene. And underneath it all, like a spluttery engine, runs the compulsory Irish myth: in this case Oisín and Tír na nÓg. In case we miss any of the parallels, or in case we haven’t looked into Agallamh na Seanórach recently, the programme serves us an eloquent essay on the subject by Irish scholar Angela Bourke.

Oisín’s father was Fionn Mac Cumhaill, and a persistent tradition. . . says that his mother was a deer. . .Outside culture from birth, but immersed in nature; partaking in animal life yet all, or almost all, human, Oisín has much in common with the heroes of other traditions: Romulus and Remus, for instance, or Oedipus. But the stories of the Fianna are unique to Gaelic tradition, and Oisín himself has been involved again and again by artists contemplating change in these regions on the edge of Europe.

So as the economy loses the run of itself, as the pockets of the venal bulge, as the service sector offers the skinny embrace of the minimum wage to the Gastarbeiter of the Tiger, as the drugs flow and the litanies of the evils prosperity are composed by the tabloid thinkers of the day, we reach for the bony hands of the Fianna, that we may know ourselves. And Oisín in 2006 is Gerry Newman, communications whizz-kid, greaser of developer’s palms, now disgraced. He’s back in Dublin for a mysterious crucial meeting in the airport, but things go wrong and he’s propelled into the under life of the city where he meets various dubious characters and is robbed by junkie prostitute Niamh in her blonde wig (Niamh Chinn Óir, Niamh of the Golden Hair). He sees the bleak housing estates for which he was partly responsible, witnesses poverty, lives ruined by drugs, murder and other mayhem in a ‘thrilling white-knuckle ride into a world forged but forgotten by the Celtic Tiger.’

The language in which all this takes place is a mix of cod myth-speak, cod communicationese, cod evangelical salvationese, and the style of the production is broadly comic, a hectic ensemble grand guignol romp. It would be daft to look for any conclusions from what is a satire of the broadest stroke, but the problem with this style of theatre is that it, for all the rich theatricality, it can seem somewhat content-poor. Stuff happens, then more stuff happens. The variety of linguistic registers, the speed of the playing, the constant multiplication of the targets, means that nothing much really can be resolved: this style doesn’t do resolution. Or engagement, beyond a kind of distanced, amused engagement as the audience marvels at the technical slickness, the timing and so on. After ninety minutes without an interval, there’s a conclusion of kinds, but by that time Oisín/Newman has begun to outstay his welcome and in spite of all the transformations he undergoes is exactly the same character (and, miraculously, not a day older) in the last minute as he was in the first. What worked for, say, Native City, doesn’t work here because the subject, if you take it on – if you first of all distil a subject from the pile of preoccupations – demands some kind of polemical engagement.

In a sense the style insulates the production from the kind of impatience I seem to be showing here. But if you take on the foibles of the Celtic Tiger (I promise never to utter this wretched phrase again), you pretty much have to end up saying something about it. Otherwise you’re left with a set of theatrical snatches, play-bites, a kind of turbo charged David McWilliams (who, indeed, features in a talk ‘about The Grown Ups and the new Irish middle class.’ in the Peacock in February). And maybe this is the intention, a quick take on the obvious manifestations of the new economy (there’s a running gag about immigrants in the workforce complete with funny voices which was getting to be a serious annoyance), a theatrical addition to the running commentary on ourselves that fills the airwaves and the papers. Maybe that's why, next Thursday (26 January, 6.30pm – 7.15pm) broadcaster and journalist Damien Kiberd responds to Homeland. You can go to that, or avoid the economics and go to the post show discussion on Wednesday 1 February.

Henry Snodden and the Coastguard Station

2006-01-19T00:44:00.000Z

Below is a poem by Eugenio Montale followed by three translations. The first version is less a translation than an extended riff on a vague notion of the original, and is taken from Tom Paulin's The Road to Inver, which came out last year. Billed as presenting four decades of the poet's translations, the book does nothing of the sort. Instead, it presents a series of loose takes on original poems identified only by the appearance of the poet's name in brackets underneath the titles. Thus

Who can say to the birds
shut the fuck up
or tell the sheep in the yow trummle
not to struggle and leap?

turns out, after a deal of searching, to be Goethe's 'Unvermeidlich':

Wer kann gebieten den Vögeln
Still zu sein auf der Flur?
Und wer verbieten zu zappeln
Den Schafen unter der Schur?

Is there anything wrong with this? It's a pretty common procedure, after all, translation as 'imitation', a kind of intertextual frolic à la Pound or Lowell. What's interesting about this particular example is the lengths Paulin goes to to domesticate Montale's poem into a Northern Irish context. You won't find Henry Snodden in 'La casa dei doganieri', nor any references to the Black and Tan war, nor to Teelin, Carrick and or 'Tim Ring's hill above the harbour'. Part of Paulin's fun here is this kind of radical domestication and transformation of Montale, as if he fell asleep in Liguria and woke up in Portnoo sounding very much like, well, Tom Paulin.

The other two are close, faithful translations, the first by Jonathan Galassi and the second by William Arrowsmith. Both have a lot to recommend them, both work as poems in English and catch the dark urgent discords of the original at the same time. As always in this kind of exercise, it's fascinating to see how two versions of the same text differ; how different translation decisions get made. For instance, the phrase 'Tu non ricordi' occurs three times in the Montale poem; it's the very first element of the poem and its repetition in the third and in the final stanza hammers home the haunting absence of the addressee. Galassi translates this phrase differently on each of the three occasions:

You won’t recall the house of the customs men...

You don’t remember...

and

You don’t recall the house of this, my evening.

This seems to me less urgent than the original; it loses the force of the repetition. Arrowsmith sticks to the simple 'I don't remember'. His is maybe the nervier of the two translations, tauter, less conversational.

The Arrowsmith version is taken from The Occasions (Norton and Company, 1987), one of the best Montale translations, and Galassi's is from his monumental Collected Poems 1920-1954 (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 1998). Both are excellent examples of the translator's art.

In his Translator's Preface Arrowsmith sets out the principles behind his translation of Montale:

In general I have tried to translate according to a few rule-of-thumb derived from my sense of what accurate rendering of meaning and tone requires. I have therefore avoided prettification, embellishment, and traditional concinnities like the plague. [five euros for the first accurate definition of 'concinnity']...I have conscientiously resisted the translator's to fill in or otherwise modify Montale's constant ellipses, to accommodate my reader by providing smoother transitions. And I have done my best to honor Montale's reticence, his ironic qualifications, and evaded cadences....'

Here are the texts; you can judge for yourselves the success of the various versions.

La casa dei doganieri / Eugenio Montale

Tu non ricordi la casa dei doganieri
sul rialzo a strapiombo sulla scogliera:
desolata t’attende dalla sera
in cui v’entrò lo sciame dei tuoi pensieri
e vi sostò irrequieto.

Libeccio sferza da anni le vecchie mura
e il suono del tuo riso non è più lieto:
la bussola va impazzita all’avventura
e il calcolo dei dadi più non torna.
Tu non ricordi; altro tempo frastorna
la tua memoria; un filo s’addipana.

Ne tengo ancora un capo; ma s’allontana
la casa e in cima al tetto la banderuola
affumicata gira senza pietà.
Ne tengo un capo; ma tu resti sola
né qui respiri nell’oscurità.

Oh l’orizzonte in fuga, dove s’accende
rara la luce della petroliera!
Il varco è qui? (Ripullula il frangente
ancora sulla balza che scoscende...)
Tu non ricordi la casa di questa
mia sera. Ed io non so chi va e chi resta.

The Coastguard Station
(Montale)

Henry Snodden and me we’ve nearly forgotten
that scraggy coastguard station –
a ruin from the Black and Tan war
it stood on Tim Ring’s hill above the harbour
like an empty a crude roofless barracks
-- same as the station in Teelin or Carrick
with the usual concrete harbour
like a berm built the century before last
to make a new fishing village with a slightly daft
name – in this case Portnoo – below the head

one August we came back and instead
of that ruin there was only the grassy track
on the grassy hill and so the field’s stayed
year after year though we’re both afraid
that one day very soon that unused field
‘ll be sold as sites – then we’ll watch
as a new colony of thatched
breezeblock cottages – Irish Holiday Homes –
with green plastic oilgas tanks at the back –
as a new colony starts up all owned
by people like us from Belfast
who’ve at last laid that claggy building’s ghost
-- well I wouldn’t go as far as that

[Tom Paulin]

The House of the Customs Men

You won’t recall the house of the customs men
on the bluff that overhangs the reef:
It’s been waiting, empty, since the evening
your thoughts swarmed in
and hung there, nervously.

Sou’westers have lashed the old walls for years
and your laugh’s not careless anymore:
the compass needle wanders crazily
and the dice no longer tell the score.
You don’t remember: other times
assail your memory; a thread gets wound.

I hold one end still; but the house recedes
and the smoke-stained weathervane
spins pitiless up on the roof.
I hold on to an end; but you’re alone,
not here, not breathing in the dark.

Oh the vanishing horizon line,
where the tanker’s lights flash now and then!
Is the channel here? (The breakers
still seethe against the cliff that drops away…)
You don’t recall the house of this, my evening.
And I don’t know who’s going or who’ll stay.

(Jonathan Galassi)

The Coastguard Station

You don’t remember the coastguard house
perched at the top of the jutting height,
awaiting you still, abandoned since that night
when your thoughts came swarming in
and paused there, hovering.

Southwesters have lashed the old walls for years,
the gaiety has vanished from your laugh:
the compass swings at random, crazy,
odds can no longer be laid on the dice.
You don’t remember: a thread pays out.

I hold one end still; but the house
keeps receding, above the roof the soot-
blackened weathervane whirls, pitiless.
I hold one end: but you stay on, alone, not
here, breathing in my darkness.

Oh, the horizon keeps on receding, there, far out
where a rare tanker’s light blinks in the blackness!
Is the crossing here? (The furious breakers
climb the cliff that falls off, sheer…)
You don’t remember the house of this, my evening.
And I don’t know who’s staying, who’s leaving.

[William Arrowsmith]

See also Arrowsmith’s Translator’s Preface to The Occasions, p xxi.

Poetry Ireland Review 85

2006-01-12T12:00:00.000Z

Just putting the latest Poetry Ireland Review (no 85) to bed. I’m reasonably pleased with it – there’s a good mix of stuff: poems in translation including Piotr Sommer, Adam Zagajewski, Yang Lian and some of the poets in the Cork 2005 series. Adam Zagajewski, Yang Lian and Robin Robertson, who also has a poem in the issue, will all feature in Poetry Now 06 in Dún Laoghaire. David Butler looks at Michael Schmidt’s translations of Vallejo, and we publish a slew of them; James Harpur writes on Boethius and contributes new poems. There are also poems by, among others, Eamonn Grennan, Arlene Ang, Peter Robinson, Michael Coady, Hary Clifton, Biddy Jenkisnson and Michael O'Loughlin. Michael Cronin reviews Ciaran Carson’s version of Cúirt an Mheán Oíche and Alan Gillis’s first collection; Peter Denman looks at Pat Boran, Joseph Woods and Thomas McCarthy ; Siobhán Campbell considers Sara Berkeley, Carol Ann Duffy and Mark Roper ; Peter Robinsonreviews Jean Valentine ; Fred Johnston on William Wall, Gerard Fanning , and Jean O’Brien . And Dennis O'Driscoll contributes his usual series of pickings from the words of poets. Here are the opening two:

‘Poetry mistrusts language: song cosies up to it.’
– George Szirtes online, 27 September 2005

‘A relatively small number of educated people read poetry, and written poetry affects songwriting, and songwriting affects masses of people. Poetry becomes an expression that filters into the world slowly.’
– Robert Hass, Grist, 13 October 2005

The issue should be out in early February. Copies available from Poetry Ireland

Messages for Moore

2006-01-08T10:12:00.000Z

Fans of haiku and of Paul Muldoon will be pleased to know the poet has followed up his ‘Hopewell Haiku’ with Sixty Instant Messages to Tom Moore. The Flap is grateful to David Burleigh, whose review of the pamphlet in Modern Haiku (Summer 2005) alerted him to this work. The IM’s record a trip to Bermuda, where Moore was appointed Registrar to the Admiralty Prize Court in Bermuda in 1803, though he wasn’t long there before he appointed a deputy and returned to London. You can read Moore’s account of his time there, and of his travels in the United States, in Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (1806). Here’s a taster to whet the appetite:

The Big House, you see,
still stands, though now the tenants
are the absentees.

Orange overshoes
make the puffin less nimble
on dry land, it’s true.

Sixty Instant Messages to Tom Moore , by Paul Muldoon (Lincoln, Ill.: Modern Haiku Press, 2005). ISBN 0-9741894-1-3. 32 pages. Hand set and bound by Swamp Press. 5½ x 8½, colored inks & paper, hand tied. $20.00 postpaid from Modern Haiku, PO Box 68, Lincoln, IL 60656.4342

Head down in Dublin

2006-01-08T10:05:00.000Z

The poems that I like best are the poems in which something happens. You go through to the end and you ask what was that about, and then you go back over it and have another look at it. There has to be enough stuff on the surface to hold your attention, and you can do that with lots of different things, with imagery, or sound, or whatever you want. But then there has to be an element of worrying at the poem until you get something from it. Something draws clear, something very small perhaps is clarified in it. That’s how the best poetry works, I think….there are some poems that I thought I knew well which are still coming clear to me now. There are lots of different things going on in good poems, and you can live with a poem for years and then suddenly think, ah, that’s what that’s about. I think that’s a good thing. If you instantly think you’ve got all that a poem offers, either it’s not a very good poem or you’ve made a mistake.

The above is from an interview with Nick Laird which will appear in the spring issue of The Stinging Fly.

The issue will also have new poems from Laird and from Eamon Grennan, Paula Meehan, Christine Broe, Mary O'Donnell, Mark Roper, Ron Houchin, Billy Ramsell, Alan Jude Moore and Oliver Dunne, and features translations of Mexican poet Pura Lopez Colome by Lorna Shaughnessy. There are also stories by Colm Liddy, Gillman Noonan, Ross O'Connor, Kusi Okamura and Aiden O'Reilly.

The Cat Flap always knew Dublin was a dangerous class of a place where a smack in the gob or a knife in the back were among the rewards of art, and he’s glad to have this confirmed by Nick Laird. The poet recently reviewed the collected Kavanagh in the London Review of Books and was less than whelmed: ‘He’s an incredibly important poet. But I also think if you had to sit down and read through that Collected Poems, you would be irritated and bored by a lot of it.’ After the review appeared ‘Brendan Barrington [editor, The Dublin Review] e-mailed me to say that he agreed with me but that he didn’t think I should come to Dublin for a while.’ Oh, a dangerous place indeed. The Cat Flap has long since taken to wearing dark glasses as he prowls the town.

The Stinging Fly
PO Box 6016, Dublin 8, Ireland

For news updates about our submission deadlines, publications and events see: http://www.stingingfly.org/latest.html

The Translation Muscle

2006-01-05T23:56:00.000Z

Take a number of Cork poets and pair them with poets from the then ‘accession’ states of Europe and countries beginning their negotiations with the EU like Bulgaria and Romania, and publish the results of the encounter – this was the ambitious project which the Munster Literature Centre set itself as part of the Cork 2005 European Capital of Culture.

Poetry translation into English can often be a fairly loosely defined affair and in truth we probably need a more extensive vocabulary to describe the range of practice from close linguistic encounter to the working of translations provided by others which, with one exception, is what happens here. The fact that the poets don’t speak the languages they are translating caused a small splash of controversy. Can a poet who does not speak a source language be said to ‘translate’ a poem from that language? If not, how should that encounter be described? The poets, apart from Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, worked from cribs provided by intermediate translators. The exact role they played is unclear, and the books don’t have an agreed protocol for acknowledging this somewhat mysterious assistance, the intermediate translator sometimes acknowledged on the flyleaf, sometimes credited as the author of distinct ‘versions’, sometimes relegated to a note inside.

In one sense this kind of translation encounter is a reflection of the power of English. In other languages translation invariably means a linguistic encounter. No French, German, Bulgarian or Romanian translator would translate from a language they didn’t know; knowledge of the source language would be a given. The context in which translation happens is very often an interest in the source literature. In poetry translation it has become very common for translators into English even from such widely known languages as French, German or Spanish not to speak those langauges. To an extent this reflects the lack of interest within English-speaking cultures in other languages. Each year university language departments dolefully announce that fewer students are studying foreign languages, as a variety of English becomes the universal lingua franca. But it’s also a reflection of the fact that poetry pretty much always gets translated by poets, just as it’s poets who form the bulk of the consumers for the product. English language poets are not often linguists, but their appetite for translation, or however we choose to define the encounter, is often considerable.

It’s true that the act of translation is always a literary event rather than a purely linguistic event, an act of creative interpretation whose end result is a new production in the poet-translator’s language, but if the linguistic encounter is removed completely from the equation, what’s left is inevitably a secondary interpretation, a response to a response, a working up of a literal supplied by someone else. Should this bother us? Isn’t it the Poundian paradigm? Isn’t this how most translations from the classics work, with poets sifting through the existing translations and scholarship to sharpen their own work? That in itself is a process of engagement and will usually have been triggered by an affinity with the work, however encountered. The Cork project is just that: a project. And affinities will have had to have been orchestrated to an extent. A friendly academic, an interested ambassador...How do poets who don’t speak the language encounter poetry in that language in the first instance? How is one Lithuanian poet chosen above another? Do already existing translations play a role? Do they encounter each other at international conferences and jamborees?

Few of the books in the series have introductory material, but a bit of googling produces the following account by Kristin Dimotrova: ‘I received a letter from Gregory [O’Donoghue] saying that he’d read a lot of Bulgarian poetry, but that he’d really liked my poetry and that he wanted to work with me on the project. It was out of this world! I still have the letter’, says Kristin. ‘He came to Bulgaria to discuss the project. When I saw him I said: Gregory, you look like Obi Wan Kanobi. He laughed. Working with him was a great experience.’ (www.sofiaecho.com). How did Gregory O’Donoghue encounter Bulgarian poetry? Was it in the original or through translation? How did Maurice Riordan come across Immanuel Mifsud or Robert Welch happen on Dana Podracká? The blurbs on the back of the books give us some context, but these can be somewhat cryptic:

In one of the few volumes with an introductory note, Theo Dorgan explain how he came to work on Barbara Korun. It began with a decision to translate a woman ‘because I had learned that, as with Ireland in the 80s, poetry in Slovenia was not what you might call actively receptive to women’s voices, so there was a small opportunity to make a political point, and partly because I thought that the final texts might be more readily seen as versions of the author’s originals if it was clear that the speaking voice was not mine as man.’ The Slovenian ambassador to Ireland provided Dorgan ‘with as wide a range of texts in translation as it was possible to obtain, and gave generously of her time in helping me find my way, at last, to the work I have chosen to translate’. Dorgan also clarifies the role of his intermediate translator, Ana Jelnikar, ‘who supplied me with meticulous line-by-line literal versions of these poems, and with minutely detailed, illuminating scholarly notes – I was able to cross over into the territory of Barbara Korun’s poems by means of a strong, well-engineered bridge.’ He also worked closely with the poet herself to make the poems ‘as faithful as could be to the originals.’

A project, then, determined on the one hand by ideological decision followed by research and selection of the poet to be translated, and on the other by fidelity to a distant original. Many of the translations in the series read precisely as if they were labouring under the influence of the literal versions, preserve syntactic awkwardness and odd line breaks, and end up in the realm of translationese, where they could have done with cutting loose sufficiently to carve out a real poem in English. Some make a particular effort to domesticate the originals into a recognisable local idiom. This is true for instance of Greg Delanty’s versions of Kyriakos Charalambides, which make for lively reading, though sometimes domestication can go too far: ‘whose dantá (sic) are they in your laimheen (sic)?’ (‘In Aramaic’). Some improve on versions of poems that I’ve seen published elsewhere (Gerry Murphy’s versions of Katarzyna Borun-Jagodzinska or Gregory O’Donoghue’s of Kristin Dimitrova). And many have succeeded in crafting memorable English poems from their material.

The fact that the she learned Romanian undoubtedly deepened Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s engagement with Ileana Malancioiu’s work. The resulting translations certainly make a strong impression, particularly the series of poems written in memory of the poet’s sister. The versions have a strength of line and image and work convincingly in English. The edition also has the benefit of a useful introductory essay on the poet’s work. The essay pursues her career through its various phases as well as giving us a sense of where it fits in the tradition of Romanian poetry. This gives us a context to read her in and this seems to me me a useful model for presenting poetry from a culture likely to be unfamiliar to most readers.
Lack of context can make it difficult to respond to poems which depend on awareness of specific events or circumstances. The concluding poem in Dana Podracká’s book is ‘The Place of Execution of the First President’:

There are no explanatory notes, but would our response to this be affected by knowing that that the president in question is the Catholic priest Monsignor Tiso, president of the collaborationist ‘independent’ Slovakia from 1939-1945, from which 60,000 Jews were deported to the death camps? How much context does a translation require? Or does translation function for us as an ahistorical, asymmetrical zone, a wash of words and images at a tangent to the real? Do we, as readers, prefer a certain socio-political vagueness, a blurrily delineated psycho-geography of otherness, to the kind of anxious explaining of the dedicatee at the foot of Zbynek Hejda’s poem ‘Variations on Gelner III’ (see below): ‘Sergej was a friend of Hejda’s who used to be pro-communist but became disillusioned’ ? One of the peculiar by-products of translation is that can feed a notion of universalist poetry, cleanly purged of the laboriousness of the particular, but it’s a dubious notion, and one of the useful functions of this series is to remind us that poems do come from particular places, out of particular circumstances and historical pressures. The fact that we don’t necessarily understand these at our first encounter should provoke us to explore further, and if these books work as initial provisional reports on a single voice from each of the countries selected, they’ll have served us very well.
This particular selection of voices wouldn’t have reached us without the paraphernalia of the City of Culture, but wouldn’t it be interesting if translation of poetry was integrated into the fabric of Irish publication, so that publishers’ lists might carry news of poetic close encounters on some kind of regular basis? And poets might get a chance to flex the useful translation muscle, and fork out on dictionaries, grammars, and language lessons. . .
Here, in the meantime, with thanks to Cork 2005/Southword, are a few sample poems from the series.

Book issued at the time of writing in the Cork 2005/Southword series:

Ileana Malancioiu, After the Raising of Lazarus, translated from the Romanian by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Kristin Dimitrova, A Visit to the Clockmaker. Translated from the Bulgarian by Greogory O’Donoghue.
Barbara Korun, Songs of Earth and Light. Translated from the Slovene by Theo Dorgan.
Kyriakos Charalambides, Selected Poems. Translated from the Greek by Greg Delanty.
Immanuel Mifsud, Confidential Reports. Translated from the Maltese by Maurice Riordan.
Dana Podracká, Forty Four. Translated from the Slovak by Robert Welch.
Katarzyna Borun-Jagodzinska. Translated from the Polish by Gerry Murphy.
Zbynek Hejda, A Stay in a Sanatorium, translated from the Czech by Bernard O’Donoghue.
Guntars Godins, Flying Blind, translated from the Latvian by Eugene O’Connell.
Sigitas Parulskis, The Towers Turn Red, translated from the Lithuanian by Liz O’Donoghue.

Ileana Malancioiu

The Doctor on Duty

Go away quickly, she said to me, I’m afraid,
you see that Doctor X is on duty
he surely knows what to give me to help me to breathe,
he told me nobody dies while he’s on the ward.

And indeed, that very young doctor
who was not as famous as his heart was good
came in te middle of the night and gave her
something that kept her breathing until the next day.

Afterwards she understood
that his shift was finished and we had started
that terrible day about which already
she had begun to say it would never be over.

The one who was on duty looked down
on us without interfering:
I never said that nobody dies
while I am on duty, I am not at fault.
From After the Raising of Lazarus, translated from the Romanian by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Katarzyna Borun-Jagodzinska

City Poets

It would be easier for us
if we stopped saying it straight,
if we his our meaning in metaphor,
if we dealt solely in obscurity.
The city sells itself over and over
for false friendships, for temporary gain.
Look at the previous dwellers
abandoned outside its gates,
dumped in its overflowing cemeteries.
We are no different,
our home is a dark stain
on a tablecloth,
a heart fashioned inexpertly
on a sewing machine.
We are foundlings
left in boxes outside orphanages,
squirming and wailing without end.

From Pocket Apocalypse, translated from the Polish by Gerry Murphy, intermediate translation by Karolina Barski

Immanuel Mifsud

The Mad People

In the electronic age every nutcase
with a laptop is writing a masterpiece.
They spend the night locked up in chat rooms
and emerge with red eyes and love poems.

From Confidential Reports, translated from the Maltese by Maurice Riordan, assisted by Adrian Grima.

Kristin Dimitrova

Sofia

Uneven lines of lamps –
some bright, others smashed.
Silent wake
of a Mercedes
sweeps across my face,
cigarette smoke
of a bully.
Asphalt mimics the sky
for colour and firmness.
The bingo hall is open,
the church is under repairs,
Coca-Cola wishes us
Merry Christmas.
In my empty pockets
I keep my fingers crossed
for the oboist
with his hat at his feet.

From A Visit to the Clockmaker, translated from the Bulgarian by Gregory O’Donoghue assisted by Kristin Dimitrova.

Urgent invitations

2005-12-27T00:35:00.000Z

Reading a review in the TLS of a book of essays by WS Merwin in which reviewer talks about the different Merwins, the different poets that live in the neighbourhood , as it were, and I liked that idea of different kinds of poets, different impulses, co-exisiting. I find that a much more congenial notion than a poet of one aspect, one kind, recognisable and predictable. But the reviewer also made another point about Merwin that I think is important. He talked about the Merwin who writes out of impulsion, and the Merwin who writes out of invitation. The first referred to a need to write something, the second to a kind of professional writing, where the writer sits down at his desk, because this is what he does, and produces language in the hope or expectation that this invitation might lead to a discovery. This seems to me to go to the heart of the poet’s relationship with his writing, particularly in an age that favours and expects productivity. The point was that a good deal of Merwin’s work begs the question, ‘did this really need to be written?’. And should something ‘need to be written’ if it’s any good or is that just old fashioned romantic twaddle? I don’t think it is, therefore I think that one characteristic of poetry is its built-in sense of compulsion, urgency. There are many kinds and levels of urgency, of course, but if it isn’t there in some shape or form you have dead language on the page. And yet, there is something puritanical about the impulsion model too, something of the old Romantic imperative. What’s wrong with invitation as a mode of working? Not a thing. Exercising the poetry muscle seems like a very good and necessary activity to me, a way of getting at the core. Urgency sometimes has to be dug for, waited for, invited.

Playwright attacked

2005-12-22T13:46:00.000Z

The literary world has been rightly exercised recently at the outrageous treatment by the Turkish government of writer Ohran Pamuk, but we don’t always have to stray too far from home to see bizarre treatment of writers. Incredible reports in today’s paper about loyalist attacks on Belfast playwright Gary Mitchell and his family. Mitchell is well known in this part of the world for plays like In a Little World of Our Own centred on a family of three brothers living in the Rathcoole District of North Belfast, produced in the Peacock. Many others were produced in the Lyric and the Royal Court. According to the report , the playwright is now in hiding ‘after a campaign of death threats and bomb attacks by loyalist paramilitaries’. Mitchell’s plays, including As the Beast Sleeps and the Force of Change, which dealt explicitly with loyalist violence, have been controversial in his own community, but this seems astonishing:

Mitchell's home was attacked by paramilitaries carrying baseball bats, their faces hidden by football scarves. His car was petrol bombed and exploded in his driveway. His wife, Alison, grabbed their seven-year-old son from his bed, ran outside with him, put him over a wall and threw herself on top of him to protect him. She said: "I heard an explosion and I thought they've killed Gary.

Mitchell spoke to the Guardian from a secret location:

The Belfast novelist Glenn Patterson has organised an open letter in support of Mitchell with 30 other writers and if I find it I’ll link to it.
Susan McKay has a strong piece about it in the Irish News:

It will be interesting to see what coverage this attracts in the Irish press. Had Mitchell been intimidated and driven out by republicans it would have been front page news and we would have Michael McDowell foaming at the mouth....

Blogs and more blogs

2005-12-22T12:59:00.000Z

Article in today’s Guardian about the growing popularity of blogs. According to Technorati there are now 23 million of the things, with 1.8 billion links. And here are some more figgers: The Pew Internet study estimates that about 11%, or about 50 million, of Internet users are regular blog readers. According to Technorati data, there are about 70,000 new blogs a day. Bloggers update their weblogs regularly; there are about 700,000 posts daily, or about 29,100 blog updates an hour. The Cat Flap is going to have his work cut out out to cut it in the blogosphere. The specific angle of the Guardian piece , is the arrival of a blog by the inventor of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee :

Not a child in the house washed yet

2005-12-19T12:41:00.000Z

A new poem. Not sure if I like it yet. Another mushy parent piece, of which there are getting to be too many. Thinking of dedicating the next Poetry Ireland Review to parenthood, smiling babies on the cover, mushy poems inside. Actually this thought was prompted by sitting in O’Neill’s pub the other day after James McAuley’s Out to Lunch reading in Foster Place. I could see James looking around bemusedly at one point at the encumbered poets: The Cat Flap, EW and baby; MG spooning food from a jar into his son; PB with child asleep on his knee. The place awash with buggies.A pint of Guinness and a jar of organic cottage pie. ‘What’s happened to poetry?’ he said.

But enough idle gossip, time for an idle poem.

The Danger Zone

The stairs are gated, the play cage is assembled,
the electricity is hidden
and the maps have all been erased.
You can barely sit, yet still we’re afraid.

We know you by the mad
frolic of your eyes and the wild explorations
of your hands. Do you not, every morning,
with quiet concentration pull my glasses off?

And would pluck out my eyes and roll
over the edge to the mystery of the floor
and leap where you could. Don’t we see
Antarctica in your eyes, and hear

the landmasses quake in your laughter
and doesn’t the whole world loosen when you go out
in your Peruvian hat? We’re watching you,
we’re busy with our endless preparations

but already you fall between the cracks,
you slip through our fingers, you have
somehow worked free of the straps and harnesses,
and move, delightedly, towards the dangerous places.

Out and about

2005-12-19T10:54:00.000Z

out and about
Originally uploaded by greenville17.

Freya in the Peruvian hat....

The Milkwoman Will Cut Our Throats

2005-12-17T23:43:00.000Z

One of those brilliant sharp clear cold winter’s days. Off to Dún Laoghaire for a meeting. Brisk walk to Tara street, so long since I’ve been on a Dart I can’t find the ticket office. What’s that line of Durcan’s about the apex of happiness being ‘on a Dart to Dún Laoghaire’? That’s what it feels like today. The first glimpse of sea and something lifts. Even the canal basin gladdens, flat stretch of urban water surrounded by old stone buildings, warehouses now turned into offices and apartments. Water should be compulsory in cities. The soul is hard-wired to respond to water and stone. Two tiny kids opposite me, staring at me. Hey mister, what’s your name? Ma, where’s me dooough----nu’? My nan’s friend has that name. Are you going to the beach? Only in spirit, alas. For company I’ve brought along Continued, a selection of poems by the Polish poet Piotr Sommer, translated by various hands. I’ve coveted this book since I read Mark Ford’s review of it in The Guardian last September. In that review he quotes the late DJ Enright, one of his translators here, who characterised the work as ‘low-key and terse. Irony there is, but it keeps its head down, while the occasional uncertain joke raises an uncertain smile. Obliquity is the rule.’ Excellent, I thought. I can’t get enough uncertain jokes and obliquity. So I immediately amazoned it and waited patiently. And finally, last week, it arrived.

What I like about the work so far is that it seems to be calculatedly incidental; it’s interested in the tiny things that are happening to one side of events, and these things become the event, as in ‘A Small Treatise on Non Contradiction’, for instance:

From the kitchen window I watch the boys kick a ball.
The door opens, and while the door’s open
you can hear that the lift works today,
clicks shut and moves on, to be useful

or in the poem beside it, ‘A Maple Leaf’:

A maple leaf with the sun shining through it
at the end of summer is beautiful, but
not excessively so, and even an ordinary
electric train passing by
nearly three hundred yards away
makes music, light and unobtrusive,
and yet to be remembered, for its own sort of
usefulness perhaps....

I like the cool appraising intelligence of this, and the sense of the importance of the small human interventions, the humble quotidian machinery about its business. The poems play with inconsequentiality in order to establish a true sense of what is of consequence. That is, in their way, in their apparent casualness, they are very sure of themselves. Part of their attractiveness is precisely this indirection, the sense of the gaze being withheld from the obvious. Maybe this is a function of our perception of work from a country like Poland, where we’re schooled to expect the large gesture, the public responsibility, the speaking on behalf of...

August Kleinzahler, in his introduction, puts it well: ‘The art of the poetry – and its art is considerable, singular and memorable – is in the way it matter-of-factly transforms ordinary incident, character, landscape, object and the assorted interactions thereof, into tiny metaphysical and epistemological essays: investigations into the subjects of language, imagination, impermanence, memory, identity.’

The book also seems to me a model of how poetry translation makes available a range of utterance that is memorable and distinctive even if it necessarily involves the loss of many elements essential to the total impact of poetry. Kleinzahler talks about the musicality of Sommer in Polish, based on hearing him read aloud (though not on an understanding of Polish) and clearly much would have been lost in the transition to English. Much more interesting is what has been gained by the team of translators that includes John Ashbery, Douglas Dunn and D.J. Enright. A hard-edge worldly wit, the stamp of a distinctive poetic personality and vision.

You’re not going to find a better place
for these cosmetics, even if eventually
we wind up with some sort of bathroom cabinet and
you stop knocking them over with your towel --
there’ll still be a thousand reasons to complain
and a thousand pieces of glass on the floor
and a thousand new worries,
and we’ll still have to get up early.

(‘Believe me’, translated by D.J. Enright)

Piotr himself is a noted translator of poetry by American, British and Irish poets into Polish, and his sense of the shifting landscape of translation, of being ‘between, that is, nowhere’, informs the poetry – his earlier Bloodaxe selection was called Things to Translate :

words stay behind the doors
of strangers’ mouths, gestures
get written in the air
by strange hands, and the child
asked at school
for his father’s occupation
answers shyly ‘transportist’.

(‘Transportist’)

The book is hugely quotable, itself a tribute to the quality of the translations, and here, to end with, is ‘Don’t Sleep, Take Notes’, translated by Halina Janod and D.J. Enright:

Don’t Sleep, Take Notes

At four in the morning
the milkwoman was knocking
in plain clothes, threatening
she wouldn’t leave us anything,
at most remove the empties,
if I didn’t produce the receipt.

It was somewhere in my jacket,
but in any case I knew
what the outcome would be:
she’d take away yesterday’s curds,
she’d take the cheese and the eggs,
she’d take our flat away,
she’d take away the child.

If I don’t produce the receipt,
if I don’t find the receipt,
the milkwoman will cut our throats.

Continued. Poems. By Piotr Sommer. Foreword by August Kleinzahler.Bloodaxe Books, 2005.

Eddie's Own Aquarius

2005-12-12T01:35:00.000Z

Eddies’ Own Aquarius is a special issue of the legendary poetry magazine put together by Constance Short and Tony Carroll for Eddie Linden’s 70th birthday. It features contributions from a host of English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Americanpoets including Dannie Abse, Sebastian Barker, Seamus Heaney, Leland Bardwell, Dermot Healy, Alan Brownjohn, Robert Creeley, Anthony Cronin, the late Michael Donaghy ( who threw a party for Linden’s 60th birthday and whose idea this tribute was), Paul Durcan, Elaine Feinstein, Pearse Hutchinson, Joy Hendry, Alan Jenkins and John Montague. Handsomely produced, it also contains photographs and paintings, essays about Eddie Linden, and some of his own poetry, including his well known ‘City of Razors’ :

Cobbled streets, littered with broken milk bottles,
reeking chimneys and dirty tenement buildings,
walls scrawled with FUCK THE POPE and blue-lettered
words GOD BLESS THE RANGERS.
Old woman at the corner, arms folded, babe in pram,
a drunk man’s voice from the other pavement,
And out come the Catholics from evening confessional;

A woman roars from an upper window
‘They’re at it again, Maggie!
Five stitches in our Tommie’s face, Lizzie!
Eddie’s in The Royal wi’ a sword in his stomach
and the razor’s floating in the River Clyde.’

There is roaring in Hope Street,
They’re killing in the Carlton,
There’s an ambulance in Bridgeton,
And a laddie in the Royal.

Sydney Bernard Smyth remembers Linden reading this in the bar of Murray’s hotel on Inishbofin at the Arts Festival in 1971:

‘The attendance was riveted. They understood immediately what this anguish was about. City of Razors made a startling impact.’

Sean Hutton’s essay, ‘In praise of Eddie Linden’ is a good introduction to the man and his work. The first issue of Aquarius came out in 1969 and it became an annual publication, with many special issues devoted to Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Australian and Canadian poetry, or to individual poets (Hugh McDiarmid, John Heath-Stubbs, George Barker and W.S. Graham. And there’s a slew of reminiscences about the man, his magazine and the Soho arts world that no longer exists. All in all, a worthwhile tribute and a great introduction to a fine literary magazine for those who might have missed it first time round.

Eddie’s Own Aquarius. Compiled and edited by Constance Short and Tony Carroll. Published by Cahermee Publications. €25. Book orders: constanceshort at eircom net.
ISBN -10: 0-9551584-0-0
ISBN -13: 978-0-9551584-0-7.