Wolves in the garden: Michael Krüger

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cellosuite

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


Cello Suite

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

Sraith do dhordveidhil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

grind their teeth.

(Reality Show)

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

Du sollst
nicht sterben, bitte

Thou shalt
not die,
please

Ná
faigh bás,
led thoil


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

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

Coiscéim, 12 euro

To have eyes

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

Double Vision: Spring

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not an editorial

(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

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

(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

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

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.