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.

John Riley

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

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...

or

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