Brenda Shaughnessy - Interior With Sudden Joy

I’ve decided to shift gears a little bit and delve into the work of Brenda Shaughnessy. Her elliptical, surreal, taut first work “Interior With Sudden Joy” makes most other collections seem dull, uninspired, and unambitious. Her opening line:

I will make something of you both pigment
and insecticide.



Categories: poetry, ireland, irish, crit, literature, criticism, contemporary, american,

Derek Mahon – Cease All Resistance, again !

There seemed to be a technical issue with the last upload of this post, so I have reposted.

Derek Mahon – Cease All Resistance

In the opening poem “Resistance Days” Derek Mahon says that there is “no art without the resistance of the medium”. I believe that this phrase haunts the collection and offers a way into its overall structure. References to film, filmic vocabulary and filmic vision abound, as do references to the history of his influences and the legacies of his own poems. In this collection Mahon seeks to confront this question of influence head on. The high mandarin style he is fated for is stretched and indented with colloquial and quasi-technical vocabulary, telephones, answering machines and contemporary communications issues of all kinds. Mahon knows and understands that the world is information saturated, that old Ireland is disappearing, and yet in the end, he is drawn back into the old rag and bone shop of the heart. One cannot help but wonder if the Harbour Lights are a longing for Safe Harbour, and if in the end this Harbour is friends and family, place, or some more philosophical comfort.

In a recent article the Scottish poet Dan Paterson said that it is ridiculous to assert that good poems “show not tell”, after all, didn’t Donne just flat out assert things in an interesting fashion, involve us, challenge us? Mahon might fall into this camp of telling in this poem. He lists, he references, gives us the physical and cultural objects to build out the picture. The opening poem “Resistance Days” in its directness gives us these initial frameworks of reference. In a lament for the sixties, the beats, Simone and Satre, Mahon sits in a Paris café, in love with the culture that still resists the complete free market economics of the USA. He is in flight from corporate Christmas, and one suspects from Post-Modernism itself. Mahon name-checks Casablanca, Ricks, Rimbaud, Beu Geste, being bored by Bowles beneath the sheltering slats, the fake sheikery of television, movies and books, and ends up here, post-existentialism, post-millennium, where in a key remark, dissent too is marketable. Capitalism with Ché Guevara T-Shirts. So far, so post-colonial, so post-modern. And here lies the problem: he makes these references without getting the fizz and pop of the post modern, the rebellion doesn’t seem his, it seems recherché. It is without any grounded sense of ‘the real’ that I feel Mahon first needs to establish as a common ground, from which we can gauge this distance traversed from the ‘real and authentic’ to the ‘information-saturated and the sham”. His ‘real’ is steeped in Bonnefoy and Eluard, his movies star are Adjani and Binoche instead of Kidman and Roberts, but they do not evoke. He flatly asserts Binoche and Adjani are real film stars, thus French cinema and French culture are superior also, and then, he says:

After so much neglect, resolved anew
Creature anarchy I come back to you
Not the faux anarchy of media culture
But the real chaos of indifferent nature.

Later, I think he is trying to assert a less deliberated aesthetic, a journey of perception straight through to presentation:

For instance my own New Years resolution
Is to study weather, clouds and their formation
Going straight to video with each new release
Untroubled by the ignorant thought police.

After such a false start to the collection we arrive with relief at the poem “Lucretius on Clouds” which is the real thing, a poem that connects the thinking constructs of the past with the thinking constructs of the present. Was Lucretius so far wrong when he said that we are penetrated by a divine breath? For what are neutrinos but the residue of the big bang? It would seem that the entire first half of this poem consists of an extended conceit that we, space, and air, are inter-related. As we are penetrated by them, so too are they penetrated by us. I use the phrase advisedly for this commingling is decidedly sexual in its overtones. Our spit, sweat and semen flows into the water, water becomes cloud, so as we too fill with bill and gristle, so too do clouds fill with our detritus. The ending of the poem is lovely:

Sometimes the two things coincide, of course,
The violent pushing and he rushing wind-force,
And then you get a cloudburst which persists
With clouds upon clouds, tempests upon tempests
Pouring out of the heavens, soaking the smoky air
While the earth breathes back in bubbles everywhere.

The final image reminds me both of Seamus Heaney’s Frogspawn, and the odious frogs of Wallace Stephens. As a culminating image it is a lesson in its kind. The philosophical ruminations never drift too far into the abstract without either reference to a ‘myth-meme’ (‘sieves at the rivers’, golden fleece’ ); a bolting image (“They give off sizzling rains/ as wax held to a brazier melts and runs”); or reference to physicality (‘windpipe’, ‘gland’, ‘pores’, ‘ducts’, ‘channels’, ‘rooms’, ‘corridors’). The style of the poem in its construction shows distinct signs of internal cyclicality, as in his linen jacket being soaked by fog, and the air under pressure attaining the texture of linen. The poem tumbles forward within itself reflecting its very subject matter.

The poem is also a good example of the work Derek Mahon makes his vocabulary perform. He uses words are often links between different bodies of knowledge and different times:

Clouds take shape in the blue sky and gather
Where flying bodies get tangled up together.

This refers both to the ‘bodies’ of the mythical gods and the ‘bodies’ of scientific discourse. In another part of the poem, clouds are gathered up, blown by a ‘Devine breath’ where ‘particles’ rise from rivers and where

Hills, for instance: the higher the peak
The more industriously they seem to smoke.

‘Industriously’ gives agency to the hill and also brings in the hidden image of the modern chimney stack. In another line, the slightly out of register “evanescent” switches on the philosophical discourse, then we are tilted into an early 19th Century empirical tone with the use of words such as ‘quantity’, ‘entity’, and ‘ether’:

Heaped up in greater quantity
They reveal themselves as a visible entity
Trailing snowy summits into the ether.

The use of vocabulary consistency builds these links between the older knowledge constructs, the relatively recent, and the contemporary. As with his other Northern Ireland compatriots it is also always worth taking some time to look at the rhyming schemes and rhyme words to see if which relationships are being reinforced (breezes/ rises; peak/smoke; quantity/entity; either/weather).

Man is confronted by the scale of nature; man is under the disinterested pull of nature; Man is lost in the recognition that he is nature; man knowing that the nature he is able to recognise is all that he can know of nature. The questions are eternal. They were as relevant and real to the ancient Roman as the modern Rural Irishman looking out to sea at Kinsale. Man speculates on what might be true, on how things are and how things come to be. In turn these questions are things of our nature and Mahon presents these to us in a wholly satisfactory poem.

Another poem in the collection “Lapis Lazuli” is an obvious homage to Yeats and is also mostly successful in its execution. I’d like to pick out some of the outstanding lines in the poem before raising some of my concerns. Looking at the unpolished gem he says “The willow-pattern wisdom is still unknown”, and

The twinkling sages and the branchy house
For this is the real thing in its natural state
The raw material from which art is born.

Later still in the poem

We need the glitter of these secret depths
Like the loved woman of our private myths.

Mahon remonstrates with us to slow down, to reflect on the very basic ‘primordial’ questions, perhaps to develop imagination rather than fancy, to be:

On dark dawns that look for that subtle gleam
And blinking noons obtuse to its dark dream
When slow thought replaces the money-shower,
We want the key to that impervious heart:
With ultramarine what need have we of art?

These lines again contain a differential diction; Mahon’s inflected scientific diction (obtuse: perhaps a reference to an obtuse moon or Gibbous moon in Yeats terms); his use of the colloquial ‘money-shower” (in Ireland you would refer to a group of politicians or other people as a shower of idiots); the phrase “slow thought” suggests and refers to ‘when thought comes dripping slow’. The final lines of this third stanza in their summing up with a question are Yeatsean their core.

All the lines command, they have such confidence, it is as if Mahon gains complete control of his influence by owning up to it. Mahon more than I, more than his presumed reader, already knows and understands these points, so he swerves from the influence in the first line of the fourth stanza. “Heat lightning photographs the astonished sea”. The looming catastrophe in the background is an ecological one as opposed to the national struggle of Ireland, and WW2. And what is to be our attitude to the death-throws of civilisation, a post-modern laugh?, or when we are really faced with the early signs of this collapse do we count ourselves “among those/for whom a spectre, some discredited ghost/still haunts the misty windows of old hopes?” Perhaps in the end we must agree that people, that other people, are impenetrable to thought, to language, that our sparks are beyond our common understanding but are real none the less.

Where Yeats says that those that make (art) are gay, that it is in the building that the pleasure is, Mahon seems to be saying what need has Lapis Lazuli (nature) of our intervention? It needs no shaping, it is made by time, it is a complex-chemical-geological process. We need only admire, not shape and destroy. Yet the poem feels sometimes like a tour around Yeatsean themes rather than any position or response to the original. Yes there are correspondences, and I may have read some where none were intended, but it feels like having gone with Mahon throughout the poem, in the fifth and final stanza we are stranded at the train station, abandoned in the Gare du Nord as in some French film that doesn’t end so much as stop. Perhaps because there is nothing risked in terms of form, in terms of letting in the chaos of nature, that the espoused lack of shaping and making is not allowed to manifest its own manifesto that in the end proves a little disappointing.

Another poem seeking to re-represent a Yeats poem, is “The Cloud Ceiling”, where the ur-poem is ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’. From scene settings, to language and semantic structure, the parallels and correspondences are well worked, and made work. The beginning is exceedingly good, and at times reminds me of “Baggot Street Desertia” by Thomas Kinsella. The opening represents the nascent daughter, coming to form and being in the womb;

An ocean-drop, dash in the dark, flash in the brain,
Suspension in the red mist, in the light-grain,
A twitching silence in the hiding place,
Fine pearly nigh-glow of the forming face
The pushing brow, the twirling ears and knees…
Space-girl, soap on a rope, you like cloud-swing,
Bath-water and world music; a kidney-bean,
You lie there dreaming on your knotted string
Listening hard with shut, determined eyes –
A soul of barely determinate shape and size.

From the mystical Carl Sagan voice over of the opening four lines, to the break in tone of “space-girl, soap on a rope”, we begin to feel the mind of the poet groping for adequate visual resonances, the knowing that the child is the size of a kidney bean, the invisibility of the now chemically known presence, and it brings a real sense of wonder and mystery to the lines. What dimension does this daughter occupy? Tellingly, it is one of ‘light-readings’, ‘a-tonal composition’, ‘quantum gravity’, ‘unspoken words’, far from ‘story boards’, but none the less, Mahon still seeks to represent the ‘unknowable’ in terms of relatively known, though non-literary fields and discourses:

Awaiting the moment when the burbles start,
The camera action, the first signs of art;

There follows in stanza three descriptions where the daughters entrance to the world is described as probably only cartable though myth, away from photographs and presumably video cameras and digital recorders, and this theme is briefly revisited in stanza five only to be eventually dismissed with;

Will you be Echo, Grainne, Rosalind? No,
You won’t be any of these; you will be you
As, ‘kitten-soft’, you float from your mother ship
Thirst pockets open for the infinite trip.

Interestingly these lines introduce a well known brand of kitchen towel that has a featured bubble texture, that is described here in its advertising terms, as a ‘thirst pocket’, in that it better soaks up spills. Although this is clever in the manner that Paul Muldoon is clever, you have to wonder if the seemingly unmediated introduction of the advertising language doesn’t defeat arguments made earlier in the collection. Perhaps another ur-poem influencing here is Muldoon’s Sonogram, one that made a great impact at the time it was published. Where Yeats wished his daughter all sorts of useful things, that she “live like some green laurel/ rooted in one dear perpetual place”, that she be beautiful but not too beautiful, Mahon but wishes that she go easy on her old man (Mahon like Yeats is late to fatherhood), because more than likely he will be dead before she is grown. After the loving detail, the obvious sense of wonder the poet has for his daughter, and the sense of respect he gives to her other-hood, the finale seems nasty, brutal and short. But that’s the point.

Mahon has in previous collections, and especially more recently, taken care to include ‘machine-things’ from the everyday. From trains such as the Eurostar to answering machines (a perennial) to questions of information and data, Mahon wants to be read as contemporary and engaged. “High Water” gives us a fine example of how this can be accomplished in a line:

Starved for pedestrian silence and in flight
From the totality and simultaneity of data,
We stand on the Gesuati steps at high water
Inhaling the rain-rinsed air or the Zattere.

I was looking forward to a poem about the issue of information, the ever present, but the poem, in my opinion, shades off into a mannered flourish, where

A paper moon dissolves in cloud canals,
The colours facing as they come to light.

There are other weak poems in the collection, mostly the short ones where Mahon does not give himself room to weave. They seem like attempts at “In The Metro”, but they just provide some surface tension: for example, A Garden God (in full)

A bomber fly flits from the ruined mouth;
From the eye-socket an inquisitive moth.

I might be over reading here, but I believe the point might have been that there is nothing we can say about nature, but our soul searches out from our eyes. It is the eye that interrogates the world; it is the eye that seeks to frame the question. But does the ‘bomber-fly’ do any work in this reading of the lines? Is it an Eliot-ruined mouth? And this is the problem with most of Mahon’s epigrams: because they don’t have an underlying aesthetic in the high modernist style, they tend to come off a little bit less achieved.

The poem “Langue d’OC”, a courtly love poem from the 12th Century, in a language now famously dead, and “A Game of Cards”, a 17th century lyric translated from Tadhg O Ruairc which plays on the double entendre’s of card play to get its point across, are both well rendered. It is in “The Widow of Kinsale” that not only the tone and vocabulary of these two earlier poems find their modern resonance, but in the acknowledgement of female sexuality. of . The reality of a ‘lively woman’ living in and through the Ireland of the 1950’s and 1960’s, is perhaps as much a call back to the old rag and bone shop of the heart as anything else.

Young ones now think only
Of fashion and easy money –
As we did once, except
We never had much of it:
Real people were the thing
To hear them talk and sing.

A widow, once desired, still sexual, has honesty and a tone that is recognisable to anyone who cares to hear it:

I was a fierce temptation
To wild, generous men
Of my own generation;
Lovingly I would watch
While driving them insane.

Her consolations are the novels of William Trevor (“that lovely man”), her children, and the primordial nature of the shore. Again however, Mahon ends the poem in the Mannerist gesture:

And the ebb-tide withdraws
With a chuckle of bony claws.

Up until the final line, the tone (of the widow) is one of slightly humorous reflection in the vein of ‘look at what time has done to me, a woman that is still a young woman in her mind’. The image is supposed to the link to the phrase of the opening stanza where she describes herself as “a rock exposed to the sun/ sardonic, cold and stiff, I go with the ebb of life” but the cruelty of that chuckle has not been earned in the poem to that point.

The two final poems Harbour Lights and The Seaside Cemetery, (after Valery) deserve more attention than I can give them here, and I will return to these two poems in a future posting. Perhaps it might seem to be a bit unfair on Mahon, picking out the mannerisms and not-quite-grafted post-modernism, but I am in no doubt that Mahon and his northern compatriot Michael Longley will enable a path for the younger Irish writers to come out from under the shadow of Yeats, Kavanagh, and Heaney.






Categories: poetry, ireland, irish, crit, literature, criticism, contemporary, american,

Some Irish Poets You May Not Know

I was just thinking of about Irish Poets that you may not know about, because they don't hit the radar of anthologies etc. Some ideas I'm knocking around with are Yvonne Cullen & Joe Slade. Disclaimer: I know Joe Slade very well, but that might enable me to perhaps run the post as an interview, and then I could post a formal review. If you have any preferences why not post a comment.

Categories: poetry, ireland, irish, crit, literature, criticism, contemporary, american,

Derek Mahon – Cease All Resistance

In the opening poem “Resistance Days” Derek Mahon says that there is “no art without the resistance of the medium”. I believe that this phrase haunts the collection and offers a way into its overall structure. References to film, filmic vocabulary and filmic vision abound, as do references to the history of his influences and the legacies of his own poems. In this collection Mahon seeks to confront this question of influence head on. The high mandarin style he is fated for is stretched and indented with colloquial and quasi-technical vocabulary, telephones, answering machines and contemporary communications issues of all kinds. Mahon knows and understands that the world is information saturated, that old Ireland is disappearing, and yet in the end, he is drawn back into the old rag and bone shop of the heart. One cannot help but wonder if the Harbour Lights are a longing for Safe Harbour, and if in the end this Harbour is friends and family, place, or some more philosophical comfort.

In a recent article the Scottish poet Dan Paterson said that it is ridiculous to assert that good poems “show not tell”, after all, didn’t Donne just flat out assert things in an interesting fashion, involve us, challenge us? Mahon might fall into this camp of telling in this poem. He lists, he references, gives us the physical and cultural objects to build out the picture. The opening poem “Resistance Days” in its directness gives us these initial frameworks of reference. In a lament for the sixties, the beats, Simone and Satre, Mahon sits in a Paris café, in love with the culture that still resists the complete free market economics of the USA. He is in flight from corporate Christmas, and one suspects from Post-Modernism itself. Mahon name-checks Casablanca, Ricks, Rimbaud, Beu Geste, being bored by Bowles beneath the sheltering slats, the fake sheikery of television, movies and books, and ends up here, post-existentialism, post-millennium, where in a key remark, dissent too is marketable. Capitalism with Ché Guevara T-Shirts. So far, so post-colonial, so post-modern. And here lies the problem: he makes these references without getting the fizz and pop of the post modern, the rebellion doesn’t seem his, it seems recherché. It is without any grounded sense of ‘the real’ that I feel Mahon first needs to establish as a common ground, from which we can gauge this distance traversed from the ‘real and authentic’ to the ‘information-saturated and the sham”. His ‘real’ is steeped in Bonnefoy and Eluard, his movies star are Adjani and Binoche instead of Kidman and Roberts, but they do not evoke. He flatly asserts Binoche and Adjani are real film stars, thus French cinema and French culture are superior also, and then, he says:

After so much neglect, resolved anew
Creature anarchy I come back to you
Not the faux anarchy of media culture
But the real chaos of indifferent nature.

Later, I think he is trying to assert a less deliberated aesthetic, a journey of perception straight through to presentation:

For instance my own New Years resolution
Is to study weather, clouds and their formation
Going straight to video with each new release
Untroubled by the ignorant thought police.

After such a false start to the collection we arrive with relief at the poem “Lucretius on Clouds” which is the real thing, a poem that connects the thinking constructs of the past with the thinking constructs of the present. Was Lucretius so far wrong when he said that we are penetrated by a divine breath? For what are neutrinos but the residue of the big bang? It would seem that the entire first half of this poem consists of an extended conceit that we, space, and air, are inter-related. As we are penetrated by them, so too are they penetrated by us. I use the phrase advisedly for this commingling is decidedly sexual in its overtones. Our spit, sweat and semen flows into the water, water becomes cloud, so as we too fill with bill and gristle, so too do clouds fill with our detritus. The ending of the poem is lovely:

Sometimes the two things coincide, of course,
The violent pushing and he rushing wind-force,
And then you get a cloudburst which persists
With clouds upon clouds, tempests upon tempests
Pouring out of the heavens, soaking the smoky air
While the earth breathes back in bubbles everywhere.

The final image reminds me both of Seamus Heaney’s Frogspawn, and the odious frogs of Wallace Stephens. As a culminating image it is a lesson in its kind. The philosophical ruminations never drift too far into the abstract without either reference to a ‘myth-meme’ (‘sieves at the rivers’, golden fleece’ ); a bolting image (“They give off sizzling rains/ as wax held to a brazier melts and runs”); or reference to physicality (‘windpipe’, ‘gland’, ‘pores’, ‘ducts’, ‘channels’, ‘rooms’, ‘corridors’). The style of the poem in its construction shows distinct signs of internal cyclicality, as in his linen jacket being soaked by fog, and the air under pressure attaining the texture of linen. The poem tumbles forward within itself reflecting its very subject matter.

The poem is also a good example of the work Derek Mahon makes his vocabulary perform. He uses words are often links between different bodies of knowledge and different times:

Clouds take shape in the blue sky and gather
Where flying bodies get tangled up together.

This refers both to the ‘bodies’ of the mythical gods and the ‘bodies’ of scientific discourse. In another part of the poem, clouds are gathered up, blown by a ‘Devine breath’ where ‘particles’ rise from rivers and where

Hills, for instance: the higher the peak
The more industriously they seem to smoke.

‘Industriously’ gives agency to the hill and also brings in the hidden image of the modern chimney stack. In another line, the slightly out of register “evanescent” switches on the philosophical discourse, then we are tilted into an early 19th Century empirical tone with the use of words such as ‘quantity’, ‘entity’, and ‘ether’:

Heaped up in greater quantity
They reveal themselves as a visible entity
Trailing snowy summits into the ether.

The use of vocabulary consistency builds these links between the older knowledge constructs, the relatively recent, and the contemporary. As with his other Northern Ireland compatriots it is also always worth taking some time to look at the rhyming schemes and rhyme words to see if which relationships are being reinforced (breezes/ rises; peak/smoke; quantity/entity; either/weather).

Man is confronted by the scale of nature; man is under the disinterested pull of nature; Man is lost in the recognition that he is nature; man knowing that the nature he is able to recognise is all that he can know of nature. The questions are eternal. They were as relevant and real to the ancient Roman as the modern Rural Irishman looking out to sea at Kinsale. Man speculates on what might be true, on how things are and how things come to be. In turn these questions are things of our nature and Mahon presents these to us in a wholly satisfactory poem.

Another poem in the collection “Lapis Lazuli” is an obvious homage to Yeats and is also mostly successful in its execution. I’d like to pick out some of the outstanding lines in the poem before raising some of my concerns. Looking at the unpolished gem he says “The willow-pattern wisdom is still unknown”, and

The twinkling sages and the branchy house
For this is the real thing in its natural state
The raw material from which art is born.

Later still in the poem

We need the glitter of these secret depths
Like the loved woman of our private myths.

Mahon remonstrates with us to slow down, to reflect on the very basic ‘primordial’ questions, perhaps to develop imagination rather than fancy, to be:

On dark dawns that look for that subtle gleam
And blinking noons obtuse to its dark dream
When slow thought replaces the money-shower,
We want the key to that impervious heart:
With ultramarine what need have we of art?

These lines again contain a differential diction; Mahon’s inflected scientific diction (obtuse: perhaps a reference to an obtuse moon or Gibbous moon in Yeats terms); his use of the colloquial ‘money-shower” (in Ireland you would refer to a group of politicians or other people as a shower of idiots); the phrase “slow thought” suggests and refers to ‘when thought comes dripping slow’. The final lines of this third stanza in their summing up with a question are Yeatsean their core.

All the lines command, they have such confidence, it is as if Mahon gains complete control of his influence by owning up to it. Mahon more than I, more than his presumed reader, already knows and understands these points, so he swerves from the influence in the first line of the fourth stanza. “Heat lightning photographs the astonished sea”. The looming catastrophe in the background is an ecological one as opposed to the national struggle of Ireland, and WW2. And what is to be our attitude to the death-throws of civilisation, a post-modern laugh?, or when we are really faced with the early signs of this collapse do we count ourselves “among those/for whom a spectre, some discredited ghost/still haunts the misty windows of old hopes?” Perhaps in the end we must agree that people, that other people, are impenetrable to thought, to language, that our sparks are beyond our common understanding but are real none the less.

Where Yeats says that those that make (art) are gay, that it is in the building that the pleasure is, Mahon seems to be saying what need has Lapis Lazuli (nature) of our intervention? It needs no shaping, it is made by time, it is a complex-chemical-geological process. We need only admire, not shape and destroy. Yet the poem feels sometimes like a tour around Yeatsean themes rather than any position or response to the original. Yes there are correspondences, and I may have read some where none were intended, but it feels like having gone with Mahon throughout the poem, in the fifth and final stanza we are stranded at the train station, abandoned in the Gare du Nord as in some French film that doesn’t end so much as stop. Perhaps because there is nothing risked in terms of form, in terms of letting in the chaos of nature, that the espoused lack of shaping and making is not allowed to manifest its own manifesto that in the end proves a little disappointing.

Another poem seeking to re-represent a Yeats poem, is “The Cloud Ceiling”, where the ur-poem is ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’. From scene settings, to language and semantic structure, the parallels and correspondences are well worked, and made work. The beginning is exceedingly good, and at times reminds me of “Baggot Street Desertia” by Thomas Kinsella. The opening represents the nascent daughter, coming to form and being in the womb;

An ocean-drop, dash in the dark, flash in the brain,
Suspension in the red mist, in the light-grain,
A twitching silence in the hiding place,
Fine pearly nigh-glow of the forming face
The pushing brow, the twirling ears and knees…
Space-girl, soap on a rope, you like cloud-swing,
Bath-water and world music; a kidney-bean,
You lie there dreaming on your knotted string
Listening hard with shut, determined eyes –
A soul of barely determinate shape and size.

From the mystical Carl Sagan voice over of the opening four lines, to the break in tone of “space-girl, soap on a rope”, we begin to feel the mind of the poet groping for adequate visual resonances, the knowing that the child is the size of a kidney bean, the invisibility of the now chemically known presence, and it brings a real sense of wonder and mystery to the lines. What dimension does this daughter occupy? Tellingly, it is one of ‘light-readings’, ‘a-tonal composition’, ‘quantum gravity’, ‘unspoken words’, far from ‘story boards’, but none the less, Mahon still seeks to represent the ‘unknowable’ in terms of relatively known, though non-literary fields and discourses:

Awaiting the moment when the burbles start,
The camera action, the first signs of art;

There follows in stanza three descriptions where the daughters entrance to the world is described as probably only cartable though myth, away from photographs and presumably video cameras and digital recorders, and this theme is briefly revisited in stanza five only to be eventually dismissed with;

Will you be Echo, Grainne, Rosalind? No,
You won’t be any of these; you will be you
As, ‘kitten-soft’, you float from your mother ship
Thirst pockets open for the infinite trip.

Interestingly these lines introduce a well known brand of kitchen towel that has a featured bubble texture, that is described here in its advertising terms, as a ‘thirst pocket’, in that it better soaks up spills. Although this is clever in the manner that Paul Muldoon is clever, you have to wonder if the seemingly unmediated introduction of the advertising language doesn’t defeat arguments made earlier in the collection. Perhaps another ur-poem influencing here is Muldoon’s Sonogram, one that made a great impact at the time it was published. Where Yeats wished his daughter all sorts of useful things, that she “live like some green laurel/ rooted in one dear perpetual place”, that she be beautiful but not too beautiful, Mahon but wishes that she go easy on her old man (Mahon like Yeats is late to fatherhood), because more than likely he will be dead before she is grown. After the loving detail, the obvious sense of wonder the poet has for his daughter, and the sense of respect he gives to her other-hood, the finale seems nasty, brutal and short. But that’s the point.

Mahon has in previous collections, and especially more recently, taken care to include ‘machine-things’ from the everyday. From trains such as the Eurostar to answering machines (a perennial) to questions of information and data, Mahon wants to be read as contemporary and engaged. “High Water” gives us a fine example of how this can be accomplished in a line:

Starved for pedestrian silence and in flight
From the totality and simultaneity of data,
We stand on the Gesuati steps at high water
Inhaling the rain-rinsed air or the Zattere.

I was looking forward to a poem about the issue of information, the ever present, but the poem, in my opinion, shades off into a mannered flourish, where

A paper moon dissolves in cloud canals,
The colours facing as they come to light.

There are other weak poems in the collection, mostly the short ones where Mahon does not give himself room to weave. They seem like attempts at “In The Metro”, but they just provide some surface tension: for example, A Garden God (in full)

A bomber fly flits from the ruined mouth;
From the eye-socket an inquisitive moth.

I might be over reading here, but I believe the point might have been that there is nothing we can say about nature, but our soul searches out from our eyes. It is the eye that interrogates the world; it is the eye that seeks to frame the question. But does the ‘bomber-fly’ do any work in this reading of the lines? Is it an Eliot-ruined mouth? And this is the problem with most of Mahon’s epigrams: because they don’t have an underlying aesthetic in the high modernist style, they tend to come off a little bit less achieved.

The poem “Langue d’OC”, a courtly love poem from the 12th Century, in a language now famously dead, and “A Game of Cards”, a 17th century lyric translated from Tadhg O Ruairc which plays on the double entendre’s of card play to get its point across, are both well rendered. It is in “The Widow of Kinsale” that not only the tone and vocabulary of these two earlier poems find their modern resonance, but in the acknowledgement of female sexuality. of . The reality of a ‘lively woman’ living in and through the Ireland of the 1950’s and 1960’s, is perhaps as much a call back to the old rag and bone shop of the heart as anything else.

Young ones now think only
Of fashion and easy money –
As we did once, except
We never had much of it:
Real people were the thing
To hear them talk and sing.

A widow, once desired, still sexual, has honesty and a tone that is recognisable to anyone who cares to hear it:

I was a fierce temptation
To wild, generous men
Of my own generation;
Lovingly I would watch
While driving them insane.

Her consolations are the novels of William Trevor (“that lovely man”), her children, and the primordial nature of the shore. Again however, Mahon ends the poem in the Mannerist gesture:

And the ebb-tide withdraws
With a chuckle of bony claws.

Up until the final line, the tone (of the widow) is one of slightly humorous reflection in the vein of ‘look at what time has done to me, a woman that is still a young woman in her mind’. The image is supposed to the link to the phrase of the opening stanza where she describes herself as “a rock exposed to the sun/ sardonic, cold and stiff, I go with the ebb of life” but the cruelty of that chuckle has not been earned in the poem to that point.

The two final poems Harbour Lights and The Seaside Cemetery, (after Valery) deserve more attention than I can give them here, and I will return to these two poems in a future posting. Perhaps it might seem to be a bit unfair on Mahon, picking out the mannerisms and not-quite-grafted post-modernism, but I am in no doubt that Mahon and his northern compatriot Michael Longley will enable a path for the younger Irish writers to come out from under the shadow of Yeats, Kavanagh, and Heaney.




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Categories: poetry, ireland, irish, crit, literature, criticism, contemporary, american,

The Next Post Will Be On Derek Mahon, Harbour Lights.

Having referenced Derek Mahon in relation to his potential influence on Conor O'Callaghan, I will be taking a closer look at Mahon's most recent collection, Harbour Lights. It might prove to be interesting over the coming years as younger writers seek to find a way out from under Heaney and Muldoon, two of the most influential of the older generation. Mahon might also be seen as a kind of enabler for the likes of David Wheatley, and Justin Quinn. Ireland has its fair share of "new formalism", and I will break out of this stream in a month or so to investigate poets with a different aesthetic.

Categories: poetry, ireland, irish, crit, literature

Your Own Seat

Seatown, Conor O’Callaghan’s second collection, is set in his home town of Dundalk, a place seen by many as non-descript, a little run-of-the-mill, with neither the charm of the rural or the “sophistication” and history of Dublin and Belfast. Not that O’Callaghan would have it any other way mind you. Like many other factory towns around the world, the Dundalk of O’Callaghan’s poems seems to be in the Autumn of its years. In some ways, I think he might have called the collection “Seatown – The Removes”, because it seems that the town and its people are seen from various removes. We will return to this point. Perhaps O’Callaghan set off to write the 'tell it as it is' poetry, the poetry of the 'real world', the real suburbs but he is all the time drawn to the artifice of language, its slips and double meanings, the high and low cultural registers. In this he has some of the spirit of Derek Mahon, mediated by the humour and technique of Muldoon.

In this place by the sea there is a history of disembarkment, of stepping off for other lands or off the radar “in search of common ground and teenage prostitutes”. Here is a man telling us 'I know what’s going on out there, and it isn’t romantic'. This is the world of the “mean” quotidian, the reduced ambition, the limited horizon. The town bypassed by a motorway where in a typical piece of O’Callaghan give-and-take there are

three huge silos swamped by the small hours
and the buzz of joyriders quite close on the bypass.

The work he makes the lines do is remarkable. Firstly we have a building “swamped” by the night (the small hours); the small hours intimating those still awake, a phrase often used to convey that you have stayed up drinking and talking into the small (wee) hours; we get the “buzz of joyriders” (aurally and pharmaceutically buzzing); “quite close” could be almost hyphenated because in the quiet of the night the sound of the engines is brought even closer, whilst simultaneously foregrounding the sound of the stillness of night, and of course meaning geographically close. In the end both types of closeness 'aural' and 'geographical' meld in the overall onomatopoeia of the line which retains its conversational tone through its use of everyday colloquial terms, (huge, swamped, buzz, quite close).

O’Callaghan wants to show us the truth of this place left behind, but he cannot seem to help his remarkable turns of phrase. Yet I’m sure that O’Callaghan does not want us to over attend to his wordplay. This is a normal town where he will build his poetic. In the poem “Landscape with Canal” a title that tells us we should expect a little more ‘artistry’ than usual, the stall is set out. Yes, to write about one's home town, one's origin is perhaps not new, and writing in the third party is a distancing device (to some), but I take full responsibility for what I choose to put in, and what I choose to leave out.

So this, the means to an end, is chosen
As the landscape of a private fiction
Where the tracks you make are all-too-well-known.
Through this time, since whatever will happen
Will happen most likely in the open,
You set it in a derelict autumn
Where all its symbolic fruit has fallen.
The action is yours alone to govern.
As long as you make the silence broken
By the presence on the bank of someone
That’s both anticipated and sudden.
As long as you don’t forget to mention
That the voice at once without and your own
Is the one that leaves the rest unspoken
And between that past and town has taken
The long way around a simple question.

We are shown “the long way round a simple question”, that which causes the overall suburban or satellite town existentialism. Not the ennui of celestial apartments but the ennui of the same ole same ole of Sunday afternoon drinking, sleeplessness, Friday's hope and Sunday's failure, the remembrance of those with whom we were involved, whose lives go on none the less. The question might be why the hell am I still here? He finishes one poem with a sly reference to Beckett, where O’Callaghan says “I could go on”. There is something very 'Derek Mahon' in all of this. The poem S"unday Drinking" almost looks like a Mahon poem:

No. Not the epiphanies
Stumbled upon like
Sunlit winter seas.

Not the peninsula
In brightness, nor stepping
Into darkness, nicely.

Nothing falls in place
For swearing “Never again”.
Nothing important changes.

There are several linguistic devices that resemble Mahon as well. “The wall clock/ mislays the last/ bright hour gone back”; “The headache/ of cold rooms bleached/ from habitual black”. Poems such as "In The Neighbourhood" also carry this influence, although in this case, that of Mahon’s recent register jumping.

Doldums of the sea itself flooding fields almost up
To the racecourse one minute and then abstract and removed
The next like the untelevised rounds of the F.A. Cup

I like these lines very much in that although you might know that the FA Cup is occurring, is real, because you are not there in person it occupies the same imaginative space as “the sea withdrawn”, and to boot, from some imaginary race, and imagined and presented in its absence if you read it closely. I suppose if you are going to have a singing master of your soul, you could do a lot worse than Mahon and O’Callaghan has learned much from him.

Another master, this time Muldoon, has perhaps enabled such references as the "Twin Peaks", and (famously) Raymond Chandler’s "Farewell, My Lovely" to make their appearances in this collection. Muldoon used the Chandler reference when he stood fairly and squarely behind the number 8, and O’Callaghan seems to be returning the reference to his former master. In “Green Baize Couplets”, which I am tempted to quote in its entirety, we are treated to a return to the pool ball meme. The poem is downright funny, and highly finished. The strict couplets use the euphemisms of snooker commentary to comment on his efforts to consummate sexually with his opponent. It produces some memorable lines:

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A handshake, a lowered light, the chance to clear her table
With what at first glance would appear to be a natural double.

2

Her colours on their spots, the cue-ball positioned perfectly …
Under normal circumstances, this would be a formality.

Etc. etc.

Perhaps this poem works so well, because O’Callaghan doesn’t overextend his reach, but keeps one foot on the floor, metaphorically speaking. Indeed one feels that O’Callaghan has been removing elements of Romanticism from his lines. In “East” we hear that he doesn’t want the Romantic Ireland;

But give me a dreary eastern town that isn’t vaguely romantic
Where moon and stars are lost in the lights of the greyhound track
And cheering comes to nothing and a flurry of misplaced bets
Blanketing the stands at dawn is about as spiritual as it gets…

But one line in particular (I believe) shows some roots. In “Pitch and Putt” he ends the poem with the lines “The greenkeeper collecting flags/ and shadows in their wake” reminds me very much of few early Larkin poems where the Yeats influence was still being shaken off. I doubt if this is an accident on O’Callaghan’s part especially as Mahon has so famously said that he couldn’t get Yeats’ tunes out of his head with a the sharp end of a hammer.

In “East” we find that O’Callaghan is also aware of and commenting on the background themes of the collection, the common threads, and gives the counterbalancing argument. In previous poems he has intimated that the murmur from the bypass, the sounds of the sea, the general background sounds of Seatown are like a pulse, a hum that lets him know where he is. It might, mistakenly be construed as some environmental determinism, or (say it!) Romanticism, but in "East" he takes that back again:

If it’s just a question of water and some half-backed notion
That the Irish mind is shaped by the passionate swell of ocean
I align myself to a dribble of a sea that’s unspectacular, or flat
Anything else would be unthinkable. It’s as simple as that.

It would be remiss of me not to comment on another theme in this collection, that of sexual conquest, sexual jealously, but not of sexual guilt. Even in (or traditionally, because of) the very sexually frank nature of the work, the punning and double entendres continues in poems such as "The Oral Tradition", and "Come Again", and to a lesser extent, "Ships". These poems drift in description from casual sex, to comfortable sex, from ships that pass in the night, to a couple whose intimacy seems to have various different approaches, stages, removes. Ireland has a rich tradition in the poem of sexual expression but even in the liberated, post- Catholic Ireland of today there are surprisingly few examples of this making its way into the work. When it does it is in an ironic remove, with a self depreciating gesture or turn. I think the last genuinely erotic poetry I read were “Erotic Haiku” by Gabriel Rosenstock, and they were wonderful indeed.

So, are we completely satisfied with this collection, have we nothing to add by way of constructive criticism? Well if I do have a gripe it might be that O’Callaghan seems grounded, comfortable with his place in the world. He is never knocked sideways by beauty, left speechless by evil, outraged by injustice. He does not seem to throw himself into the work, but plays a tight tune on a polished string, and ends up where he set out to go. In this manner he doesn’t seem to surprise himself or us. But that is just not the nature of the beast. O’Callaghan’s road is known, is rational, the emperor of whipped ice cream in a cold seaside town.

ISBN: 1852352426


Categories: poetry, ireland, irish, crit, literature