FromBostonToBerlin

Not Dead.

2010-05-31T12:31:00.002+01:00

Just a quick word to say that I have been very very busy, and not doing a whole lot of reading. Family. I have just about enough time to twitter at @boston2berlin but I do have plans to write rather long pieces about American writers I am currently very much impressed by. So, drop back in a while, I'll give a heads up over on my twitter account.

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

Must Read This Again....

2009-02-15T21:30:00.002Z

Note To Self: Re Read Desmond Egan's Collected Poems:

"how many counties are worth a child's scattered fingers" leaps into my mind today and that's reason enough.

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

Human Dark, With Sugar

2009-01-26T10:25:00.003Z

Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press) just nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. It took me three readings to get into it, but I liked it. She's becoming a bit of Prize Winning Juggernaut.

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

Simic on Cavafy

2008-03-18T15:57:00.001Z

LRB · Charles Simic: Some Sort of a Solution

Interesting piece from simic on cavafy. I have my own "little book" after cavafy, and I must get around to posting more stuff here. Find myself excited that Parnassus landed in my door this morning, it's just such a high quality journal that I find myself longing that all the reviews and essays I read were of such consistent high quality. Also looking forward to the next Jorie Graham book out, and Brenda Shaughnessy. Have read a lot of US based poets over the last three months.

Great Review of Muldoon

2007-06-22T18:10:00.000+01:00

Peter Sirr gives a wonderful reading andreview of Paul Muldoon's The End of The Poem. What I particularly love is the structure that Muldoon gives to the en-devour in that each reading of a poem and poet explores the different readings and interpretations of the word "end".

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

Poetry Readings

2007-04-17T15:30:00.000+01:00

Went to hear Jane Hirshfield and Robert Hass read at the PoetryNow 07 festival. I think Jane is a great poet, and her collection of selected poems from Bloodaxe is a must buy. The surprise of the evening for me was Hass. When I read him, I've done so in an internal voice that is sophisticated, and calm.... knowing. What comes across when you hear him read in person is the sense of nervous tension, the almost friable voice. This isn't the first time that hearing someone in person has changed the baseline voice for me. I heard Paul Durcan read at the PoetryNow 05 festival and I had a true sense of this Beckett meets Pinter-like suburbia, there was a dark laughter in the room, and I can say that for the first time in my life I "got" Paul Durcan. I am not a huge fan of readings in general, but when you have experiences such as these it is hard to argue that the readings serve a purpose.

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

Denis Donoghue: Words Alone

2007-03-18T19:50:00.001Z

I've read lots of T.S. Eliot, and many books about his work, buy it is such a pleasure to read Denis Donoghue's "Words Alone" about the poems of TSE. The close reading style is never pedantic, and his arguments are totally integrated. It feels a little like having your hair combed with a firmly held, bore-bristle (sic). Donoghue used to teach at Trinity College Dublin, and then at NYU. To have such a teacher one must be blessed, as a friend of mine was. But for Ireland to lose such a teacher..... I for one, will have to finish it, and start all over again, and hope against hope that I have mind enough to hold it.

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

Muldoon, Paul

2007-03-09T00:28:00.000Z

I had saved this and just now re-read it. What a very good poem it is.

Lines for the Centenary of the Birth of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)

By PAUL MULDOON
Published: April 16, 2006, New York Times

Only now do we see how each crossroads
was bound to throw up not only a cross
but a couple of gadabouts with goads,
a couple of gadabouts at a loss

as to why they were at the beck and call
of some old crock soaring above the culch
of a kitchen midden at evenfall,
of some old crock roaring across the gulch

as a hanged man roars out to a hanged man.
Now bucket nods to bucket of the span
of an ash yoke, or something of that ilk ...

Now one hanged man kicks at the end of his rope
in another little attack of hope.
Now a frog in one bucket thickens the milk.

Paul Muldoon is the author of "Horse Latitudes." For me, the absolute stand out book of last year, was Muldoon's book of essays. A must read.

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

PoetryNow and Robert Hass

2007-02-28T11:42:00.000Z

What a great resource. Frederick Seidel A great reader of poetry, try his soon to be famous "Kill Field".

In other news PoetryNow07 has Robert Hass reading with Derek Mahon. I reviewed Mahon on this blog before and Harbour Lights is a grand return to form. Hass is just so influential. When I was on holidays in Italy, I took three books by Hass, Collected Bishop, and Remembrance of Things Past. I think it was "Praise" that I lingered over longest. And we also get to hear Jane Hirshfield on the same evening. Joy. If you haven't already, there is a selected poems out on Bloodaxe that is just a treasure.

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

The Old Women of Magiona

2006-11-28T18:59:00.000Z

I think that I will write a small piece on Ciaran O'Driscoll's "The Old Women Of Magiona". It has just been translated into Italian, and Ciaran very kindly gave me a copy the other evening. If ever a collection was unfairly received I think this is one.

Stay tuned.

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

Allan Peterson V

2006-10-09T21:22:00.000+01:00

Lavish and The Nick of Evolution(s)

Peterson’s use of the theory of evolution is Zen-like. The theory of DNA is in his DNA. The world is numinous, the octopus is as smart as a dog, which is as smart as an etc etc. In a Peterson poem, I get the sense that there are always many connections, and in this particular instance, this particular connection will be made and presented as a mental “best fit”. The otherness of the accidental can tilt into the occidental and oriental, the very casual-contemporary mixes with the courtly-medieval. But our human response is still to make and to wonder. To make images and wander in the processes of meaning-making seems a reflective capability we should in turn, reflect upon.

Previously, we looked at nature to find God. Now we look for so much of ourselves in the world, we paint our faces there among the processes of nature. Build gods in our own image. The knowledge of the Null is Thanatos itself. When faced with the processes of evolution, its brute indifference,

we gather the animals dressed in flowers and music
we open their throats since they do not pretend higher purpose. This is how far behind we are. Our mysteries. Our little ignorance.

There are

Rituals made of nothing but surprise
as when gardenias burn in one’s presence just by touch.

I am not sure if this image refers to the blood on ones hands coming off on the flower after the ritual of killing the calf, or perhaps a mental tautology as in Stevens “Rubies by rubies reddened”, perhaps even Elliot of “roses that have the look of being looked at”. In the general image making endeavour, I also wonder if there is a buried reference to the ritual animal garlanded for sacrifice. And I wonder if it is any wonder that this animal is “missing/absent/abstract”. Also, a classic example of a scene stalled. (and all in the shades of Keats perhaps)

The Trial of Understanding Within An Unknowable Process

If our lives are lived within the “godless aesthetic” of evolution, then what “reason” can there be for our need (sic) to care for one another as human beings? In a very astute positioning, Peterson alludes to three things in the title of one poem “Trial”. I believe this to refer to (1) trial as in to test out, see if it works, takes; (2) an ordeal, (3) Kafka. It is the tone that sets the idea off for me. It is a prayer as Kafka or Beckett might have intoned, it is a waiting on mercy. A lengthy quote is perhaps required to illustrate the point:

Nothing more poignant that a being trying
to understand itself;
than a being helping another with no understanding
other than need, nothing more
than a being knowing something, caring for something
incapable of care,
than one caring for knowing so that care might be
available when needed,
when need is not wonder but a being itself.

The poem goes on to review the idea of economic progress, building larger farms, yet ruining nature, even to the idea of building a nation upon a misnamed indigenous people. In an ambiguity typical of an overall aesthetic that abhors closure, Peterson ( I think) refers to tarring and feathering in the name of profit:

A man covered in bird feathers, a field covered in corn

yet this may also refer to those self same mis-named Indians, or/and perhaps a more “earthed” way of living that might have brought us elsewhere, but that too we defeated. Although we have a ‘moral’ obligation to nature, as we are co-dependent with it, we ignore causality, and in turn we ignore reason, and in the end as always, nature in an almost comical way, will overcome us,

Black water would argue against us
Enter the alkaloids.

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

Allan Peterson IV

2006-10-08T19:50:00.000+01:00

Lavish in The Nick in Theory

I think it was Auden that said it was the poets job to “detoxify”. Peterson’s mind seems to want to work within the "new metaphysics" of science (sic), these being (broadly speaking) the theory of evolution, cosmology, and chaos theory. But these theories have implications, ones that are wide and deep. A scene has no close, a poem should not end in some predetermined manner, contingencies can (and should) occur in the process of observation and in writing.

Peterson wants to write in the Lavish Nick in Theory, as Wallace Stevens might want to “wink at that wink in the design”. For Plato there is unity within difference but for Peterson “a theory works if it answers accretions” (Swallowtails); it is never final, it too is evolving. There will be fruitful results if the poet does not stray into fancy, but remains in the hardcore centre of imaginative capability.

You remember poets those that write tangibly, about the intangibles
the way confident water softens read beans overnight
just by conviction

(Viscosity).

We have seen earlier in Peterson that making tangible the intangible is an aesthetic concern. After all, electricity is abstract until it buzzes up your arm. But Peterson is also concerned with defining, as in “to define is to limit”. In the poem “Viscosity” the onions shed their skin in layers, losing some part of their essence, and ‘something goes missing’. This dark matter is always within what we consider the final, finished object. Indeed, the dark matter that completes the object. Perhaps, he theorises, this is why sketches are so compelling, often more so than paintings, because the ‘unfinished sketch’ can ‘induce’ the final painting, it still contains all future possibilities, all future endings. This is how it sheds its dark matter. It sheds its dark matter (it’s exclusions) by maintaining the possibility of their return. Likewise the poem ended, contained, air-proofed in its jar, is a poem of ‘desperate messages/ turning yellow on the shelves/ whether handled or ignored’.

Where the word and poem might exclude in order to define itself, yet remain essentially open, the device or spirit of this theory is itself in operation in the human spirit, in kinship and conscience, in the human affirmation: “yes to prints”, “yes to innocent ginkgoes’”, yes to

Even in December it is summer by the lamps
and we linger there
the dust like diatoms in the salty ocean falling slowly
hanging suspended

and the myriad-hands of possibility within each cell, each dust mote, holds them, unfallen for an eternity in mind and resemblance, the remembrance of the time he first saw Francis in her studio, the aroma of printmaking that even now has not yet reached the ceiling. The image or scene is not ended, it is connected to the ocean scene, and that connection is fired in the brain and forever. What is interesting here on a structural level is that the dust motes falling in the dark of the ocean are buoyed by a forest of hands in the molecules themselves (and I take these to represent “blind process”), and the aromatic print particles ascending in the daylight studio, in labour, in love are likewise always ascending, and (by parataxis) also perhaps a similarly “blind process”. Both scenes are impregnated with the dark matter of absence, as dark is by light, and light by dark.

It is the scene in light that thickened in memory, time chemically slowed, attains viscosity in cross-sense memory, sight, smell, solidified, yet like glass never fully settled. Even though we are falling in the dark, in the blind hands of process, there are cross currents that connect, and in themselves become a living thought, a cosmic synapse.

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

Allan Peterson III

2006-10-07T20:46:00.000+01:00

Lavishly Looking Into Nature

From speculations about evolution, its implications and repercussions, Peterson never strays far from the nature outside the back door. It is a nature laden with his processing, heavy with his look. Pay impossibly close attention to what can only be seen in the mind like “the ciliated tufts in the oviducts of a mouse waving like grass/ seasonal variations in salinity” (From The Heart) and “Since I am of nature, my speculations are of nature” as he puts it elsewhere, and it is the property of looking deeply into natures empty spaces, into its strange relations, that is “like seeing the sky twice, one birdless and empty, one almost metrically alive”.

Lavish and Language.

In the heat of writing, Peterson feels the numinous behind and within each letter. From the physicality of how the ink was made, to the language of words and metaphor, to the fact that the relatively simple combinations of 26 letters should be made to represent all these. Yet “feelings outnumber flies”. In emotion it reminds me of Wilde, in image Eliot, but the guiding intelligence, to my ears anyway, seems to be Wallace Stevens. Imagine a Stevens pondering the index of refraction on a sea surface full of clouds, throw in a reference to the fact that the dog by your side does not see the sea, but a surface of pheromones’, introduce the poem with some wonderful aphoristic line, and resolved in a cumulative image well worked for.

Thoughts and Things: Lavish Words In Extemporised Structures

Saying what he means is often not enough. The form must show us that this feeling is a thing in itself, that could be turned around in your hand, be physically experienced. It strikes me somewhat related to the idea that the plant or animal “fits” its space, is adapted to it. Peterson wishes (I believe) to ensure that the form is adapted to the idea, yet as is the way of things, sometimes structure attracts its own meanings. In “Today The Swallows” the relationship of form and content is a kind of compromise with the structures of reader expectation, with the semiotics of everyday things, the ceiling, the roof with its wings on downstroke, the home symbolically leaving. Peterson wants us to see that he sees the binds, the seeming walls of an idea, and by looking closely, by associating, will show us that this too is always a partial understanding, that in the gap there is more to be seen, a pulse to be felt.

Of course with Peterson, the opposite course of action simply must be explored. Instead of giving us the image-structure outright, he buries it. In “Ample Evidence” the overt reading is a kind of peon to just being civilized. But the true structure is the material (bones) and rational, versus the “abstract” (word, song) and fundamentalist. The buried narrative given through references to place, and glimpses at objects (timepieces/detonators), places (NY), and ideas (fundamentalism) to build the background of “a likely someone in his off-hours/ that might travel from the Newark Clock Shop to the Apollo”.

With regards the priests and mullahs that call others to die, be martyred, to appear in paradise, and typically of Peterson, he places his attention on the “disparity in theory”, “disparity in history” and the abandonment in logic that that this fundamentalism raises. Even though the martyrs will be flown to pieces (sic), leaving their bones behind, their summoned bodies would appear in paradise”, and for this, “there is ample evidence”, which of course there couldn’t be. Note the use of summoned, followed quickly by ‘helpless’ and ‘obeisance’. Without their bones they end up, yet again powerless, before yet another throne. This from a people that ‘made time a common province for machines and music (i.e. a rational, scientific, civilized people), that created the devices that were like a backbone for music. The bones here, are surely the bones of a secular society. But labour of all kinds is also blessed, “something accomplished elaborately is devotion” and refers to the hours it takes to lavishly engrave the wheels of a timepiece that no one will see, much as the old stonemasons used to do in cathedrals.

I am guessing that another oppressed people, the black Americans of the 1950’s might also have taken to blowing things up, but the four live harmonizers at the Apollo, who stood together, shovelled the air, sung and recorded as if

“music could be wound up be sewn to the living air

to make it last and whose audience chimed like clockwork”.

It is not the only poem that refers to bones. In “Bone Structure” examples of parallax images and inversions abound.

“Fish bones, a puzzle that shatters like broken glass

A clock impossible to wind or rebuild without parts left over

Mirror images of no and on, a spine cascading like a flight of stairs.

Every bone with its dark-finned shark process swimming

Relentlessly through daylight”

Peterson's joy is in showing how the idea can be made fit in fit objects, and in negative spaces, and other times, in the play between the two.

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

Allan Peterson Part II

2006-10-06T11:19:00.000+01:00

The Devices and Desires of Negative Ions

Peterson is at all times aware of these devices, and in true modern/post-modern traditions shows us his tools at work. He uses his just slightly arcane or scientific vocabulary to stud the lines, to jewel them, to flavour the tone. It reminded me a bit of some of the poems of Robert Hass where he puts green peppers on a white dish. As I was reading I thought of some of these poems as being a bit like cream sauce with black pepper, capers, and with a twist of lemon zest. Then in “Blackout with Herbs” Peterson has his own food-synaesthetic moment where

Light behind clouds is like corn starch

That thickens gravy

The effect of this moment in metaphor is so delicious, that Peterson takes the energy he has created from it, to leap into another register of reference, where we forget the calendar also “needs extra days like a pinch of cilantro”. There is always the missing and the unknowable in Peterson’s poems and in this poem the realization of the many potential types of gaps leads him into narrative, thinking about a story about how many things would have to go wrong with a system, in sequence, for a bird in the rafters to set off a concatenation of events, that takes down the power supply all down the west coast. But that’s life, a butterfly flaps its wings. The impossible happens all the time if you know where and how to look. In a structure that Peterson uses quite a bit, the second stanza of “Blackout with Herbs” takes the basic premise of the first stanza, and then either goes back into it a different route, or speculates on the principle established in the first stanza. Here he takes the evidence that the impossible does happen (almost inevitably) and then speculates on “the impossible”. In this case he speculates that the earths minerals came from meteors, that they are harvested like oregano, which reminds him of a trip to Italy, in a dream, where the souls “in the treasury, the impossibly lonesome bones, are arranged like salads”. This is not one of the best poems in the collection but it is a clear example of where Peterson weaves with negative capability.

The idea of negative space, negative capability is hugely important to Peterson and he is not afraid of making the reader reach for the dictionary to find out what “muon and meson” are (momentary, negative, sub atomic particles). In “Elementarity”, a man who discovered these sub-atomics, and lets face it, it must have felt that the world could be entirely re-imagined at that point, years later goes scuba diving

“though a school of silversides off Santa Barbara

large as a car lot

watched how they formed around him a thinking rose

so he added the singular

hard factors of astonishment to his basic elements”

From here Peterson goes on to imagine a world where veniality is not rewarded, where pleasure is deep and without guilt, where the silver fish forming (the shape of) an aster suggests the appearance of a single mind, and the conjecture or roaming goes on until it take a comical (and perhaps self depreciating twist) until a police officer in Clearwater pulls over a car that an iguana was driving, it could have been just another weird incident, but of course that Iguana was a Kennedy, and “the charges of which are neutral though nonetheless electric”. Yes, veniality. We have truly returned from our land of speculation and discovery.

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

Opening To Allan Peterson Essay

2006-10-05T19:36:00.000+01:00

This is the opening to an essay I am writing on Allan Peterson's work. I thought I would post it piece by piece because I got so carried away writing it. Hope you enjoy it.

All The Lavish In Common: In The Nick of Time and Theory

On Taking a Line and its Dent for a Walk Until It Becomes A Fissure

In one of his poems from this collection, Peterson says “my bags go on without me

labelled density and pressure”. The same could be said for the poems themselves yet you never have the feeling that that the poet is striking out on new “big idea” poems, or that he is delighted to present ‘a telling detail’ for your delectation. It’s nothing personal; he does not feel diminished by his place in the world, or surprised by what goes on in it. After all, many things are possible, and frequently the impossible is too.

With Peterson the poem occurs in the telling, a telling that mirrors the process of reflection, where some aspect of the poet is at sea, and can almost be seen in its process of thinking. His journey cannot take everything in and knows it leaves something out, a lot out. It will thus never be a whole telling, “I cannot finish I mean”. What is important is thus to understand the process of selection, what is included in the poem. They pivot upon objects of memory and thought, but they must have adequate force to be selected, and followed. At first reading, you may think that this is a poet following the a line of thought, or taking a line for a walk, but on closer inspection, there are deep structures at work here.

Recent books by James Longenbach on The Resistance of Poetry, and the essays on poets like Bishop foreground ideation and the presentation of ideation as one of the major achievements of modern poetry. A part of its attractiveness is seeing how the poets mind moves, and to be brought into that movement by them, and thus, have our experience of experience enlarged. To better illustrate this point, I am going to linger in detail on an early poem in the collection called “Private Lives”. Many of the image structures, and poetic strategies are present here. The opening lines,

“How orb-weavers patch up the air in places

like fibrinogen, or live in the fence lock”

Well, the orb-weaver is an American bird that can apparently make its nests in locks. Much could be said of this: there are no locked fields, nature will inhabit all, your separate fields are but one field. But there are three word connections that just draw your attention in to make these lines happen in the mind: ‘orb’, ‘fibrinogen’, and ‘lock’ (supported by how, or, and live). Orb, is an unusual general word, associated with the globe, or the world, it has connotations of the old, the regal, the medieval. Fibrinogen, is a scientific term for the growths (fibres, materials, texts) that grow and thicken in the lung, they cause shortness of breath, they darken the lung, they would appear dark on an x-ray, as we can only see our lungs in negative. Yet the orb-weavers in their physical flight, seem to metaphorically patch up the air with their traces, and in very “real” physical terms they patch up the available space inside a fence lock, a space perhaps as impossible to live in and patch up, as the air itself. I think this is a very neat use of modulating vocabulary, negative space, metaphorical space, and analogy. I could go on to say that Fibrinogen carries fetid, morbid overtones, that the transmuting of the imagery from such negative spaces as “lungs/air”, “bird-trace/morbid-growth” stretches the reader, until the image cluster lands in its completely physical lock. (The image cluster repeats later in :”you will see moth clouds/ that are moving breaths”). In the next lines,

“How the broom holds lizards.

How if you stand back you will miss them

afflicted by sunset,

the digger bees mining in the yard,

birds too fast to have shadows,

the life that lives in the wren whistle.”

Here, a little playfully, we are told that the broom could/does/ potentially hold lizards, as presumably the air could hold the traces of bird flight. But observe, the digger bees at sunset, forced underground (interestingly, and ominously, “afflicted”, thus perhaps forced under), and birds that move so fast they don’t leave shadows (because the sun is perhaps too low, because they are in a hurry, because the world does not need these birds to have shadows) and observe too that life (with a big L) is contained in the wren whistle, that smallest of birds, that smallest of details. But in the background here, are ominous forces, shadows, relations we may miss. There is urgency in the lines. Having drawn up a nature-scene, having had us metaphorically “look down” at the birds in the lock, the broom in the corner, the bees on the ground, the no-shadows of birds flying over, he next directs our gaze back upwards, look…

“You will see moth-clouds

that are moving breaths

and perhaps something like the star

that fell on Alabama

through the roof of Mrs. E. Hulitt Hodges

and hit her radio, then her.

No, you must be close for the real story”.

Perhaps its me, but I think this is going from the general (the star) to the particular (Alabama) to the general/particular (the house of Mrs. E. Hulitt Hodges, a general house of a very specific woman, with a very specific name), to the really particular, to the comical Radio. This is a surprising “turn” in the poem, in both style, theme, and image-structures. We might have turned left and ended up in another poem entirely. But wait, the last line is a hinge of memory “you must be close for the real story”, close to the bees, the birds, the dramas of the barnyard floor. From where did this impulse come; why from childhood, from schooldays:

“I remember being made

to stand in the corner for punishment

because it would be dull and empty

and I would be sorry.

But instead it was a museum of small wonders,

a place of three walls

with a weather my breath influenced,

an archaeology of layers, of painted molding,

a meadow as we called them then

of repeatable pale roses,

an eight-eyed spider in a tear of wallpaper

turning my corner.

The texture. The soft echo if I talked.

If I said I am not bad if this is the world”.

It’s a rush of. recognition, or revelation. It occurs to him now as it occurred to him then: there are no small places. If you pay attention, in a place of three walls, paying attention and being open ‘disappears’ one wall of this metaphorical prison. History and time can come off in layers, where even though the observer influences the thing observed, life has a lavish texture, and if you listen and observe the world echoes back your deeper delving with further revelation. This opening up of the world saved him. Do you remember being in a corner and speaking, and hearing that soft echo, playing with it? I do. For me the poetry is in the remembering of that small soft echo coming back to him, and the reader connecting to an early, near atavistic sense-memory.

So much has happened in the poem, so many “happenings” have occurred in us as the revelation of relationships has been opened up to us. We made those connections as readers, we didn’t just join the dots. Yet we seem to have walked through a simple narrative. This is Peterson’s great skill. We walk through simple-seeming narratives, albeit at times with strange turns into unknown registers, through modulations in tone, in scene, in aspect, but we are made beings that bear strange relation, and we bear it unknowingly, into the known.

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

What's Going On Ted? I Mean In General Like...

2006-09-13T11:49:00.000+01:00

Does the cream always rise to the top? I am wondering if there is a place in the blogsphere for reviving writers that have publisehd in magazines, but not yet published a volume, or perhaps are self published. My friend ciaran o'driscoll has his first book "gog and magog" up on the Irish Literary Revival site. It is a great first step to making books available. I wish other countries would also do this.

http://www.irishliteraryrevival.com/ciaranodriscoll.html

Technorati Tags: Irish poetry, contemporary Irish poetry, poetry reviews, ciaran o'driscoll,

Lack of posting

2006-08-23T16:08:00.000+01:00

Apologies on the lack of postings. Have just been very busy on the work and personal fronts. Hope to have some new postings end of next week.

Link to Michael Longly Interview

2006-08-01T10:18:00.000+01:00

regular stuff from Longley

http://www.threemonkeysonline.com/article_michael_longley_interview.htm

Kinsella

2006-07-25T16:37:00.001+01:00

Nice to see Kinsella getting some reviews online. It is also worth visiting "Intercapillary Space" to read more about poets like Douglas Oliver, and to have people who know the work reveal these works to us.

"Intercapillary Space": Thomas Kinsella, Marginal Economy

Technorati Tags: Thomas Kinsella

Technorati Tags: Thomas Kinsella

Kinsella

2006-07-25T16:37:00.000+01:00

All The Lavish In Common, Allan Peterson

2006-06-23T19:47:00.000+01:00

Read a review of Allan Peterson's work at:

http://slickerchumways.blogspot.com/2006_04_01_slickerchumways_archive.html

It is one of the most interesting books I have read in a long time. I'm going to put together a long review when I have finished it. I have been reading it one poem at a time, so that I would be finished it too soon. More to come on this one.

Catherine Walsh Reviews by Mike Begnal

2006-06-11T11:39:00.000+01:00

Thought this was a good introduction to a few Irish poets that don't get much coverage. http://mikebegnal.blogspot.com/

Pleiades Review of Slallow

2006-05-31T16:23:00.000+01:00

Just found this review of Swallow. I think its pretty much on the ball. I try not to read reviews before forming my own opinion about a work, but i find it interesting that he zero's in on many of the concerns, indeed the lines, that I was drawn to myself yesterday.

http://www.cmsu.edu/englphil/pleiades/Field.html

Mirand Field: Swallow

2006-05-30T22:33:00.000+01:00

Read Swallow over the last few days. Where she is strong is on prose poems such as Bestial and The Lost Head from the third section. There is much to like here in terms of turns of phrase, well warped metaphor etc. But I get the feeling that we are in the hands of a craftsperson, who is not bringing us on any real voyage. In Bestial there is the feeling of real conflict in a mothers love and a desire to inflict some pain on the loved one for his neediness, for his embodyment, for his inability to exist without being viewed by the mother. Then she turns mid phantasia (where the child is descirbed as "

"..fragile, almost transparent pale, foxed with sun-gold
splashes. And the lashes: The blue eyes suffer
a surfeit of them, ting scythes, black, baroquely curved.
He is too beautiful by far. The boy must not be so."

Now, you can see the craftsmanship in the lines. It is when she realises that she cannot idealise the boy, or give him a kind of ideal childhood, that things take a genuine twist.

"...the boy is what he must not be. Break him
a tiny bit. Look into him hard enough to wound him. A tiny bit.
I mean:
Let the eye's stillness magnify the rigour of appraisal. He will not win.
Burn him with your look, his lovely skin."

Similarily in a poem like Citronella we find that within the lovely language of birth, but "Not get the girl I wanted. The boy slit me". It is at these moments where I feel that she is at the edge of an honesty where her craft can be left to as the guide, and the strange journey begins in earnest:

"...The tree is a rare strain -
bred for looking only. But the children open up the lemons
and the small birds eat and grow too full to fly away".

The New John Banville : Elegant Variation Has The Scoop

2006-05-24T21:50:00.000+01:00

http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2006/05/in_which_all_pr.html

John Ashberry

2006-04-04T13:54:00.000+01:00

The book, Region of Unlikeness by Thomas Gardner
has given me loads of insights into Ashberry. I've never "got" Ashberry before,
even though I've bought most of his books. I guess that when you are clued in to
what his main concerns are, and the strategies that he is using, the quote that
he is very like Wallace Stephens becomes apparent.

Bishop and Graham

2006-03-30T18:27:00.000+01:00

The first chapter in region of unlikelness by Thomas Gardner he builds a really good case for considering Bishop as a precursor to Graham. The way that she builds out the "frame of reference", shows it to you, and then says, "yes, very well, but it simply will not do!" is discussed within an overall frame of the "sceptic". It also reminds me of a book I read recently on "the resitance of poetry" where the author discusses how we read poetry to hear the poet thinking, the flow of thought and feeling. After all those years of reading critical theory, here we are again, at the edge of reason.

Erosion

2006-03-20T20:05:00.000Z

Picked up Jorie Graham's Erosion just to see if the theories of Gardner were evident from the early collections. What it showed me, I think, is that Graham has had a clear gift for the oblique image from the start. Will rest up now for the rest of the evening and finish this collection. I'm lucky to pretty much have all her work sitting on the floor beside me, so hey, when I eventually get around to typing up the Brenda Shaugnessy piece, I might develop a small one on Jorie. I'm sure she will only be delighted at the prospect ! ;)

Erosion

2006-03-20T20:02:00.000Z

Regions of Unlikeness

2006-03-15T17:49:00.000Z

I picked up Regions of Unlikeness, Explaining Contemporary Poetry ,by Thomas Gardner recently, and the follow up series of essays he edited, Jorie Graham Essays on the Poetry, and I have to say from the opening 20 pages, I like this a lot. in Region of Unlikeness (which I shall now refer to rather knowlingly as ROU) looks back to the modenists such as Stevens to see how the project of expression within language, and through language, happens in full knowledge of its defeat, and that this is yet still in search of a poetic that retains a concern with remaining human, of a strategy of accepting the limit, and working within it. Quoting the Robert Hass lines from Human Wishes "A man thinks "liliacs against white houses"... from Spring Drawing Gardner shows us the mind recovering it's-self within that pause. It was originally Ciaran O'Driscoll that drew my attention to this poem, and these lines, and he knew that something important was going on here. I can only say i look forward to the rest of this journey. Its very timely, in that I have been writing a poem called "Sunday Morning Caesura" for about a year and a half now, and the concerns are central to me. Enough. Enough.

Legitamite Dangers: Half Way Through

2006-03-07T18:46:00.000Z

Half way through this book and even poets that I like are not well represented here. More poems per poet are required. More later.

Legitimate Dancers

2006-03-02T10:26:00.000Z

Picked up the new anthology Legitimate Dancers from Sarabande. Firstly, what a beautiful production and on a first reading of the contents page, a pretty focused rollcall of Poets. I've read about a third of the poets on the list and liked many of them, so looking foward to this. Also half way through Henri Cole's "Visible Man", and how unfashionable his aesthetic is, and how very very good many of these poems are. I had previously read "Middle Earth" and it too was good, but Visible Man has a cold heat. As per usual I have too much work to do to linger too long on poetry these days, but having said that, no one dies wishing the spent one more day in the office!

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

Brigid Pegeen Kelly - Orchard

2006-02-27T20:04:00.000Z

Much talk about this book, and the poem Dragon. Surreal in mentation, great grasp of moving from one image into another, some great end lines. Only half way through at the moment and I was reading it in the dead of the night so maybe all that talk of "mists", "wolves" and "dawn" was just a bit much. My initial response is that below the lovely surface, there isn't much depth here. I don't sense any world-view, any real insights into "the way we are", but then, maybe thats just not the kind of poet she is. I will return.

Forrest Gander is A Strange Guy

2006-02-14T19:10:00.000Z

Have just about finished reading Forrest Gander's new book, and I must say it is elliptical, but with some kind of "realistic"/ "realism" cut up element to it. "A history of violence" is a series of poems where a criminal mind remembers the night and we as readers almost have to put it together for him. I don't think the collection as a whole lives up to the first few poems, but I am interested enough to follow up and find out more about him. Disclaimer, I know nothing about this guy at the moment !

Forest Gander, Science and Steepleflower

2006-01-26T18:28:00.000Z

The book arrived from amazon, I opened the first poem (Time and The Hour) read the first line, "The convulsive incision tore light" finished it, and I am now waiting for a three hour period where I can give this book my full attention. This guys seems to have set the bar high, where it should be.

Peter Gizzi

2006-01-06T18:15:00.000Z

Was reading Periplum and other poems the other night, made no sense to me. Then all of a sudden it all hung together for me. Very good. Very good indeed.

Todays Reading

2006-01-02T14:15:00.000Z

Reading “Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry” by Linda Gregerson today. Mostly reviews published in Poetry and The Boston Review. The bottom line with her review and point of view (I think) is that clear old line between “Imagination” and “Fancy”. She also has a keen eye for the ethic underlying a poetic strategy.

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

Upload from Performancing Into blogger

2006-01-02T13:33:00.000Z

This is a trial.

Some Reading Today

2006-01-02T13:29:00.000Z

Reading "Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry" by Linda Gregerson today. Mostly reviews published in Poetry and The Boston Review. The bottom line with her review and point of view (I think) is that clear old line between "Imagination" and "Fancy". She also has a keen eye for the ethic underlying a poetic strategy.

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

Yes I'm late With the New Brenda Shaughnessy Review

2005-10-07T15:59:00.000+01:00

However, because I am taking a great deal of time in reading her, I think I made a bit of a breakthrough last evening, in that I hear some of the background influences, and a ghostly voice....

Stay tuned....

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

Brenda Shaughnessy - Interior With Sudden Joy

2005-09-26T21:33:00.000+01:00

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 !

2005-09-21T15:11:00.000+01:00

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

2005-09-20T16:06:00.000+01:00

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

2005-09-20T14:11:00.000+01:00

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.

1 85235 384 8

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

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

2005-09-05T19:44:00.000+01:00

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

2005-09-02T21:23:00.000+01:00

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:

1

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

The Next Posting Will Be Seatown

2005-08-19T16:13:00.000+01:00

Having been hooked into Conor O'Callaghan's poetry collection Fiction, I am now re-reading his previous collection Seatown. I hope to follow and trace some of the themes and styles through this collection, and relate it to his subsequent collection, Fiction. Even at this stage, I can tell that there is lots to ponder here.

Categories: poetry, ireland, irish, crit, literature

Conor O'Callaghan, Fiction

2005-08-19T15:44:00.000+01:00

Conor O'Callaghan never reaches, to do so would claim too much, to risk being sentimental. He likes to "tell it as it is", like Larkin, to be the less deceived. O'Callaghan is the least likely of Irish poets to let words get away from him, you get the sense that they are there to serve the idea, not to play ring a ring a Rosie with each other. To quote from his poem The Flat Earth

The surface, love, is everything.
It is plenty. The wallpaper ripens,
the horizon plumbs its own depths
and the flat earth warms to us.

In the past, O'Callaghan would not use a poetic device, without giving you the frame of knowingness in which to interpret it. This is usually a straight forward narrative, a convention, or a form, all worked under the tone of a dry wit, or gentle irony. Here in his latest collection "Fiction" I believe we find this facet of his talent exploded out into full view. This is the part that understands the devices of Poetry and uses the devices of Fiction to enable the lancing of the wound. This wound is a man entering a phase of marital problems, where trust is slipping, and your word (in all senses) is being distrusted. I'd like to take a little time and go through one of the poems here to give an example of the framing devices.

In the poem Reception this writerly aspect is given from the very opening lines: "Take this whatever way you will, and you will".The story begins at a poetry reading where he "steps into my name being called", wondering if this event would exist in some time-continuum accessible from the future, tune-inable if you will. This reminds him of a memory of his father tuning in the television aerial, and the kids relaying the word "no" back and forth "like a bucket of water splashed from hand to hand/ to a barn gone up in smoke". Its a lovely image, a good scene. Then, the opening line of the second stanza .... "I tell a lie." It turns out its someone else's story, and he has acquired it as his own from someone else over diner (someone by the way that has "a lisp the size of a pup") and he took it as his own. When he remembers his own "true" past, it (tellingly) begins:

Who am I telling? you suffered it daily
in that hole where we were broke and green as barely.
The heat of Wimbledon a game of join-the-dots.
I'd sit there droning on about the Montreal Olympics,
my pissed father and the mysteries of a picture
that you and you alone could coax around.

The last two lines here have slippage and perhaps this is my own flawed reading. Is it that his father coaxed "the aerial / tuner" or is the picture; is it that only the father could coax the correct picture from the TV; or is it that the entire scene is a "picture that you and you alone (the writer) could coax around", get it moving, bring to meaning. We are not allowed to dig deeper into the if's and when and buts (as they say in Ireland), O'Callaghan shifts gear and in a mock invocation (ghosting Wallace Stephens perhaps?) he pleads "Patron saint of sound and vision interference !/ uncrowned queen of tracking and rabbits ears!/ indulge me while I fill, if just this once,/ the singular cup of corn that sentiment permits me." And now the plea proper...

What I would and wouldn't have to have you with me
here and now, though closer to what we were,
beside ourselves (no less) with loves indifference,
that you might clarify how this finds me, nicely,
waiting in a tree-star lobby on my lonesome
(so help me) to saunter any moment out to the cab
the Japanese brunette on the desk has called me
and the even greater unknown (for heaven's sake)
of tonight's canopy of satellites and nip in he air
a dope such as I can only hope to welcome.

So the author needs the other person there to help "adjust" the picture, to clarify the meaning of this scene. In the word Reception, we have the reception of the Poet stepping up to the audience, the idea of a reception where the audience stands around and talks to the poet after the reading, we have the reception area of hotel, the receptionist herself, etc. etc. Yet the point here is that there is a particular someone absent and therefore we cannot trust any interpretation of the scene, for it might all be (after all) someone else's memory.

In this "great abeyance" between man and woman, husband and wife, there are different silences, different absences. One of these is the absence where a telephone line is there allowing for the possibility of communication, yet neither seems able to get through. From Time Zones

Standing here, banging quarters into white space,
feeling like the next turn up on stage,
leaving message after disconsolate message,
sick of the sound of my own voice.

And there are the more tender moments in this sequence:

Moslty, when sleep is beneath me,
I fall all over again for your absence,
the memory of your sap like absinthe's
aftertaste, your scent this near to me.

I think that the interesting things in this collection might be happening in that space between the person, the writer/author, and the persona. As he says in one of the poems, he likes writing in the third person, and in the poem "The Present Writer" he ends it by saying he is happiest "inhabiting the third person, as if talking across himself/ or forever clapping his own exits from the wings". In The Narrator, where the relationship between these roles is captured in a bare "Where was I?".

In terms of "frames" O'Callaghan takes a number of strategies. Within the overall frame of the standard narrative structure, there are loose references to other works. Take 'The Burbs', where we find some university professors reflecting on the banality of the life about them, (the Karate masters second cousin has had been beheaded in cyberspace) and trying to slip the American accents they have acquired over their visit, presumably when a very real Englishman is about to be beheaded in Iraq, his desperate pleas shown more or less live on TV. The author is about to correct some term papers on Joyce's The Dead, where the tale of comfortable, staid middle class, in a timebefore major revolution is about to get its cumuppance, is reflected in modern suburbanites, where...

"(We) live in central air and shades,
skittish with heat, the release of feeling neither here nor there
between several raisons d'etre and the breezy self each impersonates,
blasting "The Wind that Shakes the Barley" to smother

another gospel a capella "Star-Spangled Banner' climaxing on the PA
and blurting all of the avove over takeout salad at Mort and Barb's.

Different frames stripped to their bare outline, are used in other poems. From lists of Poems that didn't quite make the collection, poems about outakes at recording sessions, the friend whose job it was to censor the nipples in films due for Television broadcast, to the poem about the lack of a "central song" in his personal relationship with his Wife, O'Callaghan looks like being more and more interested in the marginalia, and the center that cannot hold. The centrepiece "Hello" looks that the different contexts in which the word Hello can be received, waited for, looked at historically, but in my opinion always with a view that every word, even the innocent Hello, is open to interpretation.

O'Callaghan might be playing with words here, and at times you feel that the structures and some of the themes show a little bit more of the influence of Paul Muldoon than is needed, such as in Loose Change, and Crush. But this is a quibble. In Fiction, O'Callaghan has produced one of the finest collections of the year. I feel it is something of a breakthrough and look forward to seeing where he takes himself from here.

ISBN: 1852353821