|
Belfast Triptych Marilyn Hacker reads poets who span the generation that has produced an unprecedented flowering and fruition of poetry in Ireland |
|
MEDBH McGUCKIAN DEREK MAHON SEAMUS HEANEY
To a non-Irish reader, it often seems that the Irish poet inherits a vocation of representing Ireland even as s/he represents both an individual whose speech earns its own keep, as well as ‘the poet’ speaking from his or her vocation, out of and to a language itself. (For the Northern Irish poet to stand in for Ireland poses more complex problems.) The avatar of Heaney’s Ireland is the isolated rural working man whose (masculine) artisan’s craft is implicitly equated with the creation of poetry (as the avatar of Eavan Boland’s is a suburban woman looking into the dusk from her doorway at a landscape scarred by history). Mahon here is the Irish writer as cross-cultural part-time expat, often looking homeward from a Joycean Paris, like his own Ulysses recalling Ithaca on Calypso’s isle. Medbh McGuckian tells us that her book’s title comes from an Old Irish 8th-century document granting St Patrick ecclesiastical powers: a myth of spiritual and cultural origin. There seems to be a marked dichotomy between male and female Irish poets of this generation on the question of metrical form. At least three notable male poets – Heaney, Mahon and Paul Muldoon – are virtuosi of metre (and rhyme), a virtuosity which they deploy differently, but with similar bravura and obvious delight. Women poets whose careers span the same decades, whose backgrounds and formations are often congruent, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Eavan Boland, Paula Meehan and Medbh McGuckian, have a more vexed relationship with metrics. (This resolved itself otherwise for poets born in the 1960s, such as Vona Groarke.) McGuckian has intense formal concerns, but they are entirely other than those of metre. Rather, hers is a prosody of displacement, unsettling the reader’s expectations (just as metre might be said to satisfy them) with disjunctive imagery or phrasing enlivened by her lyricism. Both McGuckian and Mahon centre these recent books around what are to this reader fairly unpromising concepts: clouds for Mahon (who is at his best on terra firma); dreams and angels for McGuckian. Isn’t this everything held most suspect in lyric poetry: cloud-cuckoo-land, the unwilled imagination, a mythology made suspect by overuse and fatuous belief? (Some survey said 70% of Americans interviewed ‘believe in angels’. They believe American television commentators as well. Others may be warier.)
There is a kind of studied anti-intellectualism in some of McGuckian’s interviews. Her work belies this, not only because of its non-linear or non-representational character (which is intensely intellectual) but because of the richness of reference, which informs it throughout, whether to the plastic arts, to Catholic hagiography, to history or to literature. McGuckian’s studied indirectness of approach might be compared with that of John Ashbery, in a different register, with more emphasis on sensory and sensual imagery. Her poetry connects the lyrical and the ‘experimental’. There is a sense of corporeality in these poems, of embodiedness or incarnation, which provides grounding when sequential coherence is deliberately withdrawn: Ditch and pit and bridge and hearth Like it or not, then, here is a book returning obsessively to the idea of ‘angels’ as messengers and observers, its title referring to St Patrick’s colloquy with one such (and thus an association with Ireland itself). In keeping with this theme, the untitled ten-poem Annunciation sequence is the book’s central focus. It draws upon the perennial fertility (pun intended) of that myth and its hagiography, especially for women, women artists, in its celebration of inspiration, a sacred breath’s incipient motion coming to a woman. What could be more like a Muse than Gabriel as he is habitually depicted? McGuckian does not give a referent for her apparently ekphrastic series of poems, which at times suggest paintings and at others stained glass. Every reader attracted by this subject will have in her/his head at least a dozen such – Florentine, Flemish, French. I believe it is their juxtaposition we are invited to visualize as the backdrop, indeed as the foreground of these poems, where (as with the Flemish masters, who grounded sacred subjects in the quotidian,) eccentric details, in the corners, flying out of the field of vision, are equally significant, and inform the import of the central figures’ demeanour and movement: It is impossible to tell whether he has already spoken. (‘A Chrisom Child’) The poems are mostly stanzaic, in irregular quatrains or tercets, often enigmatically titled. ‘Chairé’ suggests enthronement within a church; some may know that it’s the Greek for ‘Ave’. ‘A More’ juxtaposes ‘amore’ on ‘more’ (the Shorter Oxford tells me that a ‘more’ is also an obsolete word for a tree-stump) in a poem about Mary’s confrontation with Gabriel ‘in a room neither can stand up in’: The earth is spread out below them Coming back obsessively to a moment before a momentous but internal action, the sequence is a series of unresolved confrontations, as the depictions of Annunciations partake of both motion and stasis. As at the moment the writer or painter puts pen or brush to paper or canvas, anything can happen, while, at the same time, a foretold story is embodying itself. I don’t know how much McGuckian wishes her reader to unravel the riddles she poses (the riddling woman is a staple of folk-tales) but there is some satisfaction when one does so. One of the most quietly powerful (and violent) of these poems is ‘Hand Reliquary, Ave Maria Lane’ in which the scene that takes form after an elegiac opening is of a dying woman digging in her own palms with her nails to create stigmata. ‘A Lost Epistle to Sister Beatrice’ could be in the voice of Dante: What if I never crush your ladyskin For whom, as for you, was the gate of heaven I have a preposition problem here! Though I’d be the last to assume that a poem of erotic longing written to a woman by a woman was in a male personna.
MacNeice, the Anglo-Irish cosmopolitan, is an influence Mahon has himself cited. But it is Yeats with whom he dialogues most frequently in this book. There is a poem here entitled baldly ‘Lapis Lazuli’, (dedicated to Harry Clifton, the same name if not the same man as Yeats’s dedicatee). In Yeats’s magnificent, problematic poem, it is ‘hysterical women’ who in 1938 foresee war, and quite specifically the Blitz. Cassandra is no more appreciated than she ever was – though one could say that Yeats with those lines incorporates the prophetic function while discrediting the women. And Edward Saïd could have had a field day with Yeats’s ‘Chinamen’. Yeats’s message is that civilization will always be rebuilt by those who have retained joy in the face of disaster, but calling attention to the probable advent of disaster seems more sane than hysterical. Mahon laconically defuses while not-solaconically claiming kinship and right of response. Formally, Yeats is the more ‘innovative’ in his non-stanzaic alternations between tetrameter and pentameter: Mahon’s poem is in dizains meandering between envelope quatrains separated by a couplet and alternating rhymes, all in the signature unbuttoned iambic pentameter of his recent work. (Mahon in the 1970s and 80s favoured tighter metre: this is a choice.) His lapis lazuli is a chunk in the rough, recalling the ‘whole night sky [as it] serves as a paperweight’ – and, later in the poem, the post-war European continent glittering before the poet in his youth; the playful Chinese sages are the eponymous Deux Magots of the Paris café, not symbolic of a decorative oriental wisdom but of the Haussmanian capital to which young Mahon escaped – and the ‘hysterical women’ are replaced by: a young woman reads alone in a lighted train Mahon’s indirect colloquy with Yeats continues more obliquely in ‘Cloud Ceiling’ – also in dizains – for a child born to his late middle age, lowering the rhetorical level of ‘Prayer for My Daughter’. Mahon’s poem wishes the child nothing but a successful continuation of her infancy, acknowledging gladly that she won’t be a heroine out of anyone else’s myth; ruefully, that he ‘probably won’t be here when you grow up’. It is more of a meditation on the unknown realm from which the newly born emerge: ‘An ocean-drop, dash in the dark, flash in the brain, / suspension in the red mist, in the lightgrain’ than an imprecation or a prophecy. (The poem descends toward the occasional in its closing stanzas, after its bravura opening.) While understanding why an Irish poet of 60 might feel obliged to ‘take on’ Yeats, this reader would enjoy seeing Mahon ‘in dialogue’ with MacNeice as well, if only because MacNeice’s political-aesthetic model seems both more relevant to the present moment and more congenial to the persona and the aesthetic of Mahon’s poetry; the formal largesse of some of his later poems is also in synch with Mahon’s current impulse. But then this reader is one of the hysterical women. Women, not hysterical, figure frequently in this book, not as the Other or even the Beloved, but as fellow humans: there is a three-sonnet sequence in the persona of Jean Rhys who could have been, and is not, caricatured as a Crazy Jane. The sequence is, instead, a portrait of a writer (sa semblable, sa soeur) surviving expatriation, poverty and drink, ‘fighting to keep sane / in a new age, and so the soul survives’. There is a double dialogue in Harbour Lights : with Yeats and Ireland; and with France, French poets and Paris in particular, as if these two countries and literatures, the athome and the abroad, were the double Pole-Stars of Mahon’s imagination (as has been evident throughout his career). The collection opens in Paris in winter time, in a long poem called ‘Resistance Days’, half of a diptych closing with the title poem, an equally lengthy internal monologue in Kinsale, County Cork. As well as Mahon’s fluid version of Valéry’s ‘Cimetière Marin’, and his adaptation of Bonnefoy, the book includes a more subtle nod to Apollinaire in the poems ‘Shorelines’ and ‘The Widow of Kinsale’, an ekphrastic poem and a dramatic monologue, both in five-line trimeter stanzas, closely resembling those of the ‘Chanson du Mal-Aimé’ (used for a similar subject in The Hunt by Night). Juxtaposed versions of playful courtly love poems by Guillaume IX d’Aquitaine (12th C.) and Tadgh O’Ruairc (17th C.) , from the Occitan and the Irish respectively, emphasize these alternating currents in Mahon’s work. These, as well as the Jean Rhys triptych and the above-mentioned ‘Widow’, create a necessary counterpoint to the voice of the poet-persona and the associated pentameter dizains or octets which comprise much of the book. But it is in the two long poems ‘Resistance Days’ and ‘Harbour Lights’ that Mahon, stepping free of influence and its anxieties, shows what he does best, allowing himself to be loquacious, even long-winded, in deceptively conversational verse. It is not the fact that the verse, when one examines it, is crafted with every metrical expansion or rhyme furthering its project, which is remarkable, but that the poet does in these poems what novelists like Flaubert (and early Joyce) do: creates a character, his situation and history, his placement in the events of his time, with an accretion of seemingly local and domestic detail: The sort of snail-mail that can take a week Alive to voices and, to my own surprise, What Mahon risks in this technique is loss of the lyric’s memorability. But that does not seem to be his project or his aim. There are poems to which the reader returns because they have imprinted themselves on her consciousness, almost asking to be learned by heart; there are others, and Mahon’s in this book are among them, to which one returns to resume a conversation.
Séamus, make me a side arm to take on the earth,
... The plate and the edge of it not to be wrinkly or crooked – ... And the best thing of all, the ring of it, sweet as a bell. The poem is in three rhymed alternating quatrains, lines of 12 to 14 syllables, mostly in amphibrachs (I do not know if this echoes the Irish form). The combination of long lines and lilting, unfamiliar triple metre gives the poem an air of an anthem – all the more so as Heaney quotes from it in the last stanza of the poem which follows. With ‘Digging’ in so many of Heaney’s readers’ minds, it resembles the insertion of a leitmotif, with a glint of selfmockery not present in the earnest early poem. Here the forging of the tool is the act of writing poetry itself, rather than the spade made equivalent to the pen. Other objects central to poems are ‘The Turnip-Snedder’ (Heaney’s genius for employing words at once homely and arcane is deployed from the opening poem onwards), a sledge-hammer, a saw, a fireman’s helmet, a harrow-pin. Even a love poem, ‘Tate’s Avenue’, is limned in terms of three different car rugs spread on the ground by the couple over the years of their relationship. In the poem ‘To George Seferis in the Underworld’ (one of a dozen homages to dead poets) Heaney retraces the process by which a local word from early life occurred to him and tells us, finally, what it means: And for me a chance to test the edge Heaney is one of the contemporary masters of the sonnet in English, not surprising given his love of the well defined, useful well crafted object. There are numerous sonnets in District and Circle, including two sequences – the number depending on how one counts sonnet-like 13-liners. The sequences, the title poem and ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’ inform each other: one is a descent into the underworld (of the Underground) and the other an imagined resurrection. It is the alter ego Heaney created in The Spirit Level who is resuscitated into the contemporary world. (The Tollund Man lived during the 4th century BC. Executed or sacrificed, he was buried in a peat bog on the Jutland Peninsula in Denmark.) It is the Dantean poet who descends. The ‘District and Circle’ poems contrast with the Olympian largesse of the Tollund sequence, all in Petrarchan sonnets: here, the rhyme scheme is irregular, and three of the poems have only 13 lines. The speaker, though he’s got a ritual with a tin-whistle-playing busker, seems as alien to daily commuting as Dante (or the Tollund Man) would have been. His gestures are akin to those of remembered figures who ‘swing a sledge’ or ‘forge a spade’: Stepping on to it across the gap, Despite their placement in the book, ‘District and Circle’ seems to continue and complete the arc launched by ‘The Tollund Man’ with the speaker once more underground, in perpetual purgatorial motion: ‘And so by night and day to be transported / Through galleried earth with them, the only relict / Of all that I belonged to, hurtled forward,’ – representing not only himself, but his ‘father’s glazed face in my own, waning / And craning’. An old world set into motion in the new. This is one of the few places in the book where there is vulnerability in the poet’s stance, even though the world’s uncertainty is often acknowledged. The Golden Age of his childhood was, as he depicts it, also a Bronze Age (thus his sense of kinship with the Tollund Man?) of ‘hoar and harder’ words and wordless epiphanies. This is underscored by his returning here to themes, forms and subjects he has considered before: the Tollund Man, his brother’s death in childhood, old age and death in the country, homages to Wordsworth , Milosz or Auden, conjugal eros with a welcome gleam of lust but a curiously absent Thou. The upper-middleclass complacency of the bloke in ‘The Birch Grove’ as he ‘dandles a sandal’ and watches his wife pouring tea seems to be tempting the gods. There were newly planted gardens in the suburbs of Nagasaki, Pompeii and Beirut. Carpe diem by all means, but vouchsafe us a word to show you’re aware of doing so. (Are the 14/15-syllable largely dactylic lines meant to remind us of Rome?) In the brief poem ‘Höfn’ Heaney says beautifully enough that we’ve been told the glacier will melt and ‘come[s] wallowing across the delta flats’. He observes it from an airplane and remarks (only) that its coldness still seems word-chillingly fearsome. A poet often enough doesn’t know where the poem will go, but still, this reads like an evasion of its premise. I’m reminded of how in (again) ‘Lapis Lazuli’ Yeats avoids confronting the prophecy of the opening stanza: London will be bombed. In both cases, the resulting poem is more interesting than any doom-saying, but the reader is still thinking ‘What about…?’ in the end. Heaney’s best poems resemble the objects, and the mostly stoic souls they describe and laud, in that they stand individual, discrete in the reader’s memory: the country funeral of an aunt with ‘the hawthorn half in leaf’ in terza rima in ‘The Lift’; the eroticism by indirection of ‘Tate’s Avenue’; the three-part elegy for Milosz; the ominous ‘flickerlit’ title sequence. These poets give us three lively, valid and necessary possibilities for poetry: a riddling, arcane and open-ended spell or charm; a colloquy with a reader imagined into dialogue; a concrete thing made of words and made to last.
Marilyn Hacker's new and selected poems, Essays on Departure, will be published in Carcanet Press’s Oxford Poets Series in October this year. She is also the author of Desesperanto (WW Norton, 2003) and the translator of She Says by Vénus Khoury-Ghata (Graywolf Press, 2003) and of Birds and Bison by Claire Malroux (Sheep Meadow Press, 2004). She lives in New York and Paris.
|
|
Please send books for review in Poetry London to: Scott Verner You can contact Poetry London on editors@poetrylondon.co.uk Tel / Fax: 00 44 (0)20 8521 0776
|
|