Cassandra Voices

Tag: Ciaran O’Rouke Poet

  • Review: Namanlagh by Tom Paulin

    Review: Namanlagh by Tom Paulin (Faber and Faber, 2025)

    The “power to think / has clean left me”, Tom Paulin claims – not quite convincingly – in his sharply observant new poetry collection, Namanlagh, which chronicles the author’s experience of crippling depression and advancing age. “Have I at last started to climb out / of the deep pit”, he wonders, “where I’ve been / this three and a half years?” Physical and intellectual lethargy, it would seem, can be the stuff that poems are made of. Luckily for us, at any rate, Paulin’s “gift survived it all.”

    If the volume, his first in a decade, has been justly lauded for its ethical courage and linguistic zing, it also confirms Paulin as successor and torch-bearer to a generation of Northern poets, whose time has largely passed. When he freeze-frames two young victims of a loyalist murder-gang – “Each in his open coffin / each with a polo-neck jumper / to hide the slashes” – we hear a murmur of Seamus Heaney’s shade, still grieved and grounded by “the actual weight / of each hooded victim, / slashed and dumped.” Likewise when we encounter, in “The Spare Room”, “the light’s ekeing growth” like “a bandage being torn off very slowly, / always with a sense of the damage / and the fictive hand’s quiet sloth”, we’re restored to the kind of hard-edged perceptual cogency pioneered by Derek Mahon, adrift “in a riot of sunlight / watching the day break and the clouds flying.”

    The list could be extended. The canny imaginative shape-shiftings of Paulin’s title-poem, for instance, seem to have a Muldoonian tinge – and the same may be said of “Not to Speak of the Cheese”, a playful flex of ancestral speculation, which is also an inspired “trip”, attempting to locate “our common awkward surname / back in the town of Nîmes”, a site of “impacted paint” where “the Huguenots were massacred / in the White Terror / that followed the Hundred Days”. The book as a whole might be understood as the final flare of an aurora borealis that once seemed nearly permanent, and unassailable, in its rich, revelatory shining.

    Admittedly, few of Paulin’s poetic peers and forebears have ever dared to broadcast, in print, their “regret” for “the loss / of the educational genius / of Martin McGuinness”, a former paramilitary commander who would, Paulin posits, quite sensibly, “have dropped the 11+”, and with it

    the whole sectarian
    and therefore necessitarian
    system of training
    the minds of the young
    and imagine all those smug fee-paying
    schools taxed out of existence
    swept off the face of the province!

    This is pure Paulin, lippy and punctilious, skillfully converting bowsy provocation into good politics and better poetry. That he’s managed to smuggle such an honourably elegiac salute into a Faber-published manuscript, indeed, may be considered a small victory in the long peace – which has yet to be won. For as Paulin reminds us, “direct rule / means the same old skules”.

    In contrast to many of the younger luminaries of the Irish and Northern Irish poetry scene, for Paulin, we sense, politics means more than selective self-projection in the name of art, and necessarily transcends the well-crafted, fully costed pleas for balance that often pass for liberal opinion. Paulin is the kind of lateral thinker, instinctively partisan, for whom, bravely, there is “nothing” anymore “to be said” about “the sight of Ben Bulben, / massive and tabled”, fringed by “wild rhododendrons”: a pained vacancy that calls to mind Robert Emmet – dying for a vision of Irish nationhood that remains unrealised – and the “epitaphs / that could neither get written / nor chiselled in hard stone.” As here, the experience of personal despondency Paulin charts often comes across as the weariness of an emancipationist whose cause, for now, has been forced into dormancy.

    In a literary landscape grown sleek, and chic, amid an unceasing rain of sinecures and market opportunities, the Oxford don stands out from the pack, combining the fire of a citizen-poet with the sad intelligence of a gnarly visionary. Like all great stylists, he is distinctive and elusive with every breathing lyric. To pilfer a phrase of Mahon’s, Paulin has become “The Last of the Fire Kings”: an anomaly and outsider, strangely attuned to the deeper weathers of his time and tribe. As in his tribute – one of a few – to the Palestinian poet Walid Khazendar, Namanlagh grants us entry and permission to “poke about in his darkness”: a “puzzle” that impels us with its intricacy and power, “though” we “can tell that in spirit / he’s gone out the door.”

     

     

  • Poem: The Revolutionary

    The Revolutionary
    Andrée Blouin, 1921-1986

    A hungry child can never truly sleep. In the orphanage
    for sinful offspring – our fathers white, our mothers
    African – the nuns were merciless, severe. I shook
    by night inside a narrow, iron cot, aware only
    of my body’s hunger, a heavy shadow
    shuttering my limbs. I prayed for pity
    in the nothing-blue that slowly turned
    to grey – another dawning misery. My later
    love for liberty began beneath the weight.
    Softened after rain, I ate the red-mud bricks
    that walled the yard in fingerfuls, to ease
    the ricket-sting within my belly. Eventually
    I sickened; a nurse and officer appeared
    to valuate my case; the reverend mother
    eyed me down. Knuckle-tough, the holy
    order washed their fists of me, like dirt.
    Cruelty, you see, ensures reiteration:
    the orphanage and colony were images
    of one another, their legatees incurably
    suspicious, incapable of kindness
    to the Africans they ruled. Sickly, sore,
    dispatched away, my life began again
    in freedom: mending coverlets and dresses
    for imperious françaises, plantation wives
    intent on delegation. I worked, in truth,
    unendingly, determined to survive:
    my labour served me well. When
    Guinea first, and then the Parti Solidaire
    demanded heartened soul, unstinting
    dedication, day and night, I gave my all,
    humming like a never-empty engine
    of vivacity for Africa, my nation. Long
    debased, the cresting Congo filled
    my veins with euphony and joy – a song
    of jubilation, born of fire, tears, and blood,
    now winnowed to an ache. I strode as one
    among the risen generation. Possessed
    of an uncommon poise, Gizenga always
    seemed at home in quietude: the Belgians
    feared his silence, knowing him a strategist,
    percipient and fierce; he listened like a man
    in meditation, untroubled by the fray
    to which he nonetheless devoted
    both the clarity and passion of a saint.
    Struggling together, comrades in the fight,
    I considered him a friend. And dear Patrice…
    as if in fever, I recall his grace, the easy
    trust he held in those around him, and
    the smiling way he seemed to bless
    the people he addressed, gliding
    lightly when he stepped, alive to hope,
    assured of the integrity of service
    to the cause: the Congolese empowered
    by the Congolese themselves, the copper-
    hearted mercenaries tossed into the tide.
    A dignified idealist, he radiated calm.
    Assessing the equation, the European
    lackeys sprang a trap: the president
    renditioned, his body would be cut
    in blocks, and dipped in acid
    swilling in a barrel. They burned
    the living trace of him to vapour, ordering
    the rest of us to leave or disappear.
    They kept a single tooth for decoration.
    His dream and he are vivid to me still.

  • A Poem for Refaat Alareer

    A Poem for Refaat Alareer

    In the poem your butchers
    fear to breathe, the murdered nurseries

    are clean, the brimming
    table-top restored – your every room

    aflush with idleness again,
    a bowl of flying spices

    near to hand, the oven-bread
    uplifted through the haze: a feast

    the windy air will sing
    from the open-hearted balcony

    to the salted promenade below,
    where a boy

    is counting ripples out to sea,
    and the market-men

    are bundling their wares,
    the coming dark

    a gentleness
    and rustling of wings:

    no raining heat
    or carnage to allay,

    the waterways unpoisoned
    by cruelty or death.

    You see – the dream
    your fingers fashioned like a sail

    is soaring in the breeze;
    your pen

    outlives the bullets
    of the eviscerator’s gun.

     

    The Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer (1979-2023) was killed along with his family in Gaza on December 6th. His final broadcasted poem, “If I must die” makes reference to his statement in an interview that if soldiers arrived on his doorstep he would fling his pen, his only weapon, in their faces. 

  • Common Concerns: John Clare & Other Ghosts

    There’s a strangeness to singing in a language you don’t understand, akin, perhaps, to the sensation that comes with remembering, vividly, a person who has died. In both cases, you can almost touch the life recalled, even as the shadow glimpsed in that one word, “almost”, clouds your every sense.

    Whenever I hear a song, an eddy of radio-speak, a casual exchange, unfurling in Irish, I go quiet, caught in the webs of a faltering familiarity. Likewise, when I return to them, I find that the recollections I have of my grandparents are locked in a grammar of (often palpable) absences: I’ll not see their like again.

    By choosing Irish placenames as titles for a number of poems in my new collection, Phantom Gang, linking the elegies I had composed for my grandparents with the landscapes I associated with them in north Leitrim, I was trying to register, in outline, the forms of loss under which the poems had been written: the twin river-banks  – an unreachable language, an irretrievable time – between which my memories had flowed since their deaths.

    So in “Achadh Bhuachaill” (meaning, literally, ‘Boy’s Field’, and transliterated to ‘Aghavoghil’ in English), the townland’s emotional cartography begins to shift, as the poem slowly unearths a seldom mentioned incident from the local past, relayed to me by my granduncle: “The land here / dreams in silhouettes // our bodies learn to read”.

    The relationship between land (and its changes) with the memories that mark it, of course, is as old as poetry itself. It recurs as a shaping concern in the work of John Clare (1793-1864), the so-called ‘peasant poet’ of the late Romantic period. “Oh, words are poor receipts for what tie has stole away”, he wrote, remembering the open commons he had known in the Northamptonshire of his youth, one of many areas in rural England directly affected by the 1801 Inclosure Consolidation Act, converting communally tended landscapes into real estate. “There once were days, the woodman knows it well”, he said, “When shades e’en echoed with the singing thrush”:

    There once were lanes in nature’s freedom dropt,
    There once were paths that every valley wound –
    Inclosure came, and every path was stopt[.]

    This truncation, and the subsequent disappearance, of the much-cherished social and ecological terrain of his upbringing, can be sensed in the knotted, quickening language of Clare’s pastoral poems, often scintillating in their natural notations, even as they crackle under the weight of the vexed environmental histories they record. The communal fields and woods, the trilling heaven of the poet’s boyhood, seemed increasingly irrecoverable to Clare, having been carved up, indelibly, “[in] little parcels little minds to please”, leaving “men and flocks imprisoned, ill at ease.”

    Phantom Gang attempts to pay tribute to this distant figure, a “loss-eyed wilder-man”, who was also, at different points in his life, a kind of “hierophant // of dirt-in-bloom / and revelry”. Tuning in to the fierce, burnished weathers of his work, the book simultaneously tries to sift through the swarming static of contemporary history to a new zone of clarity, where the spectres (of poverty, displacement, homelessness, environmental corrosion) that so ruled Clare’s world, two centuries ago, might be recognised afresh in our own – “our age / of wilting seas // and homesick, lock-out blues.”

    In all of this, among other things, I discovered that reading poetry is not so very different from the writing of it. We bring what we have – our small store of hopes and memories – to the threshold of another life, trusting in the possibility of recognition or discovery. The words on the page, I now believe, form a living monument to that possibility, creating a space where lost presences might be acknowledged, where the vitality and freedoms of an uprooted world can be sensed anew, pressing through the topsoil of everything left over, no matter how scarce. That, I think, is what the poem, “The Commons” (dedicated to Clare), reaches towards, near the collection’s close:

    To feel at all: an act
    of intimate dissent,

    as gentle-hearted heretics
    have ever felt and known.

    Is this, then, our one inheritance,
    the ache where voices grow?

    My poem’s a lifted echoing,
    as if they might continue.

    Feature Image: Lough Melvin, County Leitrim, Ireland.