My sixteen year old daughter comes to me to complain about
Patrick Kavanagh.
O great irony, hardly are the words out of her mouth
And I can see those fucking potatoes,
The drills and the furrows of old bloody Monaghan!
Why do we do it? Why does every generation get subjected
To this kind of shit?
Isn’t Life bad enough without having to force poetry
About bleeding potatoes down their bloody throats!
And then, just as I am almost in despair,
And I’m a bloody poet myself,
Her voice pipes up again, and she adds;
“Although, Epic isn’t half bad, at least he mentions Homer!”
And, I see again my reading of the poem through her eyes,
When I too saw the ancient importance ricocheting
In Paddy Boy,
As she too recognised the importance of Homer
And his epic take on Life.
Staring across the kitchen table at her,
With not a potato in sight,
I somehow saw the great blind ancient hovering above us
Monumentally human, whispering to us both
Across the infinite.
Svelte limbs, aquiline and flow, her enjambment;
The whole pelvic girdle hypnotically balances,
Famously compared to a serpent which dances,
And which has all full-blooded heterosexual males entranced…!
And, there you have it! The Feminists declare,
“No more male gazing here!”
Where are we? How did we get here?
Whatever happened to coup de foudre, colpo di fulmine ?
It was a Friday night, I had been sitting, drinking with colleagues,
When you entered the public bar dressed in your finery;
The cream- coloured micro-skirt, the flesh coloured tights,
The pliant leather of your black knee high boots!… Colpo di fulmine!… my ass jumped off the bench, reflexively!
We have known each other now for 25 Halloweens.
and I want to feel the tingle
of autumn over the horizon.
The palette of skies, laying themselves
nightly before my eyes like Turkish
carpets in the souks of Istanbul.
I want to anticipate the nuanced change
of the leaves, delicate as if the maestro
himself draws them into the rising
crescendo of the orchestra – slowly,
softly, instrument by instrument,
tree by tree, colour by colour
until the cymbals clash and the double
basses vibrate their music through
the woods and lanes.
I want to watch the swallows gather
on the telephone wires, line upon
line, their eyes on horizons I cannot
even imagine; waiting for the wind
to call them, the stars to set their orbit
across the world.
I want to see the berries fall
ripe and rotten into the hollows of
the hedge, so unseen creatures
can have their bacchanal,
their last fling of the season, then
reel home through the undergrowth
replete and tipsy, to sleep the winter away.
I want to walk to the shore and hear
the waves rising up in anger,
beating back the beaches,
sucking up the stones and hurling
them at the cliffs in fits of
equinoctial rage.
Most of all, I just want to feel
vibrancy, not deal with autumn playing
fast and loose – doling out fitful sun,
welters of drab rain; gales that blow
and pause and then roar in again, battering
my garden of deceased flowers and sad
stalks bent double with despair,
rotting where they fall. And all
in light that barely lifts its head,
light that is just a brief apology
for being short and low and hesitant;
no longer flaring with summer’s lusty
fervour – breaking in and waking me
at 4am just to whisper sweet nothings
through the chink in the curtains.
I want something other than
the torpor of half-arsed endings.
What happened to mellow fruitfulness?
Give me liquid golden light that makes me
look up, look out; something to cradle
in my mind through winter. Give me
that wild transition I know this season
keeps secreted up its sleeves, to
compensate for all the untold things
summer always snatches as she leaves,
like a jilted lover.
So autumn, please, no fickle
promises of crisp, cold days that don’t
materialise. Step up; pull your finger out –
go French – Italian – go Portuguese;
bring on the colours and the lights,
run your hit show again. You can do it.
Don’t tease, don’t cheat by sneaking limply
past, skulking like a thief between the hot
dog days and winter’s sharp retreat.
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.
hēt þā hyssa hwæne hors forlǣtan,
feorr āfȳsan, and forð gangan,
hicgan tō handum, and tō hige gōdum. The Battle of Maldon (991 AD)
Galvanized into action, my companion horses neighed
as they galloped to the woods, riderless and rudderless.
I turned back to my liege lord, reluctant to retreat,
but he waved me away from him, although I was his steadfast steed
who had taken him into battle boldly before on many occasions.
In the woods, we regrouped. Ealdorman Byrhtnoth’s proud hawk
circled and swooped overhead, dismissed as we had been,
uneasy as we were. We faced out towards the riverbank,
watching the fighting begin, watching the ruthless invaders wreak havoc.
We waited for the command to return but it never came.
I went down to the battlefield first, saw my beloved ealdorman
bristling with spears, slaughtered alongside his faithful warriors.
Leaving our heroes, our lords lying lifeless, we trotted back to our stables,
knowing that our return would herald the defeat, set off the lamentations
of the families left behind, filling us all with sorrow for our great loss.
JACK GILBERT WAS TOO HORNY TO BE A METAPHYSICAL POET
not that sex and metaphysics cancel each other out—
his was good news for Linda Gregg, until it wasn’t.
Interviewer: Did you and Linda ever collaborate?
JG: We were intertwined. We read each other’s poetry,
appreciated each other’s poetry,
discarded each other’s poetry.
(Quick shout-out to the procreative urge.
Are you gonna tell me the world doesn’t hinge
and turn on it? I don’t think you are.)
That desire is ungovernable produces—
or should I say begets—fear. Also verse; some good,
some not. Either way, learn to love that twinge
in your loins. I don’t mean make it lord, I just mean
bless it. Whatever else may be true,
it has plans to prosper you, wants
fruitfulness, wants multiplicity
at least as much as God does,
maybe more.
I’ve inherited Jack and Linda’s lettered
children. If you’re reading this,
you have too.
Discovery are coloured dark deep red.
I heard one falling as I brushed the tree —
a startled bird troubling bushy leaves —
but with more plummet, accelerated
power, crimson sinker parting waves of green,
descending progeny, seeds sheathed in a cream
flesh, webs of genes cradling what could be,
bound for the food waste bin, sequence
on sequence of supercoiled code unread.
But another journey took place instead
ascent through sound, to ears, into words
as you can almost taste that zingy first
apple of the season, sharp on your tongue,
sweet on your lips, parted and showing crimson.
I have been working in education for the last twenty-three years, and been publishing books as a writer over the last sixteen. I find disturbing the recent precipitous decline in reading and, consequent ignorance pervading contemporary culture. In response, in an effort to demonstrate its importance to my critical development, I would like to trace the build-up of my current library which I started developing in 1999. I should preface this by saying that before 1999, I had been living and working in France for the most part. So, when I returned to live in the Republic of Ireland, just before the millennium, I was really starting from scratch.
I should also mention, as it is extremely important, particularly in the context of tpoehe present discourse – primarily focused on both personal and professional growth – that I had just experienced a profound trauma at that time. In 2000, I lost someone very valuable to me, and not only that, but also by losing this person I lost a whole way of life. So, in many ways, when I started buying my first books they were, without a doubt, instrumental in helping me face the trauma on an daily basis.
So, what kind of books did I buy and read, twenty-five years ago? Looking at my library, which is comprised of around six hundred or so books, I know exactly which shelf – there are thirty-five in all – that I should start with. These are ones I began reading when I arrived here in Dublin; predominantly poetry books written by Eastern European authors that have been translated into English by some wonderful translators.
Why Eastern European poetry in English translation? I craved humour in my life, but not just of the glib and cynical Hollywood kind, which I was also relying on at other moments. You see life in Europe after World War II was not easy. Countries that had been torn apart by the most appalling violence were trying to put themselves back together. Poland, the former Czechoslovakia and Serbia were three of the main countries whose poets and poetry I was particularly attracted to. I will take each of these three countries in sequence and describe some of my poets I loved to read almost a quarter of a century ago. I will also try to identify the very specific humour that these poets displayed, and why this appealed to me at a time when I was trying to get over the traumatic event that had such a destabilizing effect on me.
Morskie Oko alpine lake in the Tatra Mountains, Poland.
Poland
Let’s start with Poland, as it is a country with which we Irish have a lot in common. Both of us experienced brutal colonial history amid violence, economic hardship and a profound engagement with the Roman Catholic church. I am going to describe very briefly the work of two Nobel Prize winning poets, Czelaw Milosz (1911-2004) and Nobel-laureate Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012), both of whom I loved to read during that period. Undergoing a lot of emotional suffering, I appreciated in particular their wonderful sense of irony.
An experience of profound suffering can do many things to you depending on your personality type. Some people, for example, simply give up. Life loses all its spark, and you sleepwalk through it for the remainder of your life. This is not living, but merely existing, and it is not my approach. Of course, you don’t know how you are going to adapt to a personal crisis, particularly of the kind that I was facing.
Of course, when you are suffering, you become very poor company to others, as all you want to do is think about yourself. Self-pity, is a terribly egotistical response, but when you are genuinely suffering, you generally don’t have any time for other people and their particular problems. These two great poets, however, allowed me to empathise with others. By reading their work I began to take an interest in other people once again, as it was quite clear from reading their poetry, that they had themselves suffered enormously. For example, Milosz particularly in his early poetry, describes the Warsaw ghetto.
Wislawa Szymborska was of the same generation of poets such as Milosz and although her poetry is less explicit about her experience of the war. There is a steeliness of spirit, as in Milosz, behind the subtlety and irony which mask these experiences. This I found deeply inspiring. Indeed, when I think of Szymborska and her poetry, I think of three lines, which were translated beautifully by her translators, Stanislaw Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh.
The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.
The last line is particularly arresting, particularly in the context of today. Revenge is not exactly a motive for the majority of so-called poets writing in this country, or so you would imagine. We are so governed to restrain ourselves from such notions – formerly by the Catholic Church, forgiveness being key – and latterly by the all-pervasive ideology of political correctness embedded in institutional ideas such as DEI (Diversity, Equity and Integration). The bland platitudes that have become the calling card of spokespeople in corporate cultures and NGOs have obliterated such notions as Szymborska seems to be conveying in the lines above.
Like most people who suffer, I felt that I had been wronged, and, as a writer myself, what Szymborska had managed to do, in just three lines, was to give credence to a whole worldview, or artistic philosophy. She made me think of Dante and Joyce and other writers down through the ages, who all had the same belief. How did this translate to me? Use your suffering, but don’t be poisoned by it. Use it with some irony and wit!
You see, I was beginning to become more human. This is what reading such poets had done to me. They were achieving two results: teaching me to be a ‘mench’, and, at the same time, teaching me how to write.
The Federal Assembly in Prague.
Czechoslovakia
Again, in the former Czechoslovakia there was the poet and immunologist, Miroslav Holub ( 1923-1998). Holub became a hugely important writer to me during this early period what we affectionately now term as the ‘noughties’. I began with a wonderful collection published by Bloodaxe called Poems Before & After, referring to the period before the Soviet occupation and after. As with Milosz and Szymborska, Holub had this beautiful steely quality. All three poets were tough, resilient, and strong. They were not ‘woke’, for want of a better word. They were not full of bright, dewy-eyed idealism about the future having tasted the bitterness of Life, with a capital L,. Yet they managed to deal with it, on terms which they had made their own.
The Gift of Speech
He spoke: his round mouth opened and shut in the manner of a fish’s song. A bubbling hiss could be heard as the void rushed in headlong like marsh gas.
Sometimes the poems read almost like ‘nasty jokes’, as I came to describe them. I loved this quality the more and more I read Eastern European poetry. It was full of what you might plainly describe as ‘tough love’. This is exactly what I needed, right after getting my ass kicked by some girl. Such was my trauma! Here were poets, of such stature, writing about world war, relating directly some of their most apocalyptic experiences, Holub and Milosz particularly, and they were making light of it! What pain had I in comparison? It really helped put things into perspective. I was just a little bitch, in comparison, moaning about some girl! Jesus, I needed to Man Up!
Golubac Fortress by Danube river, Serbia.
Serbia
Finally, there were the two Serbian poets, Aleksander Ristović ( 1933-1994) and Vasko Popa (1922-1991), who brought the very self same qualities as Holub, Szymborska and Milosz: a steeliness which fortified them against ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. I discovered Ristović first in a beautiful little Faber edition that had a detail taken from ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’, by Hieronymus Bosch, which had been one of my favourite paintings as a boy. The poems were translated by a fellow poet, Charles Simic, whom I later went on to read. This short collection, simply titled Devil’s Lunch, was a selection of the Serb poet’s work, and it was a delight that gave me hours of pleasure. Here is a taste.
The Glimmer of Gold
Nobody reads poetry anymore, so who the hell are you I see bent over this book?
I loved the directness of approach, the bookish and almost medieval humour. The poetry of Vasko Popa was very different. Again you found the steel, but, the humour was less present, more a kind of violence that lingered uneasily in the background. For this reason, I read less of him, but his enigmatic micro-constellations that inhabited defiantly every single page made me sit up. I came away from his poetry marvelling at the very distinct approach of these formidable writers.
Over a decade later, after first obtaining a degree in philosophy, I went on to complete a masters in comparative literature where I found myself translating the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. I would spend the next decade and a half translating his work, and I see the self-same qualities of steeliness and inimitable humour in Baudelaire. It is something that I find really lacking in contemporary life. There is a war going on in Eastern Europe yet again. I know that both Ukrainian and Russian poets are writing about this old theme, yet again. I see some of this work being posted thanks to poets like Nina Kossman, who is also an avid translator, particularly of the Russian poet, Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941).
Yet, when I look around here in Dublin – a city I have been quite active in over the years organizing festivals and readings – I very rarely find Irish writing with a similar vigour. You see it in poets like Seamus Heaney and Patrick Kavanagh, of course, both coming from farming backgrounds where the violent nature of life is a constant backdrop. Heaney’s first collection Death of a Naturalist (1966) was all over such themes, while Kavanagh’s ‘The Great Hunger’ (1942), is without a doubt one of the greatest long poems written in the English language in the last century. It is also extremely funny, confronting an eternal Irish problem, sexual repression.It also aligns with the stoic sense of detachment that all of the aforementioned Eastern masters brought to their work.
