{"id":11701,"date":"2021-07-03T13:00:05","date_gmt":"2021-07-03T12:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=11701"},"modified":"2021-07-03T13:00:05","modified_gmt":"2021-07-03T12:00:05","slug":"peter-oneills-henry-street-arcade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2021\/07\/03\/peter-oneills-henry-street-arcade\/","title":{"rendered":"Peter O’Neill’s Henry Street Arcade"},"content":{"rendered":"

Covid-19 has perhaps spelt a temporary death for, amongst many other things, flaneurship – that is, the practise of being able to wander throughout a city freely and unobstructed, making observations as one goes. Peter O\u2019 Neill<\/a><\/span>\u2019s latest collection addresses the flaneur directly. With a background in translation, academia and his long- avowed admiration of Beckett and Baudelaire (to whom the flaneur label is most regularly attached), O\u2019 Neill puts his own unique slant on Dublin, and he is not alone.<\/span><\/p>\n

Henry Street Arcade<\/em> is a bilingual edition, with O\u2019 Neill\u2019s poems in English appearing alongside their French translations by French novelist and poet Yan Kouton. This is an indicator that O\u2019 Neill is a poet who must, out of necessity, operate always between dualities.<\/p>\n

Henry Street Arcade<\/em> forms the end of his Dublin Trilogy, a triumvirate of poem sequences centred around Dublin, which include The Dark Pool<\/em> and Dublin Gothic<\/em>. The collection\u2019s title comes from the name of a commercial passage located just off O\u2019 Connell Street, built in the style of a Parisian arcade. A loose sequence of a single day in Dublin is gradually formed, in the title which directly addresses the arcade, O\u2019 Neill asserts:<\/p>\n

It evokes the cave which according to Vico,<\/em>
\nIn Scienza nuova, Plato singles out as the origin<\/em>
\nOf civilisation.<\/em><\/p>\n

Like Baudelaire<\/span> and Joyce before him, O\u2019 Neill\u2019s aesthetic lies in transplanting ancient, iconic mythologies into a contemporary setting, underscoring its timelessness with regards to the human condition. In his case, it is a freewheeling mix of classical and literary understandings, now set to the backdrop of Dublin\u2019s streets and architectural mismatches, that frames his poetry. He gives us a city in a state of uncertain but unstoppable transition, one in which the ideals of Ireland\u2019s revolutionary past seem to hold little relevance to the social ills that continue to plague the very city \u2013 itself in the grip of lethal capitalistic freefall \u2013 in which they were first enacted. This constant collision between mundane, everyday reality and the author\u2019s eye for both myth and observational capacity lends it a finely-tuned tension.<\/p>\n

In \u2018Portrait of a Woman on a Train\u2019, he writes: \u201cHer handbag\/Hangs from the gentle scaffold of her arm\/The murderous black leather having been tattooed\/With bolts of burnished gold, also bearing\/The holy runes of some designer\u2019s name. What inside does the urban Pandora bring?\u2019<\/p>\n

O\u2019 Neill almost seems to revel in this dualism. His own philosophy can perhaps be surmised with a line from the poem \u2018Portrait of a Woman\u2019: \u2018Beauty must always be contrasted with banality.\u201d His continual pairing of the two also becomes a way of interrogating whether making sense of the city is even a worthwhile endeavour.<\/p>\n

As an ultramodern metropolis of cosmopolitan glamour and multicultural receptivity, the social blights of homelessness, poverty, addiction and waste also remain on full display. Even a crushed coffee cup: \u2018The premium of price per individual coffee\/Reflecting back the macro environment of the\/Property world which the cafe finds itself in.\u2019 – is indicative of a society in extreme disrepair.<\/p>\n

A later poem, \u2018Heraclitus\u2019, describes: On the high street, in broad daylight, Bordello chic is promoted in plain view. And for all to see – though they pass by unseeing! Our age is one of casualised distraction – the ubiquity of screens, whether from phones, laptops, tablets in the majority of peoples\u2019 lives, necessary for both business and pleasure \u2013 conference calls and dating sites, social media as well as the commercial necessity for businesses to have and maintain an \u2018online presence\u2019.<\/p>\n

Running through Henry Street Arcade is a desire for a sense of mystery – arguably essential to the poetic imagination – to be returned to an age, as O\u2019 Neill describes it, \u2018of blinding all-seeing, all knowing\/All encompassing\u2026 nothing!\u2019 He urges the reader to \u2018Reappraise\/The splendour of the shades and the shadows.\u2019 This is not a call to return to a state of benightedness – it is a call to acknowledge that there is still a place for beauty in a world that seems to be increasingly accelerating.<\/p>\n

By Peter O’ Neill trans. Yan Koutan. Editions Du Pont de L\u2019Europe, 95p, \u20ac12.00 ISBN: 978-2-36851-573-0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Covid-19 has perhaps spelt a temporary death for, amongst many other things, flaneurship – that is, the practise of being able to wander throughout a city freely and unobstructed, making observations as one goes. Peter O\u2019 Neill\u2019s latest collection addresses the flaneur directly. With a background in translation, academia and his long- avowed admiration of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":11756,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[638,847,2185,2186,2708,3354,3355,4052,4058,6758,7115,7148,7159,7168,7341,8705,9056],"class_list":["post-11701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","tag-arcade","tag-baudelaire","tag-daniel-wade-peter-oneill","tag-daniel-wade-review","tag-dublin-poetry","tag-flaneurs-in-dublin","tag-flaneurship","tag-henry","tag-henry-street-arcade","tag-oneills","tag-peter","tag-peter-oneill-henry-street-arcade","tag-peter-oneill-poet","tag-peter-o-neill","tag-poetry","tag-street","tag-the-flaneur"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/136"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11701\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}