{"id":13549,"date":"2022-03-31T18:41:46","date_gmt":"2022-03-31T17:41:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=13549"},"modified":"2022-03-31T18:41:46","modified_gmt":"2022-03-31T17:41:46","slug":"common-concerns-john-clare-other-ghosts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2022\/03\/31\/common-concerns-john-clare-other-ghosts\/","title":{"rendered":"Common Concerns: John Clare &#038; Other Ghosts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">There\u2019s a strangeness to singing in a language you don\u2019t 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, \u201calmost\u201d, clouds your every sense. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">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\u2019ll not see their like again.<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">On a wild retreat in the Burren Fiona Hanley digs for words, and finds embodied in the Irish language a playful meaning the educational system failed to convey.<a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/eRBxGjE7ee\">https:\/\/t.co\/eRBxGjE7ee<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/broadsheet_ie?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@broadsheet_ie<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/itsmybike?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@itsmybike<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/BowesChay?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@BowesChay<\/a> @wadeinthewate11 <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/AliceHarrisonBL?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@AliceHarrisonBL<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/diarmuidlyng?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@diarmuidlyng<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/LumberBob?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@LumberBob<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; CassandraVoices (@VoicesCassandra) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/VoicesCassandra\/status\/1415645744669904896?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">July 15, 2021<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>By choosing Irish placenames as titles for a number of poems in my new collection, <span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><a style=\"color: #0000ff;\" href=\"https:\/\/irishpages.org\/product\/phantom-gang-by-ciaran-orourke\/\"><em>Phantom Gang<\/em><\/a><\/span>, 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\u00a0 \u2013 an unreachable language, an irretrievable time \u2013 between which my memories had flowed since their deaths.<\/p>\n<p>So in \u201cAchadh Bhuachaill\u201d (meaning, literally, \u2018Boy\u2019s Field\u2019, and transliterated to \u2018Aghavoghil\u2019 in English), the townland\u2019s emotional cartography begins to shift, as the poem slowly unearths a seldom mentioned incident from the local past, relayed to me by my granduncle: \u201cThe land here \/ dreams in silhouettes \/\/ our bodies learn to read\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>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 \u2018peasant poet\u2019 of the late Romantic period. \u201cOh, words are poor receipts for what tie has stole away\u201d, 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. \u201cThere once were days, the woodman knows it well\u201d, he said, \u201cWhen shades e\u2019en echoed with the singing thrush\u201d:<\/p>\n<p><em>There once were lanes in nature\u2019s freedom dropt,<\/em><br \/>\n<em>There once were paths that every valley wound \u2013<\/em><br \/>\n<em>Inclosure came, and every path was stopt<\/em>[.]<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s 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\u2019s boyhood, seemed increasingly irrecoverable to Clare, having been carved up, indelibly, \u201c[in] little parcels little minds to please\u201d, leaving \u201cmen and flocks imprisoned, ill at ease.\u201d<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Ben Pantrey makes an admission of bias in his review of his former tutor the poet Ciar\u00e1n O&#39;Rourke&#39;s collection of essays, written under the shadow of the pandemic.<a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/L4QTISkBB3\">https:\/\/t.co\/L4QTISkBB3<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/broadsheet_ie?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@broadsheet_ie<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/KevinHIpoet1967?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@KevinHIpoet1967<\/a> @corourke91 <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/BenPantrey?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@BenPantrey<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/danieleidiniph1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@danieleidiniph1<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/danwadewriter?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@danwadewriter<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; CassandraVoices (@VoicesCassandra) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/VoicesCassandra\/status\/1461299472420515846?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 18, 2021<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p><em>Phantom Gang<\/em> attempts to pay tribute to this distant figure, a \u201closs-eyed wilder-man\u201d, who was also, at different points in his life, a kind of \u201chierophant \/\/ of dirt-in-bloom \/ and revelry\u201d. 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\u2019s world, two centuries ago, might be recognised afresh in our own \u2013 \u201cour age \/ of wilting seas \/\/ and homesick, lock-out blues.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>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 \u2013 our small store of hopes and memories \u2013 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, \u201cThe Commons\u201d (dedicated to Clare), reaches towards, near the collection\u2019s close:<\/p>\n<p><em>To feel at all: an act<\/em><br \/>\n<em>of intimate dissent,<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>as gentle-hearted heretics<\/em><br \/>\n<em>have ever felt and known.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Is this, then, our one inheritance,<\/em><br \/>\n<em>the ache where voices grow?<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>My poem\u2019s a lifted echoing,<\/em><br \/>\n<em>as if they might continue.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Feature Image: <span class=\"mw-mmv-title\">Lough Melvin,<\/span> County Leitrim, Ireland.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There\u2019s a strangeness to singing in a language you don\u2019t 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, \u201calmost\u201d, clouds your every sense. Whenever I hear a song, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":246,"featured_media":13559,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[91,1687,1688,1689,1732,1824,1854,2104,3702,4922,4938,6679,6915],"class_list":["post-13549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","tag-91","tag-ciaran-orouke-poet","tag-ciaran-orourke-cassandra-voices","tag-ciaran-orourke-lana-del-rey","tag-clare","tag-common","tag-concerns","tag-culture","tag-ghosts","tag-john","tag-john-clare","tag-north-leitrim","tag-other"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13549","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\/246"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13549\/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=13549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}