The Good Samartian

Sixth picture shows a tree sparrow, distinguished from the house sparrow by the black patch on its cheeks. Like the house sparrow its population has suffered a steep and mysterious decline in recent years.

Fifth picture (I am doing this in reverse because that’s how blogger loads multiple images) shows a lapwing. Is fad ó bhaile a labhraíonn an pilibín.

Fourth shows a couple of green sandpipers lurking in the corner of a lagoon otherwise full of redshank.

Third and second pictures show a marsh harrier, to whose spectacular hovering and fly-pasts (at one point with a vole in its beak) I completely failed to do justice, as witness these pictures. The point of the third picture is to show her yellowish head, which isn’t apparent in the otherwise clearer shot. Though you’ll have to look quite carefully to see it.

And then at the top a (tries and fails to think of a collective noun) of redshank.

One of my favourite poets anyway, and perhaps my favourite to take on these estuarine outings of mine, is Johannes Bobrowski. I’ve never been to Samartia, his name for the German lands of the former East Germany and the Baltic States, but for some possibly groundless reason I think of it as full of marshes, reedbeds and waders, just like the landscape in the shots above.

The river rises
against my breast,
the voice of sand:

open
I can not get through
your dead
drift in me (‘Experience’)

Clouds move over the river,
that is my voice,
snowlight over the woods,
that is my hair.
I came along
across the gloomy sky,
grass-blade in mouth, my shadow
leant on the fence, it said:
Take me back. (‘Encounter’)

... and our paths through flowers

Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel (In Defence of Bad Photography)

Bittern-Worship

‘Thomas Browne too was often distracted from his investigations into the isomorphic line of the quincunx by singular phenomena that fired his curiosity, and by work on a comprehensive pathology. He is said to have long kept a bittern in his study in order to find out how this peculiar bird could produce from the depths of its throat such a strange bassoon-like sound, unique in the whole of Nature.’ (Sebald, The Rings of Saturn)

‘One morning while I was at the Cincinnati Museum in the State of Ohio a woman came in holding in her apron one of this delicate species alive, which she said had fallen down the chimney of her house under night and which, when she awoke at daybreak, was the first object she saw, it having perched on one of the bedposts. It was a young bird. I placed it on the table before me and drew from it the figure on the left of my plate. It stood perfectly still for two hours, but on my touching it with a pencil after my drawing was done, it flew off and alighted on the cornice of a window. Replacing it on the table I took two books and laid them so as to leave before it a passage of an inch and a half, through which it walked with ease, Bringing the books nearer each other, so as to reduce the passage to one inch, I tried the Bittern again and again it made its way between them without moving either. When dead its body measured – ’ (Audubon, The American Woodsman; he killed it, in other words)

Twelve-Year-Old in Grimsby Now Oldest Child in Britain Not Circumnavigating Globe

I Served the King of England

Bohumil Hrabal. Possibilities for puns thereon: Hrabalaisian, Hrabal without a cause, Day of the Hrabalment. I love the inscrutability of the Hrabal persona. Give your Czech a workout with the above youtube clip and find him drinking a beer down the pub (U Zlatého Tygra perhaps, the Golden Tiger) and reading the paper. The holy drinker, perhaps freshly back from the terraces of a third-division football game (I think of Ivan Blatný’s marvellous poem about football). Why, Bill Clinton and Václav Havel might even drop in. But Alexander the Great dropped in on Diogenes. What can I do for you sir? Stand out of the light. Get your round in.

Ditie, the protagonist’s name in I Served the King of England, means ‘child’, more or less. What could be more childish than his picaresque blunderings through life, latching onto some idiotic catchphrase as a way of explaining everything. The title, as one of those phrases, refers to a head waiter’s ability to tell in advance where a customer is from and what they’re going to order. And how does he know all these things? Because ‘I served the king of England’. Ditie doesn’t quite manage that, though he does serve the Emperor of Ethiopia, who eats a camel. He’s awarded a sash and a medal for his services too, which he likes to whip out as reminders of his rise in the world. Large burps in the fabric of history come and go (Nazism), or come and don’t go (Communism), and Ditie blunders through uncomprehendingly but with just enough peasant cunning to land on his feet. He marries a Nazi athlete and submits to a farcical inspection of his privates to ascertain their suitability for congress with an Aryan vagina. He is not on the list of millionaires for dispossession after the war by the Communists but insists on having himself added to it, in yet another attempt to prove himself to the social betters he feels are always snubbing him. He lives in a hut in the woods on his release and trains his German shepherd to go to the village and do his shopping, but the villagers shoot it because they miss his visits to the pub and want him to come back.

Throughout Hrabal there is a diastole-systole alternation between social routine and outbreaks of something more violent. The swaggering waiter who is knocked off balance, for instance, and drops two plates, but then smashes the rest, and starts destroying the whole hotel around him. Or artistic violence, as when a writer puts a knife to the narrator’s neck in Too Loud a Solitude and starts reciting a poem about nature (he can’t get people to listen to his work otherwise, as he apologetically explains afterwards). But even when something very gruesome does happen, we laugh. The Nazi wife dies in an air-raid and Ditie finds her decapitated body in the bank garden. But now we realize the meaning of the chapter title when he announces, despite digging up the whole courtyard in search of it, that ‘I never found the head’.

Or sometimes it doesn’t take any grisly-comic violence at all and Hrabal distils an image of pure surrealist innocence, like the floating tailor’s mannequins. The system is that the tailor makes a life-size mannequin for each of his customers, which he then inflates and allows to float up to the ceiling, where it is stored until his next visit. Ditie is enthralled:

All this made me long for a new tuxedo made by that company, and I was determined to buy one as soon as I got my waiter’s papers, so that I and my mannequin could float near the ceiling of a company that was certainly the only one of its kind in the world, since no one but a Czech could have come up with an idea like that. After that I often dreamed about how I personally, not my torso, was floating up there by the ceiling of the Pardubice tailoring firm, and sometimes I felt as though I were floating near the ceiling of the Golden City of Prague restaurant.

{Ends}

We leave him in his hut in the forest, baffling the locals with his talk of wanting to be buried on a hilltop so that half of his remains will be washed one way and half another, leaving him swimming in both the Black Sea and the North Seas. He may have served the Emperor of Ethiopia but he becomes an empire unto himself. He has quite possibly learned nothing at all from his experiences. He likes a drink and a bit of skirt, we learn, but we could have guessed that at the start.

Bohumil Hrabal, I salute you. I’d gladly have bought you a drink and allowed you to sell me the film rights to one of your books on a beer mat. I would have made the film too, needless to say.

Yellowhammer, River Hull, or, Sebald and I

‘At that twilit there were no passers-by to be seen...’, ‘Nowhere, however, was a single human being to be seen...’, ‘There was not a soul about, of whom one might have asked the way...’, ‘There were no visitors about on that leaden-grey day...’, ‘If I now think back to that desolate place, I do not see a single human being...’, ‘Slouching round the supermarket in search of cheap lager and burgers for a barbeque I’d planned for later that evening, I pondered the hordes of tracksuit-wearing simpletons among whom I live and made small talk about the rugby league with Sharon on the till before having to remind her about my nectar points...’, ‘Even in the most abandoned spot in the entire region, Shingle Street, which now consists of just one wretched row of humble houses and cottages and where I have never encountered a single human being...’, ‘Never yet, on my many visits, having come along the lane and crossed the little bridge over the moat to go up to the house, have I found anyone about...’

All right, so it doesn’t take an Inspector Maigret to spot my cameo in the above random choice of lines from W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. Pehaps Sebald had a body-odour problem, news of which would be radioed ahead through his rural Norfolk stomping grounds, causing the countryfolk to scatter to cellars and World War Two bomb-shelters? Whatever the reason, the endless tableaux of deserted seaside villages in his prose become self-parodic very quickly, and I say this as someone who loved the book. So let me also say right away it wasn’t through any choice of preference of mine that a long ramble along the banks of the river Hull yesterday saw me encounter a total of zero other human beings, though for long stretches I was walking opposite the back of a row of houses and then, a short distance off, the mighty temple to consumer spending that is Sutton Asda. No, I tell a lie, there was a teenage boy sitting under a bridge on the other bank from me fishing. We did not exchange greetings. I was also able to confirm, by mobile phone, that Hull City had beaten Bolton Wanderers one-nil with a goal from Algerian new boy Ghilas. You don’t get much of that in Sebald either, do you.

And then as for the people Sebald does meet! ‘At times it seems’, his friend Cornelis de Jong opines, ‘as if all works of art were coated with a sugar glaze or indeed made completely of sugar, like the model of the battle of Esztergom created by a confectioner to the Viennese court, which Empress Maria Theresia, so it is said, devoured in one of her recurrent bouts of melancholy’. Why are they always so wonderfully eccentric?, I wondered aloud as I watched my friend Feardorcha Ó Maolseachlainn put the finishing touches to the 1:100 scale model he was constructing out of cocktail sausage sticks of the Stadio Luigi Ferraris in Genoa, as it looked that fateful night in 1990 when Dave O’Leary stepped up to take his penalty kick against Romania for the Republic of Ireland, a model my faithful wolfhound Setanta would demolish later that evening after carelessly knocking over and lapping up the entire contents of a 1945 Château Pétrus.

Though I didn’t meet anyone on my walk, I did at least see a yellowhammer, as pictured rather smudgily above. The pictures in Sebald books tend to be indistinct affairs too, do they not. But while I may salivate over much better pictures of birds on flickr, I’m not sure if there’s any point in my investing in an expensive camera. The ratio of several hours’ tramping to one brief moment of flickering yellow smudge in the middle distance seems a truer reflection of the rate of effort versus payoff involved in the whole process.

I wish I could use my yellowhammer as a jumping-off point for a long disquisition on the whale-collecting of the Seigneur of Holderness, the vanishing villages of the East Yorkshire coastline, whether or not Andrew Marvell was gay and whether as William Empson believed he was a lifelong sufferer from the malaria he contracted in the swampy environs of Hull... and maybe I could, should, or will, one day. But for the moment, I can’t make it mean anything other than itself: one yellowhammer by the river, an unremarkable photo thereof, and this by way of my defence of the smudgy, evanescent zones around the edge of the visual field that may lead us into wonderlands of association, conjecture and mystery, or possibly lead us to nothing and nowhere at all.

Mayfield Street

Sam in a Box

Vona Groarke, Spindrift

There’s a queasy moment in Fran Brearton’s fine study, Reading Michael Longley, when Brearton describes the series of verse letters Longley wrote in the 70s, one of which, to Derek Mahon, he published in The New Statesman, and which describes the two poets picking their way through an ‘imaginary Peace Line /Around the burnt-out houses of /The Catholics we scarcely loved’. Cue a letter from Mahon the following week dissociating himself from Longley’s belief that he could speak for Mahon’s attitude towards his Catholic neighbours (and also from the phrase ‘two poetic conservatives’). How marvellous to imagine writing a poem to a contemporary of mine which its dedicatee would then be forced to disown, even partially.

Still on that generation, I remember reading Heather Clark’s The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast, 1962-1972 and, not infrequently, hardly knowing where to look as the subject turned once again to what this contemporary thought of that one, to how this writer had invested so much more than that writer in the idea of a shared group identity but now felt left out, and wondered if so-and-so had thought he was above all that now. If that was in private, that generation also did a fair amount of intra-group reviewing in the opinion-forming public prints of the time. Is that bad? Perhaps, though when I consider the shameless log-rolling indulged in by the young Ginsberg, and then consider the alternative of sitting around waiting for Lionel Trilling to start writing these raves of Kaddish instead, maybe it isn’t so bad after all.

My feeling on poetic generations, though, is that the agreeable business of being able to get drunk together (now and then) aside, it is wrong to start dressing up accidents of collective birth as mass movements. I was most blessed to have several inspiring and very talented writers as my contemporaries. I read them often, with much admiration, and wish them all hatfuls of prizes. But there are no class reunion photos for poetic generations, alas. The only ways are separate ways.

This by way of a circuitous preamble to the question of how to write with any honesty, never mind usefulness, about one’s contemporaries, as prompted by the arrival of Vona Groarke’s Spindrift. I wrote publicly about Vona’s third book, Flight, when it came out, but felt I was being on super-good anti-log-rolling behaviour and maybe sold myself and the book short. So let me get out of the way straight off that her, what, fifth book now since 1994 reminds us (me) again how much VG has been one of the small few making any kind of a difference in poetry from Ireland these days.

VG is a midlander, an inhabitant of what if Ireland were just a little bigger we who’re not from there might be tempted to call the ‘flyover’ counties. (Having once stopped in search of something to eat in Kinnegad I’d be in favour not just of flying over, but tunnelling under, around or right through the goddamn place in future). All that’s missing from many of these Auburnian landscapes, a lot of the time, is a spot of tumbleweed blowing past in the background. So even when the poetic locus is the home (and home is at least three places here, by my count), there’s a sense of camouflage or obliquity, of the home place lurking somewhere it thinks you might overlook, and not feeling the need to shout its grid reference from its inconspicuous rooftop. Consider the ending of ‘The Family Room’:

From here on in
light will be noiseless,
chastened, as if
holding its breath.
Ask any question
of a bolt of smoke;
the scissors will answer
‘Indeed, indeed’.

Consider too the clothes horse of ‘Horses’ that segues from a clothes horse to one of the outdoors kind, and brings the indoors outside and the outdoors back in (and lo, elsewhere there is a poem called ‘Inside Out’):

He bred horses, fenced them in clean lines,
swaddled them in cast-off woollens,
gave them our names,

walked out to stand with them
one Christmas Day; bought back
to the house a voice infused

with inland fields and breath
that flocked above them
like damp flannel, streaming silks.

The tag-line to ‘The Difficult Poem’ proposes a poetry version of Gödel’s theorem: ‘No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it’, but then the problem identified at the end of the poem turns out to be the use of the word ‘froth’ in a sonnet (‘That is all I can remember’). There is a ubiquitous reluctance to fall back on the poetry of first-person insistence, and when some poems do (‘The Difficult Poem’, ‘Cowslips’), they quickly shut down, as though having none of it.

The final title sequence is an audacious piece of writing, in several ways. I’d been rereading Mahon’s’ ‘Light Sequence’ lately and thinking about how far down the road of stripping away his usual stanzaic splendours he is prepared to go (answer: a certain distance but no further). What distinguishes many of these little will-o’-the-wisps of poems is their swerving away from anything resembling not just a punch line, but any manner of hop-step-and-jump towards the little something extra you may be looking for at the end, not to speak of a tuck-in and story before bedtime too. No, they insist, the poem stops here and that’s it, basta. These are poems of rare unadorned self-sufficiency and grace, to the point of being (like spindrift itself) exceedingly hard to make stand still long enough to say something meaningful about, if you’ll pardon the tortuous syntax. And why is this such a big deal for me, in the (usually) very small package of the poems themselves? At random:

The field
is silked
in magenta.
Ragwort
sequins it.

*

Honeycomb fields.
Low clouds
swarm over them.

*

Hide and seek
in the windbreak.
I never grew out of it.

{Ends}

The final poem goes like this:

It is all a kind
of love song, really,
and I am only
listening to it,
trying to follow
the words.

{Ends}

I don’t mean to suggest that VG is some manner of superheroine of the oblique, doling out the thin gruel of facticity and no epiphanic garnish on the side. Not at all. There’s plenty here that’s straightforwardly direct, detailed and skilful (as ever). But there is also a quality of closeness-to-the-bone, of an insistence on this, on a this here and only this which manages at the same time to be so much more, that is new, arresting and moving.

I recommend this book.

(Vona Groarke, Spindrift, Gallery Press)

Awful Occasion

How exquisite, to be able to seize by the throat at last the opportunity to say, like Krapp, ‘Thirty-nine today...’, given the anniversary more or less around now of my dropping, thirty-nine years ago, to seize this opportunity by the throat, as I was saying, and shake soundly until dead. Except that the introspective bug has never enjoyed very rich pickings on my vitamin B-deficient blood and I don’t really have anything, anything at all, to say on the subject. In my imagination the subject of my dropping occupies a position not dissimilar to what people like to say about the sixties: what would I know about it/them anyway? I was only there.

I can however oblige with two renderings of Beckett in French on the subject of birth, due to appear in my cobbling together of his Selected Poems 1930-1989, which you can expect to see darkening your local bookshop some time next month.

chaque jour envie
d’être un jour en vie
non certes sans regret
un jour d’être né

each day the desire
one day to be alive
not of course without scorn
for one day having been born

pas davantage
de souvenirs qu’à l’âge
d’avril un jour
d’un jour

no more
memories all told than aged
one day in April
one day old

Melodrama

On a Dying Animal

lifted

its empty waterbowl
heavier in my hand

than the full

as if

a shadow
alone casts
no shadow

departing to no
goodbye it
can receive
or return

it goes
without saying

(2006)

Cailleacha Dhubha

Paull Holme Sands, with Egret

Samuel Beckett, 'An Badhbh'

ag streachaíl a ocrais trí spéir
mo chloiginn blaosc an spéir ’s an chré

á umhlaidh féin do na bacaigh a bheas orthu
tromán na beatha a árdú is siúil leis

iad ina gceap magaidh ag an gcolainn
go n-iompóidh ocras cré agus spéir ina ndramhaíl

Henri Michaux, Labyrinth

Life the labyrinth, the labyrinth death,
labyrinth without end, says the Master of Ho.

Everything caves in, nothing sets free.
The suicide is reborn to new pain.

The prison opens onto a prison,
one corridor opens on another:

he who thinks he’s unrolling the scroll of life
is unrolling nothing.

Nothing leads anywhere.
The centuries too live underground, says the Master of Ho.

Secret Beach, Flamborough Head

Days of the Brindled Cow/Tell Us a Joke

Always read the footnotes. Or so I was reminded when skimming through Donna Wong’s essay on ‘Literature and the Oral Tradition’ in the Cambridge History of Irish Literature and I came across this:

Modern Irish dictionaries often quote proverbs, and as Tomás Ó Cathasaigh has observed, Father Dinneen’s Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla (1927; 2nd edn Dublin: Irish Texts Society: 1934) ‘is the only dictionary in the world with a folktale in it.’ I hand him laurels for referring me to Dinneen’s marvellous entry for riabhach, which concludes ‘laethanta na riabhche, the days of the brindled cow, .i. March; the legend is that the brindled cow complained at the dawn of April of the harshness of March, whereupon March borrowed a few days from April and these were so wet and stormy that the bó riabhach was drowned, hence March has a day more than April, and the borrowed days are called laethanta na riaibhche’, p. 893.’

This story reminds me of the joke about the surveyor working on the Polish-Russian border after the First World War who meets an old farmer and offers him the chance of deciding which of the two countries he wants to be in. He thinks about it for a while and chooses Poland since, as he says, ‘I don't think I'd be able for the Russian winters’.

And since I’m telling jokes, I wonder if anyone else noticed the story in the Guardian feature on comedy a few days back in which a comedian described reading a children’s book to a bunch of six year olds in the library, one of whom raised his hand and asked ‘Does this get good soon?’ Is it too late to change the title of this blog, to change my name to ‘Does this get good soon?’

And since not everyone reading will have seen Mock the Week last Sunday, here’s another joke, from that show. A bored teenager is sitting in a classroom whacking her malfunctioning calculator against the desk. ‘Linda! Stop that!’, her teacher shouts. ‘How would you like it if I banged you against a desk?’

Sea Stack, Cormorants, Flamborough Head

Puffins, Flamborough Head

Aillte Shliabh Liag

Irishness Now Among Leading Causes of Innumeracy

I was pondering just the other day the nature of my objections to the business of Irishness and Irish Studies when along came Stephen Watt’s Irishness and Contemporary Writing (CUP) to remind me what I mean. In a comparison of Beckett and Derek Mahon on p. 142 I see the author misspells, twice, the word ‘fouillis’ from Beckett’s mirlitonnade on Arthur Keyser as ‘foullis’, not to mention ‘coeur’ as ‘couer’ and ‘minuscule’ as ‘miniscule’, but on the following page we read this:

Then there is the burble concerning the memorial to Caroline Hay Taylor at St André’s cemetery. Mahon’s burble follows Beckett’s poem closely in most respects (...) Each depicts Taylor as remaining ‘true to her belief’ (fidèle à sa philosophie) that ‘there is hope while there is life’ (qu’espoir il y a tant qu’il y a vie), and each mentions that she escaped Ireland with this view intact. But Beckett dates this flight as occurring ‘en août mil neuf cent trente-deux’, which Mahon ‘translates’ as ‘in August nineteen-twenty-two’. Why makes this revision? Did Mahon’s considerable facility with French fail him at this moment? Probably not.

{Ends}

The reason, Watt goes on to suggest, for Mahon’s mistake is that he has moved her death back ten years to coincide with the Irish Civil War, thus underlining the dead woman’s ability to retain her ‘unflagging optimism at a historical moment least hospitable to the cultivation of hope’, with the ghost of a premonition of the Northern Irish Troubles thrown in too. She ‘remained forward-looking in circumstances least likely to cultivate hope or affirmation; by contrast, 1932 in Beckett’s original exercises a far more restricted connotation.’

For a start, I can’t believe that was anything other than a mistake on Mahon’s part. But if not, to suggest that the fact of the Irish Civil War in 1922, with all its opportunities for ready-to-hand poetic significance, should trump the bald fact the woman died in 1932 – this embodies perfectly, for me, my objections to the unearned exceptionalism of Irish Studies. She died in 1932, not 1922. Some pointless Irish civil war is not a good enough reason for assuming to yourself the power to alter this fact. Mahon made a mistake, and I defy anyone to convince me otherwise, or explain why that otherwise can be anything other than a species of wish-fulfilment.

Photo shows an old stomping ground of mine, Misery Hill on the south bank of the Liffey. I hadn’t been back for a decade or so. Someone had stencilled ‘I’m Nobody? Who Are You?’ on a hoarding on the other side of the street.

Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Málainn Bhig le hÉanlaith Ní hEol Dom Cad Iad

Teach Tábhairne Uí Robhartaigh

Aingeal, Leac Uaighe

Gleann Cholm Cille

Laochra Gaeil

I don’t have a copy of The Best of Myles to hand, but fondly remember his rejection of the suggestion that, while the average English user had a basic vocabulary of 400 words that average Irish speaker used 4000. The real figure is in fact closer to 400,000, he declares, while in Donegal there are some Irish speakers so rich in Gaelicness that they pride themselves on never using the same word twice in their lives. I was reminded of this more than once during this last week in Donegal, as during a presentation on the 89-year old who was commended to us as the possessor of the richest Irish in the county. Irish-speakers will frequently use the patronymic system, e.g. Tom Phaidí Sheáin, but this man had no fewer than ten components in the family tree of a full name he carries around with him, tracing his lineage all the way back to the 1730s. If he isn’t in the Book of Leviticus too he obviously should be.

I’ve been to the Donegal Gaeltacht before (Gortahork, Falcarragh), but one of the things that makes Glencolumbkille distinctive is that those places, remote as they are, are at least, or can be, on the route to somewhere else. Glencolumbkille is at the end of the line and 26km from the nearest sizable town (and ATM), Killybegs. It appears to be a Garda-free zone too, with all the delightful implications this has for pub opening hours. The pubs are full of music, just about every evening. I was most disappointed to learn that the great Glen fiddler James Byrne had died last November, but I got to see his widow and daughters play in Roarty’s, several times, as well as the legendary Tommy Peoples and, down from Glenties, Peter and Jimmy Campbell. Oideas Gael, where I was taking my Irish language course, has one of the few surviving examples of the tin fiddles endemic to this part of the world, as occasionally played by the greatest of all modern Donegal fiddlers, John Doherty. Donegal fiddling, to start repeating myself from the last post, appeals to me in its relentless eschewal of vibrato and unapologetic scratchiness, its horde of eldritch eighteenth-century Scottish crossovers, and utter singularity to its own place and nowhere else.

But as for the language itself: I found the experience of speaking Irish for a week (well, parts of that week at least) entirely pleasurable. During the week our host, Liam Ó Cuinneagáin, circulated copies of a journalistic turd dropped by brain-donor reject Kevin Myers in the Irish Independent rehashing his very familiar desire for the Irish language to disappear off the face of the earth. Even if every remaining speaker of Irish was prompted by this article to jump off the cliffs of Slieve League, all 1972 feet of them, learning and speaking Irish would be just as worthwhile and admirable an endeavour. One of the things I debated up there with my fellow student Saerbhreatach was what if anything makes Ireland any different anymore from Britain, and while we had somewhat responses to that (S. has written, in response to a critique of his position by Barra Ó Seaghdha that ‘I wished to inquire whether a work can be Irish yet not be in that language. I ultimately don’t think that it meaningfully can be, and that it forms a kind of sub-section of Anglophone poetry, which is not identical to English or British poetry’; I can’t link to the original article by BOS as the page appears to be currently off-line), what was I saying here? that like S. I strongly feel, and for entirely un-nationalist reasons, that to have any kind of professional involvement in Irish Studies, as that subject is studied in universities, is impossible without a working knowledge of Irish, and that what goes by the name of Irish Studies in the absence of such a knowledge is a dereliction of scholarly duty, a kind of fraud, even. But then there is that question of nationalism and the caduceus-like coils in which it has traditionally wrapped the language. Neither S. (see soundbite above) nor I is any kind of card-carrying Irish nationalist, and both find e.g. Thomas Kinsella’s fondness for seeing his involvement with the Irish language as a species of nationally mandated one-man crusade as, well, meaningless to us. But this leaves what? Is the Irish language just so much material, in the way that Icelandic or Swahili would be, a holiday destination for our anthropological field trips? Perhaps this is a question for which I should provide a snappy answer, if only to avoid ever having to dwell on it again, but while I for one don’t fancy being called some manner of neo-Unionist by Barra Ó Seaghdha, and am perfectly familiar with the parochialism of would-be post-nationalist platitudes (see Kevin Myers passim), I was happier to spend the week pondering facts about Irish such as these:

the Irish for jellyfish, smugairle róin, means ‘seal snot’.

the Irish proverb Is fad ó bhaile a labhraíonn an pilibín (‘it is far from home that the lapwing sings’) refers to the lapwing’s habit of leaving its nest to sing, to mislead predators as to the location of its eggs. This I did not know.

that the first of the list of seven times’ seven words that end in ‘óg’, birds, goes like this: druideog, fáinleog, faoileog, fuiseog, glasóg, riabhóg and spideog. The other six refer to trees, martime things, parts of the body, plants, things around the house, and women, and I will happily burn a CD of Donegal fiddle music for the first person who tells me what they are.

Photo (not by me, own pictures to follow) shows the awesomely remote abandoned village of Port, over the hill from the Glen.

And to everyone I met there, from the barmaid leaning out the window watching the Glen v. Carrick GAA match through binoculars, to the fiddlers, to everyone who spoke even one word of Irish I say: Mór sibh a laochra Gaeil!

The Cat that Kittled in Jamesie's Wig

A marvellous image of fiddle-playing brothers Francie and Mickey Byrne from Kilcar in Donegal. I’ve always loved Donegal fiddle music, the scratchy, cat’s gut rasp of it (seem to be having a Seamus Heaney moment here), and was thrilled on a trip to Donegal a few years ago to put some musicians in Gortahork to the test by asking if they knew ‘The Cat That Kittled in Jamesie’s Wig’, as played on the 1987 Claddagh album The Brass Fiddle by Francie Byrne (I think Mickey had died by then), and yes indeed they did, striking up its yawping descending ninth.

This by way of saying I’m taking off to Glencolumbkille in south-west Donegal for a week to brush up on my Irish and annoy the locals with requests for obscure John Doherty reels.

Felicity Afire

An Australian poet I was most happy to rediscover down under last year is Robert Adamson, whose new Bloodaxe collection The Kingfisher’s Soul I review (in brief) in today’s TLS. But as they’ve snipped the last sentence off I’d like to log it here: ‘Like Amy Clampitt’s kingfisher, these poems are flushed with “the color /of felicity afire.”’ And since I can hardly leave it at that, here’s the end of his poem ‘Creon’s Dream’ by way of illustration.

I sleep in broken snatches and dream nothing.
Mosquitoes suck at my cheeks and empty bottles
clutter the verandah, the books are in darkness

but the sandy whimbrels finger the pages, words
dissolve, waves of the dead arrive in dreams.
Out there the black finger points to the mouth

of the river, where the dead are heading, they
move over the window glass. The extinct fins move
the fingers of my grandfather, mending nets,

the dead friends sing from invisible books. The heron
picks the blood-shot eye from my father’s terrible
work in the kilns and darkness is complete.

Miracle in Limerick as Limerick People Confound Skeptics with Proof That Yes It Is Possible to Be That Dumb

Story here.

Gatto di Trieste

Literate Graffiti

Trieste is the Hull of Italy. Each city is a port out on an eastern limb, often overlooked by the rest of their respective countries and... there the comparison breaks down. Oh, and both cities have a disproportionate literary tradition (Stendhal was French consul in Trieste, and then there’s Svevo, Joyce, Umberto Saba and Magris, for starters). I mean, it says something about Trieste that Philip Larkin should have chosen to spend that crucial formative decade there rather than in Florence, Milan or Venice: a strangely neglected period of his life, I find. And consider that Triestine graffito, a pleasant change for me from the endless bits of Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg you see sprayed on gable-ends round the place here in East Yorkshire. Ungaretti served at the battle of Caparetto, I did not know before my latest trip to Trieste, though his later enthusiastic fascism all through the Mussolini years takes any dulce et decorum est edge off that fantastic two-liner of his, above. He shared the irredentistism of his fellow Futurists, who sent a Volunteer Bicycle Brigade to the northern front, which must have come in handy among the tanks and mountains of that savage theatre. The Italians lost 1000 men a day for two years; there is still a street in Trieste named after the walrus-faced old idiot who masterminded this hecatomb. On the subject of statues, I heard from John McCourt (author of the most excellent biographical study of the Triestine Joyce The Years of Bloom and a fine singer too, let me add) that all manner of Austrian statues are being re-erected there too, who knows why, or why now. And still on the war, Marinetti, I learned, spent his war years digging latrines, while Wittgenstein too saw action on the Italian-Austrian front, serving as a private in his war-long but ultimately quixotic attempt to get himself killed. I didn’t encounter any contemporary irredentists casting surly glances over the border at Koper (Capodistria) or Rijeka (Fiume, site of D’Annunzio’s finest inglorious hour), but given the tendency of these towns to change name under a new flag, I hope the Italians leave well enough alone in the nearby Slovene district of Arse.

Why Joyce, who used to hide from thunderstorms in the cupboard, ever agreed to live in Trieste I don’t know, given that copious thunderstorms cascaded down just about every single day I was there.

Ah Trieste, ah Trieste, ate I my liver!

Gatto di Roma, Protestant Cemetery

Gatto di Trieste

Svevo and I

Catching Up

I have returned from Italy, my thoughts on which anon (the secret ingredient for submarine paint is nun’s sweat), but first some items of note fished from the pizza menus and ads for patio salesmen cluttering up my porch.

The lapwing above is in honour of Michael Longley, knowing as I do that it is his favourite bird. Longley is seventy, an occasion marked by Enitharmon’s Love Poet, Carpenter: Michael Longley at Seventy. Contributors include his belaurelled contemporaries and several generations of juniors, including my own. Michael Longley was writer in residence in Trinity in the early 90s, a period I’m pleased to see described here, though my own account of it will have to wait for my forthcoming memoir Cappuccinos I Have Known. That fine poet Peter McDonald’s contribution, ‘Weather’, ends:

The sunshine makes red virulent
and yellows vibrant with decay;
it’s not surprise, more like assent
when they fall, when I let them fall,
to what is fated, in its way,
of which this rain-cleared light makes little,
meaning the day can gleam, can glow:
and not a bad day, as days go.

Another contributor is Ciaran Carson, whose On the Night Watch (Gallery Press) I see is also out. I wrote a long essay here about the turn in Carson’s style in Breaking News, and am pleased to see him continue to inject a belated bacillus of Objectivism into Northern Irish poetry. The leitmotivic obsessions of For All We Know are still much in evidence, as is the wrong-note line-break, sending the reader’s eye scrolling up and down as it registers a whole series of split-second semantic adjustments as the first word of the next line retrospectively adjusts what you thought the last line meant. Many poems heighten this effect by describing the passage of time. ‘If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness,’ Wittgenstein wrote, ‘then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.’ Here is Carson’s (a run-on title, this) ‘Of Yesterday’:

says St Augustine
what

is there to say
the past is not

as is the future
as for now

it flits from
split to split

into the next
so what

is there to fear
from time

when now
is forever

The latest issue of that fine Dublin journal The Stinging Fly features a comprehensive and provocative review of Paula Meehan’s latest, Painting Rain. One thing I like about the review is how it takes and acknowledges the whole context and background of Meehan’s work then, in the nicest possible sense, ignores it. It will not have been so important to how we read her, in the end, that Meehan spent a lot of time giving poetry workshops rather than working in life insurance, whether the ‘I’ in her work is identical with its author, resembles her closely, or even not at all, given the secret life we have now established for her a life-insurance saleswoman.

Fryatt also begins by mentioning class. Having got my feelings about Eavan Boland off my chest in a long article a few years back I feel that’s a subject I never need to revisit, but it has always puzzled me how easily gender trumps class in the grievance queue, where recent Irish poetry has been concerned. Meaning, I’ve always felt there was a mismatch between the amount of time Boland spends investigating Irish gender politics and the amount of time (none that I can see) that she devotes to class, but also how seldom she gets picked up on this issue. Fryatt concludes (to get around to quoting from the review at last): ‘Meehan, like many contemporary poets, maintains a Romantic emphasis on subjectivity while neglecting the duty that accompanies it: that of ensuring the versified soul earns her privilege through linguistic concentration. That neglect makes of social conscience mere worthiness, and of protest mere protestation of virtue.’

Speaking of fine Dublin journals, I mentioned, a long time ago now, an upcoming piece of mine on Beckett’s letters. It can be found (in the print copy only, I mean) here.

The summer conceptual/flarf issue of Poetry (that makes it sound like an annual event) features a brief note on Michael Hartnett by the ever-waggish Conor O’Callaghan, including this anecdote:

Sometime in the nineties an Irish Studies conference was hosted by the University of Limerick. The local laureate gave a plenary reading. The speaker immediately preceding had used an old-fashioned overhead projector that Hartnett, not big on technology, mistook for his lectern and microphone. He laid his pages on the magnifying glass panel and spoke his poems into the projector’s lamp. A combination of its bulk and his diminutive stature meant that not only was the plenary reader mostly inaudible, but he was mostly invisible as well. Whenever it came to lines of importance or of particular emotional intensity, he would lean into the projector’s bulb and whisper. A collective giggle began murmuring around the audience. Eventually Hartnett peered from behind the apparatus and asked rhetorically of the darkened auditorium, “What the fuck are you laughing at?”

And finally, some lyrics from the new Tinariwen album Imidiwan. From a track called ‘Tenhert’:

The doe of Azuzawa is so radiant
She was leaving Tin Ardjan before the rains
Following the Tashalghé river westwards, towards some striking camels
Who came from the Awaji family, more beautiful than nine fawns
Bolting to the top of the hill where the rock pools are green

I learn from the sleeve notes that the Touareg never use that word to refer to themselves, given its Arabic provenance, and should in fact be referred to as the ‘Inazaghen’, the people of Adagh, which is almost a town in Co. Louth but, luckily for the Touareg, isn’t quite.

I recommend this album, and the various magazines and books listed above.