Hint Hint

‘Among the unusual professions of the people [greatest-living-Brayman Dara Ó Briain] meets [in his book Tickling the English, reviewed by someone or other in the current TLS] is that of airtraffic controller controller, which does not, it turns out, involve preventing air traffic controllers from bumping into one another.’

(Harbour Bar, Bray, Christmas?)

‘There is the world’s most middle-class crime story, when an audience member describes a burglar breaking into a house during a dinner party and “We all just presumed he was another guest”; all the valuables are recovered when the escaping thief drops them on the courgette patch.’

(Good to get away th’ auld family for a bit. Porter House maybe?)

‘Tickling the English is a thoughtful and wise critique. It is also extremely funny.’

(Christmas holidays then. The Porter House it is. Any afternoon there’s a Liverpool game on. Mine’s an Erdinger, thanks.)

The Country, The Burn, The Hard

Leeches petrol.

















Leach’s petrel.

For more by me on one of the above subjects, courtesy of the kindly folk at Verse Palace, see here.

Large Vat of Drivel

The university sector, as it exists in the minds of the people who run this country, is a fairly dysfunctional-absurdist place, in policy theory and, increasingly, thanks to the efforts of those nice people, in practical fact, and I can’t explain why any better than Stefan Collini does in his commentary piece in this week’s TLS, ‘Impact on Humanities’.

Workers in the humanities produce ‘outcomes’ of various kinds which are then graded for the purposes of conversion into funding on a five-yearly basis in the Research Assessment Exercise, as was, lately renamed the Research Excellence Framework. Among recent government bright ideas is the suggestion that research be given a 25 per cent weighting for ‘impact’ achieved, in terms of its ‘demonstrable benefits to the wider economy and society.’ Examples of these benefits could not be more crudely utilitarian, including ‘creating new businesses’, ‘commercialising new products or processes’ and other ideas copied from the minutes of the nearest photocopier salesmen’s convention. This sounds like a familiar standoff between highminded layabouts and hardnosed philistines, but more important than that is the total incoherence of these ‘indicators’, even in hardnosed philistine terms. Collini gives the example of a diligently researched edition of a Victorian poet, ‘exemplif[ying] the general values of careful scholarship and remind[ing] its readers of the qualities of responsiveness, judgement, and literary tact called upon by the best criticism’, but whose ‘impact’ (in the terms outlined above) is zero. Unless of course that Victorian poet was in the habit of burying poetry manuscripts with his dead mistresses and digging them back up again afterwards, and the bodice-ripping ITV period drama on this subject mentions the study in the credits afterwards. That, apparently, is ‘impact’.

Collini writes;

Even if the policy represents a deliberately attempt by government to change the character of British universities (and the humanities are, I suspect, simply being flattened by a runaway tank designed for other purposes), its confusions and inadequacies should still be called to public attention. There are, after all, some straightforward conceptual mistakes involved. For example, the exercise conflates the notions of ‘impact’ and of ‘benefit’. It proposes no way of judging whether an impact is desirable [DW butts in: is it ‘impact’ if the Times covers a front-page story on my latest article in The Journal of Thomas Lovell Beddoes Studies as the single most arse-achingly tedious piece of English prose ever written?]; it assumes that if the research in question can be shown to have affected a number of poeple who are categorized as ‘outside’, then it constitutes a social benefit of that research [DW again: if I throw copies my article out the window and hit a passing schoolchild on the head, is that ‘impact’?] It also confines the notion of a ‘benefit’ to something that is deliberately aimed at and successfully achieved. Good work which has some wider influence without its authors having taken steps to bring this about is neither more nor less valuable than good work which has that influence as a result of such deliberate efforts, or indeed than good work which does not have that influence at all.

{Ends}

The proposals, Collini concludes, are ‘drivel’, reducing humanities academics to ‘door-to-door salesmen for vulgarized versions of their increasingly market-oriented “products”.’

Speaking as every taxpayer’s idea of the layabout academic, and someone who has never read the Times Higher Education Supplement in my life, I am, I presume, a walking embodiment of all the reasons why these barbarians are now at the gate, or inside it writing government reports. But drivel is drivel and having a large vat of it emptied over your head does not become any more pleasant an experience for your being told it was written by the people who pay your wages.

Oh, and can I put this blog on my RAE returns? Assuming I can, some customer-driven ‘impact’ in the comments, please.

Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich

Ah, the sweet aftertaste of crumbly Arran cheese, as I was reminded the other day while washing some down with a pint of Arran blonde beer in a bar outside Brodick. And ah, the distinctive kidney shape of the island itself (ára = kidney), I was also reminded, looking at the large map of the place on the wall, before replacing my pint on an Arran-shaped table. That’s four Arrans in one mouthful of beer.

For whatever reason, there is less perceived need in Hull to look at the place on the wall, and eat, drink and dine off it too.

Arran, however, is quite suburban, as Scottish isles go, given that it’s a mere two hours from Glasgow city-centre. Perhaps the more remote you get the larger the chunks the island name takes out of the rest of the language, until by the time you get to Sula Sgeir all other words have been purged and the inhabitants (gannets and fulmars, in that case) spend all day reworking that scene from Being John Malkovich where he goes inside his own head and into a world of conversations that go ‘Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich’, ad infinitum. ‘Sula Sgeir? Sula Sgeir Sula Sgeir Sula Sgeir.’

For reading, MacNeice’s I Crossed the Minch. It chimes all too perfectly with my remarks the other day about the appeal of ‘meta-Gaelic’ to people who cannot speak that language. As Jonathan Allison was saying of that book at the get-together in Aberdeen where I was doing my own sounding off too, this poet of things being drunkenly various finds himself strangely susceptible to all manner of Gaelic purism, which burden they, the locals, not he must then shoulder. The Perceval and Crowder figures in that book remind me strongly of the idiotic Englishmen in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes who spend the whole film worrying about the test-score at Lord’s, unable to turn off the drone of their upper-class twittish chatter no matter what their surroundings (much like the group of wax-jacketed, purple-trousered upper-class twits in the bar in Brodick, intent on some fraternisation with the stags on Goatfell, I’m sure). MacNeice gets some wan mileage out of this Mutt and Jeff combination, but then launches into his own version of chatter in a discussion of Stephen Spender’s Forward from Liberalism, an utterly pointless book, then and now, and not, one would have thought, the kind of thing anyone needed to dwell on in the wilds of Lewis or Harris. My point being that, for all the appeals of the far Celtic shore, the ambient musak of Anglophone chatter retained a certain irresistible appeal, if only as a buffer against the elemental ferocity all around, a point MacNeice never quite faces in that fascinating piece of hack-work. In just the same way that MacDiarmid’s ‘On a Raised Beach’ gets back, philosophically, to the stones, by forsaking the earthier language (but artificial in its own way, yes I know, I know) of Sangschaw and Penny Wheep to crash his way through all those Latinate jaw-breakers, half of whose meanings I suspect he didn’t even know himself. Do stones speak Latin? Or Gaelic? Or possibly Sumerian? Whichever, I’m sure they sound nothing like ‘On a Raised Beach’. It’s an exercise in ‘meta-stone’, in other words.

Sighted: stags loping lazily across the road, a golden eagle on a telegraph pole, a buzzard, lots of oystercatchers and lapwings, and most pleasingly of all, Britain’s most persecuted bird, the grouse-fancying hen harrier, préachán na gcearc.

Anyone with a spare hour on their hands can listen to John Kerrigan speak, fascinatingly, on I Crossed the Minch here.

What I Believe

Ses ailes de géant l’êmpechent de marcher, but as for the contents of the albatross’s stomach...

I was inspired to look up Chris Jordan’s work by a similar picture in the Guardian the other day. He has been documenting the effects on albatrosses of the plastic they pick up out at sea and feed to their young, believing it to be food.

An obituary for Claude Lévi-Strauss the other day described his philosophy of life as one of ‘serene pessimism’, but how to express this serenely? Life is shit. For most people and creatures, at most times, life is shit. As Beckett’s ill-fated attempt at a stage character in Mary Manning Howe’s play Youth’s the Season put it: ‘My conception of the universe is a huge head with pus-exuding scabs – entirely revolting.’ This is my philosophy of life too.

(Life is shit.)

'Service Me Sexually From Three to Seven Times a Day'

John Cheever to Allan Garganus: ‘All I expect is that you learn to cook, service me sexually from three to seven times a day, never interrupt me, contradict me or reflect in any way on the beauty of my prose, my intellect or my person. You must also play soccer, hockey and football.’

On the Trembling Margin

Hereunder the text of a talk I gave at Aberdeen at the weekend, titled ‘On the “trembling margin”: Irish-Language Trace Elements in Contemporary Irish Poetry in English’. Yes, it is woefully incomplete. I don’t discuss Heaney or Montague, the first of whom has every bit as deep a scholarly knowledge of Irish as Thomas Kinsella, but without the Gaelic Atlas with the weight of the world on his shoulders complex, and the latter of whom is every bit as much of an old-style culural nationalist as Kinsella, but whose engagement with Irish partakes more noticeably of a private drama (the stuttering speech of his ‘grafted tongue’). I also don’t engage with Vivian Mercier or Declan Kiberd, as alternatives to the merely catastrophist view of the fate of Irish taken, again, by Kinsella. And since I was speaking in Scotland you’d imagine I might have had something to say about Rody Gorman, who triangulates his work between English, Irish and (Scottish) Gaelic, but no. I did, however (thanks Kit), receive some suggestions for who that Irish poet might be who lives and writes in apparent total indifference to the Irish language (your suggestions please...). Seo agaibh anois:

In a short film of 2003, Yu Ming is Ainm Dom, a Chinese man decides to move to Ireland, and having established in an atlas that the official language of that country is Gaelic, sets about learning it. On arrival in Dublin he enters a pub and asks for a job, only to be met with incomprehension. Finally, one man sitting in the corner intervenes and explains as Gaeilge how Yu Ming has been sadly misinformed. English is the language of Ireland, not Irish. At this point, his use of the famous mirror sequence from Taxi Driver while practising the language in China (‘An bhfuil tusa ag labhairt liomsa?’, ‘You talkin’ to me?’) seems all the more appropriate, since also in the words of that celebrated soundbite ‘I’m the only one here’. It gets worse: the bemused barman exclaims to another drinker that he wasn’t aware Paddy spoke Chinese. But all is not lost: the closing sequence of the film features some tourists arriving at a pub in the Gaeltacht and encountering Yu Ming behind the bar, who greets them with a hearty ‘Fáilte go Conamara!’, ‘Welcome to Connemara’.

A post-Celtic Tiger Irish-resident version of Christopher Reid’s Katerina Brac can easily be imagined, a Latvian, Angolan or Chinese poet commenting with affectionate irony on the Irish and their foibles. But as Yu Ming’s example reminds us, there is already a resident linguistic alien among the Irish, and that is the Irish language itself. A taxonomy of Irish writers and their relationship to the Irish language today might go something like this. At one end of the scale are poets who not only write in Irish, but refuse to have their work translated into English. I’m thinking here of Biddy Jenkinson, whose gran rifiuto was, oddly enough, made in precisely that language: ‘I would prefer not to be translated into English in Ireland. It is a small rude gesture to those who think that everything can be harvested and stored without loss in an English-speaking Ireland. If I were a corncrake I would feel no obligation to have my skin cured, my [torso] injected with formalin so that I could fill a museum shelf in a world that saw no heed for my kind’.

Next along would be the great majority of writers in Irish who, I presume, would have no objection to being translated into English or any other language, but whose books are read and received by an Irish-language readership with little acknowledgement of their existence outside this small community. Liam Ó Muirthile, for instance, is a fine contemporary Irish poet, but where is the engagement with his work among critics of Irish poetry who write predominantly on poetry in English? It is practically non-existent. A different case again is that of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Ní Dhomhnaill has done more than any writer in recent memory to raise the profile of the Irish language, but the manner in which she has done lays bare not a few of the morbid aspects of the relationship between Irish and English. Ní Dhomhnaill’s translators include some of the most distinguished contemporary Irish poets some of whom can, and some of whom cannot, speak Irish. Moreover, it is entirely within the bounds of possibility that one of the latter, working from Ní Dhomhnaill’s cribs, might produce a more readable version than one of the former, as indeed has happened. Where Irish is concerned, the postcolonial linguistic condition admits of not just hybridisation but immaculate conceptions.

Another category again, possibly a one-man category in recent times, is that of the writer whose sense of grief and guilt over writing in English leads him to abandon it for Irish. I am thinking here of Michael Hartnett, who dramatised his great about-turn in A Farewell to English in 1975. A central problem throughout that book, however, is its re-energizing of the link between the Irish language and a brand of national and even racial consciousness that almost guarantees the tragic impasse of the project, and which finds more profitable expression in the series of translations from Ó Bruadair, Ó Rathaille and Haicéad that occupied the last years of his life.

My next category would be that of the committed but Anglophone cultural nationalist, actively translating from Irish and fully aware of the postcolonial ironies of his every step in English. Here I might name Thomas Kinsella, whose translation of the Táin and whose New Oxford Book of Irish Verse and (with Seán Ó Tuama) Duanaire: Poems of the Dispossessed are landmarks, dolmens even, in modern Irish poetry, but products of an unabashed belief in the mutilation of the Irish psyche by the colonial experience. In his Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, Justin Quinn takes a very brisk view of Kinsella’s position: his theory of a ‘dual tradition’ is ‘plainly wrong’. To Kinsella’s example of Jonathan Swift and Aodhagán Ó Rathaille’s ignorance of each other’s existence, Quinn replies: ‘the distance between the two languages and their worlds is greater than Kinsella will admit: you can only have a “dual tradition” if there are enough readers who are bilingual.’ For Kinsella, even when ignoring each other, the two traditions remain locked together in time-honoured antagonism, whereas for Quinn, lacking Kinsella’s nationalist template, it is simply delusional to describe contemporary Irish writing in these terms. This leads him to combine a hard line on what, if anything, is still distinctive about Irish poetry (his answer being: the Irish language) with a total absence of the emotional reasons that might underpin the argument if it were being advanced by Kinsella. How apparently close but in fact utterly removed we are from Kinsella’s position when, in a debate with Barra Ó Séaghdha, Quinn declares: ‘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.’

How far we are, too, from the practice of most contemporary Irish poets should also become apparent in what follows: here my taxonomy begins to fragment, as writers unwilling to follow the logic of Quinn’s demanding position put the Irish language to more private or meta-poetic uses instead. A good example of this would be Eavan Boland. To the best of my knowledge, Boland is not an Irish speaker: the Irish language in her work seems to me to fall into the category of fetishised identity exhibit, to be touted in the abstract rather than examined, spoken or read in the living particular. I have written about this before, so will restrict myself to one example, the bardic poet whose dispossession she sketches in ‘My Country in Darkness’:

The Gaelic world stretches out under a hawthorn tree
and burns in the rain. This is its home,
its last frail shelter. All of it –
Limerick, the Wild Geese and what went before –
falters into cadence before he sleeps.

He shuts his eyes. Darkness falls on it.

Whatever else Boland’s aims, adding to the store of our knowledge of the Gaelic world is hardly among them. The reality of Gaelic culture is snuffed out and replaced by Celtic Twilight cliché. Why is our bard voiceless and unnamed? Boland could tell us a lot more about him if she wanted. When other people do this to us it is cultural imperialism. When we Irish do it to ourselves it is laziness.

A different example of this combination of distance from the Irish language and re-engagement with it across that very distance occurs in the work of Medbh McGuckian. When The Southern Review devoted a special issue to Irish poetry in 1995, it featured a remarkable conversation or comhrá between McGuckian and Ní Dhomhnaill. When the conversation turns to the Irish language, McGuckian describes her linguistic self-image as an Irish-haunted speaker of English in frankly remarkable terms. She frets in the shadow of the colonial language, so that:

even the words ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Wordsworth’ – at some level I’m rejecting them, at some level I’m saying get out of my country, or get out of my...

[Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill]: ... soul.

MMcG: Get out of me. [...] I do feel that there’s a psychic hunger [...] and I’m lying like a corpse under it all.

She aspires to write ‘an English that would be so purified of English that it would be Irish’, but it is a revealing commentary on the Irish purity aspired to by McGuckian, surely, that both the medium of pursuit and the eventual goal are the English language. The further postcolonial experience appears to take us from the Irish language, the greater the temptation to reinvest in it as a cultural fantasy, a mirage of otherness from the Anglo-culture we flatter ourselves we reject, but that in fact governs every aspect of our daily lives. Are Irish poets in denial about this fact and using the Irish language, or a meta-version of it, as a shield against this unpleasant reality?

One immediate come-back to that might be to wonder what is wrong with cultural fantasies, when they take the rich and compelling form McGuckian’s poems frequently do and, also frequently, with some Gaelic element very strongly in the mix. In ‘Elegy for an Irish Speaker’ McGuckian invokes the ‘Roaming root of multiple meanings’ before announcing ‘I cannot live without /your trans-sense language /the living furrow of your spoken words /that plough up time.’ Shane Murphy has done invaluable work identifying the wholesale borrowings and rewritings going on under the surface in McGuckian’s work, but even the non-specialist reader might recognize the quotation here from Mandelstam’s ‘The Word and Culture’ (‘poetry is the plough that turns up time’), not to mention the reference to the Futurist movement of ‘zaum’ or trans-sense. Once again though, it is revealing that, for all McGuckian’s talk of returning to a decontaminated Irish essence, her work takes the route of centrifugal dispersal across other languages and traditions. Perhaps Irish sleeps somewhere at the heart of all this in the same way that, as she writes in ‘The Dream Language of Fergus’, ‘Latin sleeps, they say, in Russian speech.’ But no matter where it resides, it does so as an enabling myth, a projection, a glorious fantasy, as well as a mere language to write in or speak.

Derek Mahon too has translated Ní Dhomhnaill from English cribs, but it is notable in the wake of the politically greener noises Mahon makes in The Yellow Book, with its jibes about Northern Ireland, how its sequel, Harbour Lights, strikes overtly bardic postures, unpicking the etymologies of Irish place-names and translating a seventeenth-century poem of Tadhg Ó Ruairc’s. Mahon displays his characteristic Francophilia when the girl addressed in the poem is praised for her ‘gold chevelure’, while it is also doubtful the original card games played included bezique (invented in the nineteenth century). Reading the poem again in his collected translations, Adaptations, it is striking how tonally consonant it is with Mahon’s versions of poems from French, German, Italian and other languages: not for Mahon the willed (or at any rate I’m guessing it was willed) awkwardness of Kinsella’s translations, underlining the implicit resistance of the Irish poem to Anglicisation. This may be a late variant on the old redskins and palefaces divide, but even as Mahon becomes (apparently) more racy of the Munster soil, he insists all the more on how racy of the Baudelairean intertext his Irish versions are. Mahon is no neo-Corkeryan, but the most pragmatic of born-again bards.

A fellow Ní Dhomhnaill translator of Mahon’s, Michael Longley, is worth reeling in on our súgán rope at this point. Of his fine poem ‘On Hearing Irish Spoken’, Justin Quinn has commented: ‘Yet Longley, it is clear, is not going to go so far as to learn [Irish]’, which brings our argument to a sensitive crux: should he? Poetry is not community service, so Longley no more ‘should’ learn Irish than he should learn Icelandic, Latvian or any other minority language that took his fancy. But do we hereby establish that this attitude to the Irish language (the commonest among Irish poets writing in English today, I would suggest), means that while we dip into language as a theme or source of Celtic otherness, in practical terms owe the language nothing, nothing at all? I am very reluctant to think this is the case.

And finally there is the poet who does not speak Irish, whose imaginative world does not include the Irish language, and in no way registers its absence. Can anyone suggest such a contemporary Irish poet? We have long established that the game of ‘Irish, Irisher, Irishest’ is demeaning to discussions of Irish poetry, and using one’s interest in Irish as a badge of privileged identity should impress no one. But taking that as read, we find ourselves at my previously announced crux all over again. On what grounds could one reprove, if one wished to do so, this hypothetical writer whose world simply excludes the Irish language? Do we wish to reprove this writer?

In pursuing this Linnaean survey, I am aware of following an arc away from the Irish language as medium to the Irish language as message, as in Boland’s auto-exoticising appropriations of it. But even in Irish this strategy is all too tempting. When Quinn notes that for Gearóid MacLochlainn, as for Ní Dhomhnaill, ‘the Irish language itself is also the main theme’, are we at risk of aping the ludicrous feis of Myles na gCopaleen’s An Béal Bocht, whose fanatical Gaelgeoir insists that speaking Irish is not enough, we must only use it to speak about the Irish language, the better to be ‘fíor-Ghaeil fíor-Ghaelacha a bhíonn ag caint fíor-Ghaeilge Gaelaí i dtaobh na Gaeilge fíor-Ghaelaí’ (somehow I think that translates itself). But Mylesian absurdity aside, it must be possible to write both intelligently in and on the language without succumbing to morbid self-referentiality. I will now conclude with two examples from recent poets that, I believe, make use of Irish-language themes in just such a way.

My first is the sequence ‘Edge Songs’ from Peter Sirr’s 2004 collection Nonetheless. A note describes the poems as ‘a series of workings, adaptations, versions, “skeleton” translations of poems in Old Irish, Middle Irish and Latin, as they might be remembered or misremembered by an imagined Irish poet’, though original poems of Sirr’s are added to the mix too. Sources given include the Aisling Mhic Chonglinne, The Life of Brigid the Virgin and the poems of Sedulius Scottus. We meet a ‘solitary blackbird’ in the first section and think, of course, of the ninth-century blackbird of Belfast Lough:

the quick impulse of it, slantwise
scribbled on the edge of the moment
this hasty space, trembling margin
this at last a place to live in

The poems are full of transformations, performed with the fiat of Amergin’s ur-text of Gaeldom, familiar to generations of readers of Graves’s The White Goddess:

she hangs her cloak on a sunbeam
turns water to beer
she causes a foetus to disappear
makes salt from rock
her mantle is not stained by raw meat
a river rises up against cattle thieves
wolves are her swineherds

There is a cottage, or even bothy industry today in Celtic spirituality and nature mysticism, which operates almost entirely on the meta-level of self-conscious Celticness (I’m thinking here of the works of John O’Donoghue and John Moriarty), but here is the real thing, whatever that may be, precisely in its abstention from self-applied identity markers. Consider section x, a response to the eleventh-century lyric ‘Ná luig, ná luig’:

What else should we swear on, if not the earth
how should we walk, if not so lightly
we hardly touched it

[...]

where else can the world go
but away from us, like an ebbing tide
and what should we do

but follow

‘Edge Songs’ are among the finest achievements of recent Irish poetry and a paradigm of what a linguistically curious writer, with no apparent cultural-nationalist baggage whatever, can do with this rich and challenging material.

My second and final example is the poem ‘Gloss/Clós/Glas’ from Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s The Girl Who Married the Reindeer. This must count among the most intensely coded, some might say overdetermined, reckonings with the Irish language through the medium of English in recent Irish poetry. Its scholar has been ‘raking the dictionaries’, ‘hunting for keys’, working on a puzzle whose solution is ‘the price of his release’, though his release from what remains opaque. Where most poets troping the Irish language in English are concerned to emphasize its distance from the language in which they are writing, Ní Chuilleanáin instead drives the two almost together, but subject to a tantalizing yet insuperable divide, in which I for one hear echoes of MacNeice’s ‘Dublin’, with its similarly painful degrees of closeness:

Two words as opposite as his and hers
Which yet must be as close
As the word clós to its meaning in a Scots courtyard
Close to the spailpín ships, or as close as the note
On the uilleann pipe to the same note on the fiddle


Caitríona O’Reilly has praised the poem as a ‘visionary examination of what it means to reach out, to step beyond personal limitation and prejudice in all areas of life’, and in its final stanza it achieves a condition of, simultaneously, doubleness, in-betweenness, and neitherness, if that is a word:

The rags of language are streaming like weathervanes,
Like weeds in water they turn with the tide, as he turns
Back and forth the looking-glass pages, the words
Pouring and slippery like the silk thighs of the tomcat
Pouring through the slit in the fence, lightly,
Until he reaches the language that has no word for his,
No word for hers, and is brought up sudden
Like a boy in a story faced with a small locked door.
Who is that he can hear panting on the other side?
The steam of her breath is turning the locked lock green.

The solving language is recognized, paradoxically, through its poverty – it has ‘no word for his’, just as the Irish language has no word for ‘No’ (or ‘Yes’). The final image is of togetherness across, or do I mean in division. The unreachable girl turns the ‘locked lock green’ with her breath: the door is faoi ghlas, locked, and glas also means ‘green’ (it also means ‘death-knell’ in French, I might add). However, on the Gaelic colour chart it’s important to note that glas can also be glossed as ‘grey’: they are the same word, just as Irish has the same word for ‘hand’ and ‘arm’ and ‘leg’ and ‘foot’, and other very obviously different things, one would have thought. I am reminded of George Steiner’s discussions in After Babel of the different cultural resonances of the same word in different languages: Brot is not bread is not pain, or arán. Ní Chuilleanáin exults in this small act of ‘insisting so on difference’, as Larkin called it in ‘The Importance of Elsewhere’, an act of tricky ambiguity that may appear to complicate the plain sense of things, while in fact reminding us there never was an innocent plain sense of things in the first place, just as that concluding locked bilingual door is more liberating than any amount of monoglot open sesames. Despite my earlier worry about the ‘overdetermined’ nature of this poem, it is surely among the outstanding Irish poems of our times.

At this point it only remains to say that it is a cause of real regret to me that I am not talking here, today, in as well as about the Irish language. It is, let us not forget, vastly more important to speak and write the Irish language than to speak and write about it in English. The Yu Mings of this world, from Connemara to China, have had enough time now to practise their Travis Bickle lines in the mirror, but the next time an Irish-language poet finds him or herself asking ‘An bhfuil tusa ag labhairt liomsa?’, there has to be a better riposte than – I switch back to English to underline the gloominess of the answer – ‘I’m the only one here’.

Baldpates - Pearl Eyes - Tumbles Well

To sew its nest in place, the reed warbler sometimes collects threads from spiders’ webs.

‘Imagine a whale’s tongue, grey-brown and wet for ever, fifteen miles long and fifteen miles wide – that is the mud of the Wash.’

Starlings on Shetland use sheep as towels.

While living in England, Rimbaud compiles a list of pigeon names, as follows:

homing – working – fantails
pearl-eyed tumbler –
shortfaced – performing tumblers
trumpeters – squeakers
blue, red turbits – Jacobins
baldpates – pearl eyes – tumbles well
high flying performing tumblers
splashed – rough legged
grouse limbed
black buglers
saddle back
over thirty tail feathers

A woodcock arrives ‘with the kerfuffle of a Dickensian clerk, hunched and wheezing and crabbed. He looked more as though he was carrying a heavy ledger up Threadneedle Street. It was hard to think that he was in the thick of a sex dance.’

The bittern was formerly known in England as the myre dromble.

‘Peter took the wooden fish-priest strung on his waist and hit each mullet very hard three of four times on the head. It was bone-crunching, a loud and finite noise amidst the never-ending soughing and blow of wind and water. As he hit them, Peter talked to the fish in a soft voice. “I know, I know”, he said.’

A heron trying to land, according to J.A. Baker, is ‘like a man descending through the trap-door of a loft and feeling for a ladder with his feet.’

All this and more in Tim Dee’s The Running Sky: A Birdwatching Life (Jonathan Cape), a luminous read and surely instant classic. The youtube clip is of his favourite bird, the redstart, subject of John Buxton’s classic 1950 study, called simply The Redstart, to which this book has now sent me scurrying.

Il Fuoco Che Gli Affina

An appreciation of Richard Price’s Rays and Thomas A. Clark’s The Hundred Thousand Places. And before you ask me why I describe Price as the author of a dozen books, please just don’t: I never said that!

Dried Fruit

War threatens market trader Zeno
Cosini’s freedom to sit up thunder-struck
in bed and announce ‘Buy that dried fruit
at once!’ It was a border town

but the border town had wandered, like true
magnetic north or the date of Easter.
Its latest name sweated out
its overheating Italian vowels

with a brisk after-lunch shower.
Dried fruit is civilisation.
Dried fruit, the pouting finch

corrects him, eyeing his leavings –
a fig-rind – dried fruit is war.

{Ends]

I hereby adjourn to the frozen north (Aberdeen) for a few days. More anon, then.

Y for Mistress

A correspondence on the Cockney alphabet in the Guardian inspires me to go sleuthing for it online. And how could I not record it here, with entries like ‘F fer Vescence’ and ‘Y for mistress’). The Cockney alphabet:

A for Horses (or A fer Gardener)
B for Mutton
C for Miles (or Seaforth Highlanders)
D for Kate (or D fer Ential)
E for Brick
F for Lump (or F fer Vescence)
G for Police (or G for Get It)
H for Consent (or H for Bless You)
I for Novello (or I for the Engine)
J for Nice Time (or J for Oranges)
K for Restaurant
L for Leather
M for Cream (or M for Sis)
N for Lope
O for the Wings of a Dove (O for the Rainbow)
P for Relief
Q for the Loos
R for Mo (or R fer English)
S for you, you can take a hike (or S for Rantzen)
T for Gums (or T for Two)
U for Me (or U for Mism)
V for Espana
W for a Quid (or W for the Winnings)
X for Breakfast
Y for Mistress
Zee for Moiles (or Z for Wind)

O My Slovenia!

O my Slovenia, fanatically mild
and unknown! Empire’s glove-compartment,
land of modestly-priced swimwear and cheese,
and the capital with the loveliest name.

I fancied the hills full of knee-high bears.
Walking among vineyards I found a toy
scorpion pricking the air above its head,
defying you and your army’s ignorant bootheels

and taking for victory the nearest gap,
reversible-into, in the dry stone wall.
The bells peeled on the hour in honour

of Our Lady of the Tape Recorder.
There was no bell-ringer. There were no bells.

Poor Old Liverpool Finally Turn Up Genuinely Rubbish Team to Take It Out On, Vidic Now on Nectar Points for Anfield Red Cards, Beach Ball 'Gutted' etc

Tally Most Incredibly Ho!

Much pleasure from Jeremy Mynott’s Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience. This anecdote, for instance, recalling James Fisher and Roger Tory Peterson’s thirty-thousand mile crisscrossing of the United States, as described in their Wild America (1955), and their sighting of the legendary California condor:

Fisher then makes two remarks which from an Englishman of his class and generation represent pretty strong language:

“Tally most incredibly ho!” I said as I ticked it off on my checklist. “Worth seeing, actually.”

Peterson, notoriously, rarely thought about anything other than birds, as Fisher describes:

I’ve learned several things about Roger in the course of our acquaintance, and one of them is this: that Roger talks most of the time about birds. When the subject switches, a faraway look comes into his eye. He just waits for a lull and steps in where he left off.

A famous example of this habit is when Peterson was accompanying a party of eminent statesmen and others on a bird trip to a UK estuary. Lord Alanbrooke, chief of the General Staff during the Second World War, was holding forth to an attentive audience on his relations with Winston Churchill when Peterson abruptly turned to the group and said ruminatively, “I guess oystercatchers will eat most any kind of mollusc.”

The Plover is a Mellifluous Bird

Rereading The Third Policeman, I am reminded of a quality of gloriously manic indirection which, let me suggest, lies close to the heart of Mylesian comedy - a quality on which, it strikes me, I too have all too often had cause to draw, in the sad and monotonous prosecution of my daily routine. I come down in the morning to feed the cats and find you, for instance, a total stranger, sitting in my kitchen, but being of a nervous disposition I hold off from asking you what exactly you are doing there. There must, I assume, be some other way of eliciting this information. Such as asking you every conceivable other question possible in the English language. For example (sample answers supplied):

Are you not in fact Maolseachlainn Ó hIfearnáin, from a long line of Maolseachlainn Ó hIfearnáins, known for the manly vigour of your countertenor vibrato and your love of the corncrake of Inishbofin?
I am told the 46a will bring you there direct.

Is your wife not Assumpta Mullarkey of the County Wicklow, known to the authorities for worrying ewes?
It was generally thought his tattoos were ill-becoming of the bishop’s station.

What if any are the connections between the Hebridean isle of Mingulay and notorious Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele?
Though my great-uncle Paddy would drunkenly boast of having invented the croissant, I dismissed these claims with outright contempt.

What are your credentials in the field of ailments of the urinary tract?
The plover is a mellifluous bird.

Is it not true that your researches in the field of turf-powered self-brewing tea have come to nothing?
A brisk of walk of four to five miles, before breakfast.

What are the practical advantages of driving blindfolded?
I have never cared for cinnamon.

Why is your ferret doing that?
The Central African Republic has struggled to impose itself on the world stage.

Is it not the case that shaving one side only of the face, though a razor-saving measure, leads ultimately to ridicule?
The south island in particular is remarkable for its mangrove swamps.

How do you assess reaction to your proposed revisions of the Bolivian flag?
Ministers of the Eucharist are increasingly hard to come by.

Is a sonata for inaudible dog whistle not a pointless endeavour?
By the end the hovercraft had become an embarrassment.

Would you care to say a few words on the influence on your life and thought of the works of pontiff Sixtus V?
It is widely acknowledged that my cat possesses an exemplary set of whiskers.

{Ends}

I could do this all day, and in fact frequently do. Ask me a question in the comments stream and I’ll supply another answer in the same vein. I presume if I do it enough this interweb thing will get the knack and just keep on going itself.

Liverpool Defeated by Freak Inanimate Object on Pitch...

... otherwise known as yesterday’s starting eleven. And the beach ball didn’t help much either. Pathetic!

At the Sign of the Fudge-Coloured Cat

At the Sign of the Empire that Came and Went,
at the Sign of the Fudge-Coloured Cat,
we are well met. There is time
between the waiter’s leisurely rounds

for the currency to change and change back.
The Futurist Volunteer Bicycle Brigade.
Caparetto. M’illumino d’immenso.
The old Austrian statues going back up

here, now, but under what flag?
The end of war need not be defeat
but obscurity raised to a fine art.

Another empire could come and go
and the beer at this café still be flat.

(Trieste)

Mute et svelte

Hand-delivered to my door, issue one of the Cambridge Literary Review. Yes, hand-delivered, which I’d wager is more than anyone reading this in Cambridge can boast, but it seems one of that new journal’s editor’s parents live around the corner from me here in Hull. (How unsatisfactory the collective possessive is in English, is it not, may I add parenthetically. I’d like to thank you on all our behalves. The behalves of all of us? Fie on’t!). ‘In one corner of Oxford, I have not been forgiven for coming to Cambridge’, begins Jeremy Noel-Tod’s ‘A History of Difficulty: On Cambridge Poetry’, an essay that has already inspired excited reveries in the TLS and much cyber-debate. Substitute ‘Grimsby’ and ‘Scunthorpe’ for the place-names in that sentence and you will be halfway, at least, to grasping why some people still flinch from Cambridge poetry, the very thought of it, though I seem to remember JNT venturing beyond those city wall to t’North Country a few summers back with no obvious ill effects, even if t’soft lad ’ad t’nerve to compare Philip Larkin to Patience Strong while ’e were ’ere. There is a pathology of Cambridge poetry, undoubtedly, a small glimpse of which can obtained on (CLR contributor) Robert Archambeau’s blog, when having made the unfortunate suggestion that some consciouness-raising-in-the-community might have the effect of getting a Seamus Heaney reader to read a bit of Tom Raworth, which would after all be a good thing, Keston Sutherland pounces faster than a Proletkultist reproving a less ideologically sound comrade at a Comintern meeting on town sanitation to point out that, no it wouldn’t, Heaney being a running dog of international capitalism (‘by this point practically an armrest of the state apparatus’), though Sutherland also rejects the ‘weird vignette of cults, sects, mysteries, conspiracies, messianism, contrived suffering, programmatic self-exclusion, etc’ he found in Kent Johnson’s characterisation of recent British poetry recently over on Digital Emunction (‘If anyone’s obnubilated in incense and ectoplasm it’s people like Fiona Sampson, the editor of the once again wretchedly conservative and dull Poetry Review’). Would there were world and time enough to do justice to these epic struggles of our time but, can you believe it, there aren’t.

Among the other noteworthy things in CLR are an opening poem, ‘Patridges’, by Helen Macdonald, whose Shaler’s Fish, let me repeat myself here, remains one of the best book of British poetry of recent times. I also recently read and can recommend her Reaktion Press book on the falcon, and note from the back of the mag that she lives in Cambridge ‘with her gyrfalcon Mabel’. ‘Partridges’ ends:

You can whisper birds for as many times as you like
but they are mute et svelte, et primaries wet as palms

alulas wet as thumbs, lovers of beets and ground.
How many those walked alfalfa. Toadflax and hairy beeds
weak foci for the dispossessed. If I could plant plover
in the sky. Or shake a westerly with landrails down.
And all its invented ghosts. And for all its clouds.
They run along the lines as tiny soldiers
all wintry & humane.

{Ends}

She also contribute a prose piece, ‘Big Trouble in Little Shelford’.

Peter Riley presents some poems by ‘Ray Crump’, who J.C. at the TLS seems to think was a kind of Fenland Ern Malley, though for non-devotees of this kind of thing ‘How would they tell the difference?’ would seem an obvious follow-up question. From a ‘real’ Cambridge I mean, whatever that might be.

Suffice to say, then, that I found that the Crump poems perfectly readable, nay lucid. (perhaps that’s why he had to leave Cambridge?):

Flint in long
grass. Fracturing, cracks
like the death of a bird. Blood
edge echoes chorus
of the hedge. Stubmling down
a damp lime slope. Roadside
littered with flint stone. Flint
and a black feather.

{Ends}

There’ also John Hall on Douglas Oliver, Christina Macleish on Nigel Wheale and R.F. Langley, and a meaty essay by Stefan Collini, among much more. Subscription details on the website.

I recommend this fascinating new journal.

On Ilkley Moor Bar T'At

Bittern-Worship (Last Word)

Positively my last word in bittern-worship. For now.

Plus a night-parrot (next page), close cousin of the kakapo, as glimpsed over the weekend on Last Chance to See momentarily distracting Stephen Fry for his quest for wifi reception by attempting hilariously to have sex with zoologist Mark Carwardine’s head. I’m facebook friends with the bird in question, Sirocco Kakapo, he boasts embarrassingly.

And I’ll throw in a Tasmanian devil while I’m at it (next page after that). But first, a a picture of my good friend Sirocco, gettin’ down and dirty.

Conor O'Callaghan

Not for the first time, earlier typos fixed now.

Rereading Conor O’Callaghan ahead of his visit here next Tuesday, I am pleasantly reminded that he got to Hull before I did, in ‘Ships’, from Seatown, that key collection of late 90s Irish poetry:

Lately I find I can lie here
listing their grey ports in my head –
Hull and Bergen and Bilbao
and Riga – without drifting off.

There’s a lot of water and a lot of drifting in O’Callaghan’s work: a swimming pool on a headland, closed for the winter; a second pool, entered with a step ‘from the edge into the shallows / [that] makes no ripples on the white day that follows’; the river at night ‘where I am floating in darkness’; the blue of a computer screen as yet another swimming pool; the Plath-inflected (‘This is the sea, then, this great abeyance’) sea-missing anxieties of ‘Inland’; and the endless aqueous humours of Seatown, culminating in the masterful, slow windings of a Sunday drive around the Louth coast in ‘Slip’.

O’Callaghan was already quipping years back now about being tired of his party-piece poem ‘East’:

I know it’s not playing Gaelic, it’s simply not good enough,
to dismiss as someone else’s all that elemental Atlantic guff.
And to suggest everything’s foreign beyond the proverbial pale
would amount to a classic case of hitting the head on the nail.

But give me a dreary eastern town that isn’t vaguely romantic,
where moon and stars are lost in the lights of the greyhound track
and cheering comes to nothing and a flurry of misplaced bets
blanketing the stands at dawn is about as spiritual as it gets...

– so I can only imagine how he feels about it now. I well recall Mary O’Malley’s ‘The Loose Alexandrines’ and its pot-shot at ‘East’ (a poem that mentions Bray, let me say, to complete my auto-toponomical double-whammy) – condemning the poem for its implied defection from the Sturm und Drang of the Atlantic shoreline, not to mention its West-Brit cultural cringe (‘more Larkin, less Yeats, no Plath’), though as Venn diagrams go ‘West-Brit’ and ‘Dundalk’ will already have the more practised travellers among you up and down the Irish east coast guffawing into your pints of McArdles, or do I mean Harp.

Implicit in O’Malley’s flyting of ‘East’ is the perennial charge-in-waiting against anyone deemed to be versifying under the influence of Larkin – those lowered sights and patiently diminished expectations, even making allowances for a vaguely Mahonesque condiment of lurking apocalypse, very quiet apocalypse, somewhere in the background. But if this kind of critique suggests that O’Callaghan writes about the familiar world, what it misses is that he writes about a world we know not just well but too well. ‘It’s a view that seems too familiar’, ‘Landscape’ begins. The first line of the first poem in The History of Rain, begins ‘It must be a cliché to think...’, but it is plain wrong to imagine these poems are in the business of tying us down, imaginatively, to the this-and-only-this world of familiarity and boredom with which they play. Althusser’s hoary old theory of interpellation, whereby ideology shouts ‘Hey you!’ in the street and, in looking round, we recognise ourselves in its beaded-eye gaze, holds all too true for these poems that stage and restage the pacts we make with habit; but at the same time (let me insist) repeatedly circle with a kind of hypnotized fascination the moment of original choice, identification, and freedom, or was it surrender. ‘Landscape with Canal’:

So this, the means to an end, is chosen
as the landscape of a private fiction
where the tracks you make are all-too-well-known.
Though this time, since whatever will happen
will happen most likely in the open,
you set it in a derelict autumn
when all its symbolic fruit has fallen.
This action is yours alone to govern.
As long as you make the silence broken
by the presence on the bank of someone
that’s both anticipated and sudden.

But if Mary O’Malley sees Larkin, I see Edward Thomas:

Walking back the shortcut none the wiser
through the mill and the gates of the manor
there must always be some faceless other
on the towpath by the slick of water
who’ll call in the murk ahead, ‘Who goes there?’
and call once more when you don’t quite answer.

Or consider the title poem (one of them) of Seatown, the familiar bric-a-brac of its opening lists achieving epiphanic... not quite lift-off, more a muddy tidal flux and reflux of mixed feelings that are as good as it gets. No really, they are:

Point of no return for the cattle feed on the wharves
and the old shoreline and the windmill without sails
and time that keeps for no one, least of all ourselves.

May its name be said for as long as it could matter,
or, failing that, for as long as it takes the pilot
to negotiate the eight kilometres from this to open water.

One of my favourite poems from O’Callaghan’s third collection, Fiction, is ‘Shanty’, which jumps across the page as fitfully as the poet jumps radio station on the car stereo, its ‘ditty from home’ ‘flicked across three provinces /inland of any shore’, ‘with chorus enough to keep /the memory of a squeezebox company’. The poem loses a lot deprived of its proper visual format, but you’ll have to make do with lowly line-break indicators here, alas. O’Callaghan has lived in Philadelphia and North Carolina, and while his stylistic response to the US may be like Mao Tse Tsung’s response to the French revolution (it’s too early to say), there are signs of a loosening up, which may lead him further away again from the conservative caricature of him we find in ‘The Loose Alexandrines’. Adorno intoned about two torn halves that no longer made a whole, but the flick of a wrist across the line-break after ‘whole’ soon puts paid to even that much attempt at mirages of holism here. ‘the phrases don’t recall if they are /warm of half /measures become a whole /new frequency: the carriage lights of an island /stopped in black or a swell /between passing cars /there and there again /the air as yet unsung’. There is a large gap in the line between ‘there’ and ‘there again’ in that penultimate line, and it is in that absent ‘there’ that O’Callaghan is perhaps most at home.

Something similar is going on in the fine recent poem ‘Emergency’.

I mentioned ‘Slip’ earlier. I’ll finish with the slow release of its final letting-go, a moment I find among the single most satisfying in all the poetry written by my contemporaries:

There is just long enough
to saunter down
in shirt sleeves,

spill some shingle from
one hand to the other
and wonder about the patch

of charred cans and ash,
the gulls scattering,
the pristine life-ring.

If the glazed window
piercing the haze
is dusk in Port Erin.

To whistle strands
of an unplaced air,
then call it a day.

Before the haze swells.
Before the tide
comes around again.

{Ends}

And just in case the foregoing seemed like a slobbering pitch for him to buy me a drink on Tuesday, I now forfeit all the credit I have just earned by dredging up from the hard-drive of history the following picture, from a Leinster Leader of 1997. From left to right: Emmett Tinley, Bill Tinley, a turtleneck-wearing (for shame) DW, Conor O’Callaghan.

till better flounder

bail bail till better
founder

So runs an uncollected late poem included in the new Beckett Selected Poems 1930-1989. What the notes to this edition don’t tell you, however, is that the poem began as Beckett’s attempt to write an advertising slogan for a charity that helped the partially sighted:

Braille Braille till better
blinder

A second draft played on Beckett’s love of a certain Belgian singer-songwriter, who he felt deserved more airplay on French radio:

Brel Brel till better
blander

While another again recorded his impressions of the fish suppers he scoffed on a trip to Hull:

brill brill till better
flounder

‘till battered flounder’ even, perhaps. Any other suggestions? Go on, you know you want to.

Zen

A Zen puzzler for you. In addition to the Clark and Price titles noted two posts down, Carcanet have brought out A Century of Poetry Review, a celebratory volume edited by current editor Fiona Sampson. As is well known, Poetry Review has known its share of spin-cycle lurchings now in this direction, now in that, dawdling along for thirty-five years (until 1947) under the shamelessly middlebrow Galloway Kyle, then cutting up rough in the much-mythologized lustrum of Eric Mottram’s tenure, from 1972 to 1977, and so on and so on. But my point is this. Adverting to the self-imposed exile from ‘page poetry’ of a second generation of performance poets, heirs to Linton Kwesi Johnson, Grace Nichols and Benjamin Zepheniah, Sampson comments: ‘While the Review records this shift too, it must often do so by omissions and silences.’ In what sense can we record something ‘by omissions and silences’? Examples, anyone?

Apologies for all the typos in this morning’s posts, by the way. Now fixed.

'As One Would Turn to Nod Good-Bye to La Rochefoucauld...'

Reading Peter Robinson’s book on the train to Reading, I found myself scribbling the following paltry attempts at aphorisms of my own:

No I’m not in the mood, I might snap, woken from a light sleep. And I was having such a nice dream about having sex with you too!

A memory of one small thing, at least, that seemed to give her pleasure: ‘So X is your girlfriend?’, an Irish writer once asked, to which I countered, ‘No, I’m her boyfriend.’

I need to see you again, one last time. But then again perhaps I’d rather not, since if I was being truthful I wouldn’t need to see you again after that, which would be a shame, or I’d decide I needed to see you another last time, which would be just embarrassing. If only we’d stayed together, I tell myself, then I wouldn’t need to see you at all!

To the Paparazzi of the Soul

I was wondering aloud the other week about the fine line being negotiated between apparent and actual inconsequentiality in the closing sequence of Vona Groarke’s Spindrift. Perhaps inconsequentiality is the wrong word, more a principled abstention from ornamentation and a no logo rebuff to personality as poetic product-placement.

Thomas A. Clark’s The Hundred Thousand Places falls into much the same category. It is a book-length sequence devoted to the landscape of the Scottish east coast around Pittenweem, entirely innocent of punctuation and painting in primary elemental colours of time and space:

once again
for the first time
morning

[...]

a sea mist closing
every distance
cliffs falling away
from the edge of a world
only half accomplished

listen
feel your way out
into what might
wave or rock
take form

[...]

you are not sure

there where you hover
over yourself
stay there

Lapwings call to the poet to confuse him. When he departs ‘brightness /takes your place’. All is throughther, in Hopkins’ word, meshing and merging into something else: ‘What you see /you will become’. Steven Gerrard (cracker of a goal against Hull City at the weekend, eh) once expressed his dissatisfaction with a poor performance by saying ‘We’re a long way from where we are’, an insight whose philosophical depths pay off here when Clark stumbles on the ‘continual revelation’ that ‘you are not where you are’.

This is rewarding work, and without being in the least obscure or knotted nevertheless seems to me as far from the guileful, irony-laced colloquial register of Armitage or Duffy as any amount of Keston Sutherland. Consequences of this? Are these poems small standing stones in a Scottish field, best left where they are, or are there legs in this style, for its readers? Suggestions, please.

By the same post comes Richard Price’s Rays, which makes three collections in four years now after Lucky Day and Greenfields in 2005 and 07. I’m pleased to see Price’s work from Lute Variations (Rack) and Earliest Spring Yet (Landfill) collected here, but the alphabet poems of ‘little but often’ are something else again, with their tickling rhymes and abecedary zest:

absolute beginner,
a little shy

asked directions –
so did I

[...]

blame the books, blame the bees

blame the feathered creatures, the boyish features,
the emblem on the tree –

blame me

[...]

course you can,
daily and late at night –

any time and many the time
is perfectly alright

{Ends}

These are fantastic poems of love and desire. Is Richard Price the best Scottish poet of recent years? I should think so.

It’s very easy, reading aphorisms, to imagine all that genre’s historical practitioners sitting round the same table arguing. In which case someone has just made room for Peter Robinson, whose Spirits of the Stair (Shearsman) is an agreeable addition to company. Ah, the structural grammar of the aphorism. The truth-is-in-the-exactly-opposite-place-from-where-you-think-it-is aphorism:

‘One way to avoid ending up like your parents is consciously to imitate them.’

The semi-colon d’adieu, dispatching a sentence as briskly as an over-attentive waiter being waved away:

‘Good poems resolve emotions; bad ones provoke them.’

The fiat veritas definition:

‘An aphorism is a well-used dishcloth waiting to be wrung out.’

Much wistfulness on the subject of pobiz:

‘Self-promoting authors must be volunteering to become canon-fodder.’

Homeopathic doses of return-to-the-scene-of-the-crime reflections on a previous marriage:

‘Back in Cambridge, years ago, some people would sometimes refer to my then wife and I as an ideal couple. I should have known from their use of that word there was something dreadfully wrong... and not only with us.’

Age-of-Muldoon ‘itself’-construction-sponsored quasi-prose poems:

‘An Italian summer: every postage stamp of beach jam-packed with shame taking a vacation from itself.’

The wan smile, fading, fading:

‘For a dedication: “To the paparazzi of the soul.”’

I recommend these books.

Valparaiso

A ship set out from Valparaiso,
slipping its moorings in the bay
and taking as it went the kingdom
of the sun, the days of glory.

‘Abandon me’, she said, ‘and journey
to a place of clouds and fog,
forsake the blue slopes of the Andes
for a dark and rain-kissed city.’

I was young and off I went,
desperate days, of youth foresworn,
when I still believed no poems
were mine to sing, no yarns to tell.

I took that ship across the sea,
under sails that masked the sun
and threw their shadow on the dark
and high among the paltry stars.

One day I’ll return there though,
and see again that far white city
under the hill by a peaceful sea.
Dear God, I almost still believe it.

This is a reverse translation, I should explain, of a poem that will be familiar to generations of Irish schoolchildren – An t-Athair Pádraig de Brún’s ‘Do Tháinig Long ó Valparaiso’.

And now I’m nipping down the country for a Beckett shindig. Apologies for sparsity of prose posts of late and more on my return.

Oppozble Tumbz Wil Open Buke in... 3, Twelfty, 2, 1 Milyun Yeerz

Oblivia Revisited

Herr Neumann, unable
to find an Aryan bride
these past ten years,

reconciles himself to a helpmeet
of ‘suntanned’ complexion.

‘Deutschland über alles!’
he roars, downing his Bock,

but stares blankly when
I mention schnitzel and bratwurst.

Macaw droppings profane
his only 78,
a Fürtwangler Beethoven Seven.

One day he too
will hear Wagner, he tells me.
Perhaps I might whistle some now?

Parsifal, which is
to say The Pirates of Penzance,
and the cicadas join battle.

My good friend
Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald
hauled a steamboat over

a mountain to give
the jungle its opera;
I too will prove myself

a conquistador of the useless.
Amfortas lies wounded.
The realm of Klingsor

awaits me, and Kundry the witch.
‘I am the very model of
a modern major general...’

Herr Neumann wipes
the tears from his eyes.
‘Ach so!’

Fête Galante

Isosceles formations of hooligan ballerinas
improvise folderols on the harp to a chorus
of four-letter words. Even the headmistress
sees how well the party is going:

the glasses smashed,
a thrilling bocage of divots
where once the croquet lawn
kept itself pinned to the ground.

The tortoise permits himself to be fondled,
shyly at first, but make no mistake.
Did I (retching noise) put what
in the lemonade? I certainly did.

Looking glass because but for, rabbit hole
because fastest way between here and there,
Mme Verlaine’s heels in the air because
if only, which is to say not tonight, not ever.

The little fat girl with terrible skin gets sick
in her hand and opening it releases
a butterfly that flops back to earth
and touching it sticks to and drowns in the puke.

The Swimming Pool at Night

Until morning, I thought, there is no water.
There is water. There are spiders
and sticking plasters, the flaked skin

of verrucas shed and to come,
and the chlorine haze of a light-sleeping
swimmer turning over miles away

in search of the perfect stroke,
of the far window of blue over midnight’s
last, gulped deep breath

bubbling slowly towards dawn.

Falsely Imprisoned Liverpool Fan Describes 'Living Hell' of Early-Season Defeats to Spurs, Villa, Sale of Xabi Alonso, Life in Bulgarian Prison

Justin the Great

Promising young Irish poet Justin Quinn has a poem in this week’s New Yorker. Evidently a name to look out for, in future.

The discerning will notice an allusion to the work of Evan Rail.

Self-Referentiality as Dickhead Moment

I was reading Martin Amis’s Money the other week, when I came to the bit when the novel’s repellent protagonist meets a writer called Martin Amis and thought: this novel has just reached its dickhead tipping-point. This is not Pirandello, this is not Flann O’Brien, I’m not finding the satire funny anyway. This is a dickhead moment.

I mention this because of J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, if it is a novel, Summertime, which investigates the life and writings of a deceased South African writer called Coetzee, complete with awkward interviews with old girlfriends remembering what a priggish wet blanket and all-round human failure he was. Is it a bluff (i.e., this is a novel, not a memoir, so the real Coetzee is of course nothing like that)? A double-bluff (no he really is like that, and wants to beat his breast about it in public, while simultaneously getting us to admire his courage for doing so)? A triple bluff, if anyone can suggest what that might entail? Coetzee’s last two books, Slow Man and Diary of a Bad Year, were not good books, by his or anyone else’s standards. His writing slips ever further into the substitution of notes and jottings for anything merely finished, the limp handshake of his perfunctory adjectives snubbing their nouns, while his studiedly ornery protagonists coat themselves ever further in the anti-glamour that now trails Coetzee, or even ‘Coetzee’’s every mention in the press. So while, on the face of it, Coetzee could not be more different from, of all people, Martin Amis, what are the shenanigans of Summertime if not his own version of the self-referential dickhead moment?

Other examples, dickheaded or not. Peter Reading stepping into his 5x5x5x5x5, in square brackets, I don’t consider a dickhead moment. The humour and craziness save it from that.

This guy:

Combine a far-seeing industrialist,
With an Islamic fundamentalist.
With an Italian premier who doesn’t take bribes.
With a pharmaceuticals CEO who loves to spread disease.
Put them on a 916.

And you get Fred Seidel.

{Ends}

Pleading immunity as I do to the Seidelmania currently doing the rounds, I would have to say guilty. Dickhead moment.

Brecht’s ‘Of Poor BB’ (‘I, Bertolt Brecht, came out of the black forests...’)? Not guilty, obviously. The poor is far too moving and human for that.

Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock? Roth’s heroes have such a gift for being dickheads, anyway, that maybe his taking of it to the exponential level in this novel has the saving grace of reducing the whole project to a glorious fiasco. An open verdict, then.

So it doesn’t seem to be self-referentiality per se that trips the dickhead switch, for me. It’s the particular form of preening, whether exhibitionist or self-disguising (Coetzee seems to me a preening camouflage artist) that makes the difference. Could this be this my much-repressed inner puritan rising to the surface? Man the harpoons.

Leave your own examples of self-referentiality that are or aren’t dickhead moments in the comments, if you want, with or without explanations, also if you want. Or not, if you don’t.

Le hibou, c'est moi

The Hunt in the Forest

John Burnside a-huntin’ goes.

Eyesight

against the lucifer strike
of a kingfisher’s
like any other
kingfisher’s
gold and blue

for one moment
remarkable thing
a grey reedpit
in dull rain
came into view

{Ends}

Spotted today, in Far Ings, south bank of the Humber. My first kingfisher since Mount Usher Gardens, Ashford, County Wicklow, maybe five years ago now.

Accommodation Theory

‘Weugheughtleh.’ That’s either the sound of me revisiting the ten pints of Schlenkerla and the curry I had afterwards last night or, just maybe, the sound of me booking a taxi on the phone, which needless to say I do every time I wish to leave the house. I do not speak like this, let me rush to insist, but if there’s one thing I get weary of living in England it’s people not being able to follow my accent. And where my name is concerned, all the vowels and consonants are different in Yorkshire from their Hiberno-English equivalents (another example: the word ‘hurt’ in a Hull accent comes out as ‘eh-UH-eh’: you see what I’m up against here). So I resort to what linguists call accommodation theory. But only when giving my name on the phone. Let them lump it the rest of the time, say I.

This by way of a preamble to a strange cultural version of the same thing I found in an essay of John Millington Synge’s I wasn’t previously aware of, ‘An Autumn Night in the Hills’, available in Nicholas Grene’s edition of his Travelling Ireland: Essays 1898-1908, most handsomely produced by Lilliput Press. Parts of the landscape with a weakness for eating dogs are always a nuisance, but I was thrilled to learn that Lough Nahanagan in Co. Wicklow, whose name means ‘lake of the monsters’ in Irish, has just such a proclivity. As the young girl in Synge’s essay describes it: ‘There do be queer things them nights out on the mountains and in the lakes among them. I was reared beyond in the valley where the mines used to be, in the valley of the Lough Nahanagan, and it’s many a queer story I’ve heard of the spirit does be in that lake.’ She then tells the tale of a man whose dog jumps in the water for a swim and ‘before the word was out of his mouth the dog went down out of their sight, and the inside out of him came up on the top of the water.’

I assume Wicklow County Council will be opening a dog recycling facility there any day now. But listen to how Synge talks to the women: ‘I’m afraid it’s a lot of trouble I’m giving you (...) and you busy, with no men in the place.’ Come again? Does anyone believe, whatever about the young girl, that Synge himself talked like that? One of the great unspokens in much of his prose is what the country people must really think of him as an interloping Anglo-Irishman, as in the mysterious moment at the start of The Aran Islands when a man in Inishmore harbour claims to recognise him and Synge says nothing (the man is thinking of Synge’s uncle, who had been Church of Ireland rector on the islands, a post that seems to have chiefly involved discharging a shotgun at anyone who strayed into his fishing waters). And while Synge or some proxy for him doesn’t feature in his plays, we are always aware of the author as an eavesdropper figure, as described in his foreword to the Playboy, listening to this alien culture and its servant girls through a crack in the hotel floorboards. But when he starts talking as he does in ‘An Autumn Night in the Hills’ he oversteps the mark and gives the game away. It can’t helping seeming an ‘accommodation’ too far. No wonder the essay was omitted from in In Wicklow and West Kerry in 1912.

Another interesting aspect of the essays, we learn from Grene’s edition, is that while Synge describes himself as meeting his old beggars and wanderers in Aughavannagh, Glenmalure and other evocatively named corners of Co. Wicklow on his own, he was in fact frequently in company with his family. But that would give an entirely different complexion to the encounter, would it not: ‘Old Man of the Hills, sour-faced rent-grabbing old battleaxe, otherwise mother; mother, unwashed indigene yahoo, otherwise Old Man of the Hills’. No John Synge, solitary man of mystery it was, perforce.

Here’s a Wicklow poem of Synge’s to end, and one I never fail to recite to myself as I thrash around in the heather on Djouce, Lugduff or wherever. There’s no accommodating that, let me tell you:

Still south I went and west and south again,
Through Wicklow from the morning till the night,
And far from cities, and the sights of men,
Lived with the sunshine, and the moon’s delight.

I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds,
The grey and wintry sides of many glens,
And did but half remember human words,
In converse with the mountains, moors, and fens.

{Ends}

And by way of a final footnote on whether or not anyone ‘talks like that’, I recently asked a man in Glendalough whether the red deer in the valley ever came into his back garden, to which he replied: ‘Sure amn’t I ate out of it by the bastes!’ But maybe he thought I was a visiting German or Norwegian Celticist and had decided to pull my leg.