PrayingSnow Water by Michael Longley; These Days by Leontia FlynnReview by: Peter DenmanThe Irish Review (1986-), No. 33, Global Ireland (Spring, 2005), pp. 141-144Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29736281 .

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verisimilitude, is purely fictional, while McNamee, whose sense of truth is so much

more occult, pursues his quest for it through a text which is constructed from such

facts as are available, albeit in a highly stylised version. At one point Avery consults

David McKittrick et als Lost Lives but if we follow him into its pages we will not

find the April 1976 murders that Larry fears he has committed. McNamee makes no

reference to Lost Lives but the facts on which The Ultras is founded can be tracked

through that work. Despite their many differences, of style, tone, content and motive,

both novels can be thought of, like Lost Lives, as memorial works not simply because

they seek to remember the past but more because they recognise the damage

incurred by forgetting or trying to forget it.

EAMONN HUGHES

Praying

Snow Water, Michael Longley, Cape, London, 2004. 0 224 07257 9. ?8.00.

These Days, Leontia Flynn, Cape, London, 2004. 0 224 07197 1. ?8.00.

Snow Water is the fourth of Michael Longley s late collections, a series inaugurated with Gorse Fires and continued with The Ghost Orchid and The Weather inJapan.The poems in these books display

a continuity of tone and manner. A reader knows

what to expect: short poems, and long sentences that play lyric form against prose

sense. Although formally scrupulous, at times the poems appeal to the construing

eye as much as to the ear for their rhythm and shape. The resulting edgy balance

between these two aspects is what gives Longley s poems their characteristic sway,

along with the miniaturist's observed detail of a habitat and its inhabitants.

By now

Longley has built up a repertoire of subject matter. It encompasses the

natural world along the shoreline of a part of west Mayo squeezed between the

Atlantic and Mweelrea mountain; evocations of violence and war, roving over the

trenches of the Great War, the streets and townlands of Northern Ireland, and the

battlefields of Homeric epic; and poetic postcards from travels in America or Asia.

The title of this collection seems to come from one of the last named, a poem that

catalogues varieties of tea ('Eyebrows of Longevity','Silver Needles') requested for

the celebration of the poet's sixtieth birthday and which are best brewed with snow

water. But tucked away at the back of the book, after a page of'Notes & Acknowl?

edgements', is a three-line fragmentary tailpiece:

feathers on water

a snowfall of swans

snow water.

A true epigraph, written and placed after all the other matter, this recruits snow

water as a metaphor while also reminding us that Longley is a bit of a twitcher

- or

ornithologist, as he would probably prefer.

DENMAN, 'Praying', Irish Review 33 (2005) 141

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WH Auden remarked 'Whenever a man so concentrates his attention -

be it on a

landscape or a poem or a geometrical problem

or an idol or the True God ?

that he

completely forgets his own ego and desires in listening to what the other has to say to him, he is praying.'This goes part of the way to explain Longley's poems, if not all

the way to prayer. But while the ego may be suppressed, and the eye concentrates on

observation, there is less sense of a listening two-way relationship. Instead there is the

stance of the birdwatcher (twelve of the poems have birds in their titles) and, in the

poems about painting and friendship, a

reaching out to the experiential world, as

greedy and affectionate and demanding as the reach of a lover.

Many of the poems are sonnets or variations on the form. The sonnet is a good

length for Longley; it provides him with a form for what are his longer poems. The

variations involve breaking the sonnet into its component parts: quatrain, couplet,

sestets and tercets, sometimes numbering them to emphasise that the poem is writ?

ten and should be read in smaller units. He can write a half sonnet (four lines plus

three), or a sonnet and a half. The longest poem in the book is made up of five son?

net length stanzas.

In their fidelity to observed experience, Longley's poems resemble the early

work of Robert Bly - before the emergence of Iron John and its concomitant

posturing. Bly s poems from his first collection, The Silence of the Snowy Fields

(probably best known on this side of the Atlantic through the 1960s Penguin Con?

temporary American Poetry anthology) show something of the same dwelling on

chosen details of the visible world, especially on the landscape in large or in little.

These details gather significance simply through being named. It is a poetry that

goes beyond the imagism of proto-modernism, and not just because the poems are

more architectonically elaborated than they would be in the imagist mode. Imag? ism tends towards the atemporal, arresting its objects in order to remove them

from the flux of time. In Longley (as in early Bly) time is nearly always of the

essence, either on a historical or on a human scale. Here is 'Pine Marten' in its

entirety:

That stuffed pine marten in the hotel corridor

Ended up on all fours in nineteen-thirteen

And now is making it across No Man's Land where

A patrol of gamekeepers keeps missing him.

And here are some opening lines of poems in the collection: 'We are both in our

sixties now, or bodies' ('Aschy'); 'Why, my dear octogenarian Jewish friend' ('Two

Skunks');'Decades ago you showed me marsh marigolds' ('Marsh Marigolds');'No

one has ever lived a luckier life than you, /Achilles' ('Interview'); and the final

poem in the book, 'Leaves', begins 'Is this my final phase?'. It is noticeable that a

number of the friendship poems are elegiac. Snow water might, in the end, be a

metaphor for anything destined to lose its form and flow away. These Days is the first collection from Leontia Flynn.Time, albeit under a different

aspect, is also to the fore here, as the title indicates. The opening lines of the first two

poems in her book run 'Five years out of school . . .' and 'On my 24th birthday'.

142 DENMAN, 'Praying', Irish Review 33 (2005)

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Other poems also allude to dates and to her own age: 'I was sixteen when I met Sea

mus Heaney ..

.'/July the tenth, 1999

Like Michael Longley, she is published by Cape; the dust jacket carries an

encomium from Longley, and one can see some resemblances. 'By My Skin' is

structured around a list or catalogue of the titles of songs her father sung, very

much in the Longley manner and about a Longley subject. But whereas Longley will suggest the possibility at least of a salvific and transcendental permanence

attaching to the objects he names, Flynn fastens on contingencies. There is little

promise of consolation; her world is a world of temporality rather than tempering,

of transience rather than transcendence.

Last night they dreamt of her again,

My falafel-cooking predecessor.

Of how she would have the flat hysterical,

When in her opulent cups, with the one about the three men,

The three men, I think, and the greyhound.

('The Second Mrs de Winter')

The world evoked is the unpropertied urban fluidity of shared flats and shifting

relationships lived out in that ever-extending interval before the rhythms of a career

and its ballast settles on the soul. This refusal of stability carries over into the form

of the poems. There are five poems scattered across the collection each bearing the

same undifferentiated title of'Without Me'. These are poems of loss, starting from

the flipside of an implicit 'without you'. There are also two separate poems entitled

'It's a Wonderful Life'.

Flynn enjoys unstitching the language, as in 'Doyne':

I let my tongue from your cheek for just long enough to have you practising your Doyne, Soyth Doyne, Soyth

?

till my eyes rolled up, two zeros in 2000.

The translation of the eyes into the zeros in the date forces attention to the materi?

ality of print, a stratagem also employed in 'Bed Poem':

bed, the word, is almost a child's

picture poem, a hieroglyph spelling itself,

the stroke of the b forming a bedpost on one side

and the stroke of the d the bedpost on the other.

This move is taken to its extreme in 'Perl Poem', partly written in Perl program?

ming language: "while( <FHND> ){s/ \x0a/ \ x0d\x0a/g; push( @m_arr,

Hio:parse( $_) ); )'.This is not a poem likely to feature at the poet's readings, one

imagines, but it does offer some insights

on the nature of poetry as a performative

language.

Flynn writes with a style that is offhand. The style is contrived to match the

unrooted life that she is writing about. (Although there is indeed a sestina in among the four dozen other poems, just to show that she can turn her hand to that kind of

DENMAN, 'Praying', Irish Review 33 (2005) 143

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thing if required.) But what is eye-catching about this collection is not so much the

exploration of a contemporary generational condition; it is the refusal to adopt an

accepted and established language and style in which to do it. The loose, ostensibly relaxed rhythm and lexicon run counter to the frequent anxiety and occasional

exuberance that feed these poems. This gives a raw freshness to the writing, which

is its most engaging quality. Her poems are a long way from the carefully construct?

ed and construable poems of Longley; they do not offer to make sense of or impose

shape on

experience through balanced form. Any balance that they offer comes

from the search for a discipline and style that correspond somehow to the flow of

experience that runs through these days.

PETER DENMAN

Typhoid Marys Gordon Bigelow. Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ire?

land. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0 521 82848 1, 229 pp.

?45 hbk.

Peter Gray (ed.). Victorias Ireland? Irishness and Britishness, 1837? 1901. Dublin: Four

Courts Press, 2004. ISBN 1 85182 758 7,192 pp. 55, ?50 hbk.

In Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland, an out?

standing interdisciplinary work, at once penetrating and imaginative, Gordon

Bigelow studies the interface between culture and economic discourse. In terms of

neoclassical economics not only the economy but also society is a marketplace,

with individual consumers calculating their felicity, maximising their utility. Under

this dispensation the world consists entirely of consumers. According to Bigelow,

the Great Famine challenged the established theory of capitalism while popular fic?

tion and journalism engaged in a critique of market society. He studies the social

fiction of the day such as Dickens s Bleak House and Gaskell's industrial novels, Mary Barton and North and South as well as Cranford, and a range of commentaries on the

Irish economy itself. These varied works apply romantic aesthetics and politics to

the problems of the marketplace, providing the foundation for a new theory of cap?

italism based on the desires of the individual consumer. Though the Romantic

humanistic critique of political economy, associated with such names as Carlyle,

Ruskin, and Dickens, is well-known, Bigelow startlingly argues that political econ?

omy reconfigured itself, cunningly incorporating its romantic adversary. While the

new discipline of'economics' claimed scientific objectivity and disavowed its ideo?

logical past, its utilitarianism concealed its debt to Romanticism, its Benthamism

occluded its Coleridgean lineage. Veblen remarked that the opportunity cost of the increased scientificization of

political economy was a concomitant decline in its 'metaphysical charm'. It is

144 F0LEY, 'Typhoid Marys', Irish Review 33 (2005)

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