Ireland and Scotland: Colonial Legacies and National Identities || Not so Poetically Conservative

Not so Poetically ConservativeCollected Poems by Derek Mahon; Selected Poems by Michael Longley; The Weather in Japanby Michael LongleyReview by: John KerriganThe Irish Review (1986-), No. 28, Ireland and Scotland: Colonial Legacies and National Identities(Winter, 2001), pp. 167-172Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29736057 .

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his position, however, make her work in this one respect seem like an exercise in

the critical subjunctive. Again, the inclusion of a chapter

on Robert Graves as an

Irish poet of the Great War seems odd, after all. While Graves presents himself, occa?

sionally, under an Irish aspect, and more frequently in his war-forged identity as

writer, these two features do not seem to combine in any inevitable way in his

work. In the last chapter of the first part, however, 'Louis MacNeice: Between Two

Wars', the subject begins to shift into the realm of recollection that displays Brearton's special, indeed exceptional, strength; and it provides

as such a seamless

transition to her second part. All in all, her work presents an esssential contribution

to the developing understanding of the Great War in the literary and political

history of Ireland.

VINCENT SHERRY

Not So Poetically Conservative

Derek Mahon, Collected Poems. Oldcastle: Gallery Books, 1999. ISBN 1-85235

256-6-9; 1-85235-255-8. Stg. ?25.00 hbk; Stg. ?13.95 pbk.

Michael Longley, Selected Poems. London: Jonathan Cape, 1998. ISBN 0-224

05035-4. Stg. ?8.00 pbk.

Michael Longley, The Weather infapan. London: Jonathan Cape, 2000. ISBN 0-224

06043-0. Stg. ?8.00 pbk.

The publication of any one of these books would be an event; their appearance so

close together constitutes a high point in Irish poetry. Here are two major figures,

from rather similar Protestant Belfast backgrounds, showing how poetry can grow

through personal trauma and the experience of sectarian conflict. Literary fashion

has moved on; both now write ?

in Mahon's case with an artful old-fogeyishness ?

out of sensibilities formed in the sixties. But you can turn to this work after reading

Muldoon or Armitage or

Duhig and be as taken by its responsiveness to the

moment as by its indurated integrity.

The books have not been much thought about together. Longley, by no means a

self-promoter, got some attention and presumably new readers when The Weather in

fapan won the Hawthornden andT.S. Eliot Prizes, and he was awarded the Queen's

Gold Medal for Poetry - a well-deserved gong but symbolically appropriate too,

given the significance in his work of the medals his father won in war service and

his hope that the tokens of conflict should give way to the laurels of peace. Derek

Mahon's Collected Poems, on the other hand, slipped out with hardly a ripple, the

author, it is rumoured, seeking no reviews. Yet this reception, or lack of it, also

answered to something ?

a certain estrangement ?

in the verse. A poet so haunted

by blank paper and the transience of language ('Ovid in Tomis', 'Heraclitus on

Rivers') might well be fascinated by not being read.

KERRIGAN, 'Not So Poetically Conservative', Irish Review 28 (2001) 167



Symptomatically, the Collected opens with 'Spring in Belfast', a lyric that presents

the young Mahon 'Walking among my own', and concludes:

One part of my mind must learn to know its place.

The things that happen in the kitchen houses

And echoing back streets of this desperate city

Should engage more than my casual interest,

Exact more interest than my casual pity.

To be among your own is not quite to be with or of them; and if part of the mind

must learn (i.e. against the grain), other parts are destined or determined to remain

detached. Wherever the poem's audience is, it doesn't seem to be posited in the

back streets of Belfast.

One reader was envisaged. In Mahon's Poems 1962?1978, the same

lyric, called

'The Spring Vacation', is dedicated 'for Michael Longley'. This is just one trace of

the deep connections that run between these contemporaries. Technically, it is sug?

gestive that the piece is written in the five-line, unrhymed stanzas that Longley

would later favour. And it would certainly be wrong to assume that the changes

imply a

repudiation. Mahon ? an obsessive reviser

? is quick to prune dedications

and epigraphs in this Collected. Removing 'for Michael Longley' increases the

impression of isolation, an effect that becomes less obtrusive when Mahon address?

es big themes in such texts as 'A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford', but which persists even in the ostensibly gregarious and reminiscent later poems, limiting the depth of

Mahon's involvement with the ordinary ? an obvious contrast with Longley

?

while giving him an attractive empathy with marginal people and things (Gypsies, terrorists on the run, industrial detritus).

Both poets had mid-life crises. Longley wrote little during the 1980s, then picked up again in Gorse Fires (1991) with his tonal range extended (partly by Homer) and

his unaffected precision intact. Mahon's output was steady, but, during the early

nineties, he lurched from stanzaic writing into a long-lined loquacity. The change

was deplored by many, but the poet had for the moment exhausted his Horatian

mode, and the subject-matter and speech-styles pressed on him by America, plus the

mess he got into with alcohol, demanded silence or risk. To reread The Hudson Letter

(1995) and The Yellow Book (1997) as they appear in the Collected is to spot all sorts of

thematic continuities with the early work and to notice how loose-limbed and close

to prose poetry much of the stanzaic work had been. Yet the contrast in diction

remains. Instead of a limpid transparency, the recent verse is thick with graffiti, catch

phrases, brand names, video trash. At times it all seems too willed, more decorative

than hectic, but any failure to internalize what the writing gamely takes on is for the

most part rationalized by the aesthetic disengagement which, incipient in 'Spring in

Belfast', becomes full-blown attitudinizing in The Yellow Book. This is Mahon in

Wildean guise, observing with witty insouciance our techno-decadence.

Longley has talked about trying to achieve inevitability in poems, of giving the

impression that what gets written was preordained. Mahon's formalism is more

provisional. What The Hudson Letter quotes from Jack B. Yeats on painting -

168 KERRIGAN, 'Not So Poetically Conservative', Irish Review 28 (2001)



'nothing is ever "done"' ?

might be applied to the poet, especially since the line

itself is cut from the Collected. A sequence such as 'Light Music', already rewritten

for Poems and the Selected Poems (1990), is now an archive of cuts and interpola?

tions, awaiting the variorum edition. Even classics are not safe. 'The Globe in

North Carolina' suffers a change in title and loses a number of stanzas. It isn't all

deletion. 'Oh, mile-high sex is fine', Mahon justly inserts at one point, 'but does it

excuse / monopoly capitalism and global image control?' Cuts are more usual,

however, often to restrain luxuriant endings.The cosmic conclusion of'A Garage in

Co. Cork' is only the most disconcerting victim of this policy.

Most of Mahon's changes seem

prompted by technical considerations, but one

adjustment is intriguingly doctrinal. Brooding on his alcohol problems in TheYellow

Book, he complains that psychiatrists want to make people happy by driving out the

demons of creativity. The Muses will not smile, he fears, without suffering and

extremism: 'No dope, no "Kubla Khan"; no schizophrenia,

no Chim?res . . . Do we

want the Renascence art-and-poison paradox / or a thousand years of chocolate

and cuckoo clocks?' In the Collected, he seems to recognize that these Romantic

destructive clich?s (echoes of The Third Man) most likely rationalize a desire to hit

the bottle again, and he substitutes the lines:

but now they have a cure for these psychoses as indeed they do for most social diseases

and, rich at last, we can forget our pain.

She says I'm done for if I drink again; so now, relieved of dangerous stimuli,

at peace with my plastic bottle of H20

and the slack strings of insouciance, I sit

with bronze Kavanagh on his canal-bank seat . . .

Yet Mahon did not easily abandon the thought that it is creative death to lose

touch with disaster. A broader version of the thesis drives a number of scintillant

passages late in the Collected. Affluence and po-mo inauthenticity have led to the

decline of art. We have given up 'the sublime', high tragedy and critical thought,

respect for 'the medium' and 'creative tension', in a flux of popular pleasure. 'Sad

old geezer' is one response that Mahon seems determined to provoke; he revels in

being bypassed, out of fashion (to the point of nostalgically reverting to rhymed stanzas at the end of the Collected), since that legitimates estrangement and its access

to truth. In The Hudson Letter, he quotes from Wilde, 'There is something vulgar in

all success; the greatest men fail, or seem to have failed', and though he cuts from

his Collected the thought that 'even perceived losers have sometimes won / for

there, of course, a different truth is known', the hope seems to keep him going as he

perfects the delicate art of being a winning loser.

In his prose memoir 'Trinity Days', Longley praises a 'Love Poem' by the student

Mahon -

Nerves sing and sing that the thin water

Is drawn in sand, the chill sea disinherits

Of all unfathomable movements his offspring,




? and contrasts it with a

juvenile piece of his own: 'I see in your eyes words big as

thunder / On your silent lips the small sound of roses . . . ' This is feeble, to be sure,

but at least he's looking at his partner and trying to work out what she thinks, not

being obscurely nihilistic about waves running up the beach. Mahon's description

of his young self in The Hudson Letter, 'morose -

worse, sinister -

in youth / a

frightful little shit, to tell the truth', is comically harsh (in the Collected 'worse, sin?

ister' is excised, whatever about telling the truth). But the attentiveness and

generosity of Longley's lines do point another way.

Thus while Mahon's Collected starts in a spirit of estrangement, Longley s Selected

opens with an epithalamion. It is followed by a love poem, a friendly piece about

many-husbanded Circe and, after a handful of other mythological lyrics, a 'Personal

Statement' that retains its dedication for Seamus Heaney '. From the outset there are

intimations of the reclusive, even eremitical sensibility that is so evident in The

Weather in Japan. 'The Corner of the Eye', for instance, is an exquisitely acute, nim?

ble set of bird-sightings (one of the big Longley subjects). But the social world is

never far away, and when, in 'Letter to Derek Mahon', Longley wanders through

Belfast, Mahon is not a detachable dedicatee but comes into the poem as compan?

ion: 'Two poetic conservatives / In the city of guns and long knives.'

For those who know Michael Longley only through his recent books, the most

surprising thing in the Selected is the abstracted, even ratiocinative manner, of his

earliest poems. The syntax is elaborate, and the formal ambition can't be missed in

the complex stanza patterns. But the diction seems to float away from the pressure

of occasion, all emotion processed into argument. In their Richard Wilbur-ish way,

the debut poems are impressive.Yet it's easy to see why 'A Personal Statement', with

its dedication to Heaney (whose own work at this time was so histrionically con?

crete), should ask 'My brain-child, help me find my own way back / To fire, air,

water, earth', and end: 'come, Mind, raise your sights ?

/ Believe my eyes'.

But if the quest was on to bring things into view, the poetry didn't become a

picture-box. Longley was

always sensitive to the dynamics of perception and

somatic fragility of the subject. In a poem such as 'Landscape', this carries no great

sense of danger:

I am clothed, unclothed

By racing cloud shadows,

Or else disintegrate

Like a hillside neighbour Erased by sea mist.

But in most of his post-Troubles poems ('Obsequies', for instance), disintegration is

more bizarrely drastic (the poet is chopped up in hospital, his eyes put in another's

head). Somewhere behind this lies the contingency of the self in Romantic tradi?

tion, but around it, all too plainly, is local evidence of vulnerability. 'When they

massacred the ten linen workers', Longley writes, over the page from 'Obsequies':

There fell on the road beside them spectacles,

Wallets, small change, and a set of dentures:

Blood, food particles, the bread, the wine . . .

170 KERRIGAN, 'Not So Poetically Conservative', Irish Review 28 (2001)



Many a Selected Poems gives a thin account of the poet's first decades, then shov?

els in recent work. Longley has been more even-handed ? as his consistent quality

permits ?

to the point of sacrificing a

large proportion of the haunting work in

Gorse Fires. There are some interesting reorderings of (especially early) poems to

create new juxtapositions; the intention has clearly been to make this book coher?

ent in its own terms, not the wreckage of a larger edifice. One of the pleasures of

reading even a Collected as worked over as Mahon's is that of seeing growth-points

that went nowhere and became dead ends. Longley purges his Selected of such

experiments; he includes nothing like 'The Rabbit' in The Weather in Japan, which

tries on some fancy dress from Ciaran Carson. He does, however, reproduce comic

and discursive pieces (often the first victims in a cull) and finds space for a hand?

somely long poem, 'River & Fountain', which remembers TCD and his formative

friendship with Derek Mahon.

Michael Longley is, on the one hand, the most scrupulously moving elegist of

the Troubles and, on the other, a nature poet whose subject is moths and feathers,

water that pulses and unravels, lit thistledown and whispering spindrift. It is a virtue

of this Selected that it encourages the reader to take him whole, to resist the specious

view of him as a pastoral poet distracted by atrocities. As the array of poems about

war and extermination across Europe in The Weather in Japan makes even more

apparent, he writes poignantly about delicate things because he sees them in the

shadow of disaster. This is 'Terezin' from Gorse Fires:

No room has ever been as silent as the room

Where hundreds of violins are hung in unison.

All credit to Cape Poetry for giving that short poem a whole page in the Selected, some measure of the blankness that surrounds it. The inward craft is impeccable,

'room' pre-emptying 'room', and 'violins' sounding with 'hundreds' and 'hung' in

the 'unison' which (refusing rhyme) runs into silence. Yet there is a moral vision

too: the suspended music of the lines creates a consoling coherence, gives an inti?

mation of ceremony. Would any other living poet have heard the silence so acutely?

The humane, sometimes grave but never severe quality of Longley's sensibility is

magnificently shown and developed in The Weather in Jap an. There is memorable

writing here about the First World War, translation from Irish and Latin, evocative

animal lyrics and pieces (more uneven) addressed to friends. These are not poems

to rush. Though nothing in them is obscure (beyond a few Ulster-Scots locutions,

glossed at the end of the book), they require of the reader the absorbed attention

that they so

frequently represent. At a few points Longley's urge to be simple

becomes, as it were, a mannerism, and one hankers after the showmanship of

Mahon. More often, though, he makes the everyday precious by avoiding precio?

sity. As in:

THE WEATHER IN JAPAN Makes bead curtains of the rain,

Of the mist a paper screen.




This complement, or antidote, to 'Terezin' is in some ways the ultimate Longley

poem about home (of which there are many). Where 'Terezin' affectingly fails to

rhyme, even the title here is drawn into a syntax and an acoustic patterning which

helps conjure domestic space. The fragility of the accommodation that the poet

finds in nature is yet another reminder of human vulnerability. The skill with which

he shapes it, on the page and into the ear, is one of the finest in modern poetry.

JOHN KERRIGAN

If Women Must Be Anything

Kathryn Kirkpatrick (ed.), Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identi?

ties. Dublin: Wolfhound, 2000. ISBN 0-86327-844-2. IR?25.00

Rita Ann Higgins, An Awful Racket. Newcastle on Tyne: Bloodaxe, 2001. ISBN

1-85224-563-8. Stg. ?6.95 pbk.

Kerry Hardie, Cry for the Hot Belly. Dublin: Gallery, 2000. ISBN 1-85235-265-5.

IR?6.95 pbk.

Catriona O'Reilly, The Nowhere Birds. Newcastle on Tyne: Bloodaxe, 2001. ISBN

1-85224-560-3. Stg. ?6.95 pbk.

The quotation from Eavan Boland's poem 'Story', 'I am writing / a woman out of

legend', which prefixes Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identities

may alert you to the kind of criticism in store, and for the most part, you'd be right.

There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with repossessing voices that have

been lost or suppressed. Arguably, there is also no real harm in acquiescing to the

narrative of a (women's) literary tradition in a provisional kind of way -

and, in her

introduction, Kirkpatrick answers Audre Lorde's old chestnut, about using the mas?

ter's tools to dismantle the master s house, with a less well-known one by Amy Ling

to the effect that it's all in how you wield the claw-hammer. What does, however,

make the bulk of Border Crossings such a dispiriting read is the terms in which this

new tradition is written. Despite the editor's welcome claim that her contributors

do not assume a static literary context into which women are to be placed, but

rather the discovery of a dialogue in which women have always spoken, this note is

not always sounded in what follows. In many of the essays there is too frequently

the assumption of a continuity between the writer and her fictional protagonist and

from there to a rhetoric of victimhood, marginalization, exclusion, displacement,

silence, disembodiment and defeat. Whatever the historical accuracy of this, a pro?

ject of repossession begun in the name of rescuing silenced voices which then

represents them only in terms of their defeat is starting to look like a strange one.

The book's critical apparatus is, for the most part, synopsis, explication and

historical investigation; the perspectives, even when the subjects become

172 FLYNN, If Women Must Be Anything', Irish Review 28 (2001)



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Ireland and Scotland: Colonial Legacies and National Identities || Not so Poetically Conservative