MAPPING IRELAND (ESSAYS ON SPACE AND PLACE IN CONTEMPORARY IRISH POETRY) 2 NICOLETA STANCA MAPPING IRELAND (ESSAYS ON SPACE AND PLACE IN CONTEMPORARY IRISH POETRY) 2nd revised and updated edition EDITURA UNIVERSITARÃ Bucureºti, 2014 3 Colecþia FILOLOGIE Redactor: Gheorghe Iovan Tehnoredactor: Ameluþa Viºan Coperta: Angelica Mãlãescu Editurã recunoscutã de Consiliul Naþional al Cercetãrii ªtiinþifice (C.N.C.S.) ºi inclusã de Consiliul Naþional de Atestare a Titlurilor, Diplomelor ºi Certificatelor Universitare (C.N.A.T.D.C.U.) în categoria editurilor de prestigiu recunoscut. Descrierea CIP a Bibliotecii Naþionale a României STANCA, NICOLETA Mapping Ireland : (essays on space and place in contemporary Irish poetry) / Nicoleta Stanca. - Ed. a 2-a, rev. - Bucureºti : Editura Universitarã, 2014 ISBN 978-606-28-0120-5 821.111(415).09 DOI: (Digital Object Identifier): 10.5682/9786062801205 © Toate drepturile asupra acestei lucrãri sunt rezervate, nicio parte din aceastã lucrare nu poate fi copiatã fãrã acordul Editurii Universitare Copyright © 2014 Editura Universitarã Editor: Vasile Muscalu B-dul. N. Bãlcescu nr. 27-33, Sector 1, Bucureºti Tel.: 021 – 315.32.47 / 319.67.27 www.editurauniversitara.ro e-mail: redactia@editurauniversitara.ro Distribuþie: tel.: 021-315.32.47 /319.67.27 / 0744 EDITOR / 07217 CARTE comenzi@editurauniversitara.ro O.P. 15, C.P. 35, Bucureºti www.editurauniversitara.ro 4 DEDICATION This book is dedicated to friends who have been supporting me unconditionally for eleven years. 5 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Firstly, I would like to thank Professor Adina Ciugureanu, Ovidius University of Constanþa, His Excellency Mr. Gerard Corr, Ambassador of Ireland to Romania, David Costello, Deputy Head of Mission, Anamaria Suciu, PA to the Ambassador and Cultural Officer, Embassy of Ireland and the IrelandRomania Network for the constant support through these years. This study, included in the framework of the Centre of Cross-Cultural Studies, the Faculty of Letters, Ovidius University of Constanþa, is the result of my research within the ASIGMA project on quality assurance in internationalized MA programs (the Anglo-American Studies program at Ovidius University of Constanþa), of which I was a member between 2012 and 2013. Secondly, the Irish American component added to the revised and completed edition is the outcome of my participation in The Institute on US Culture and Society/ the Multicultural Institute on American Studies (MIAS), New York University, New York, June 7 – July 20, 2014, for which I am grateful to the American Department of State and the American Embassy in Bucharest. 7 8 CONTENTS Acknowledgements ............................................................................... 7 Introduction .......................................................................................... 11 Chapter I John Hewitt: Colonies of the Past and Present ..................................... 35 Chapter II Thomas Kinsella: Universal Voracity and History ............................... 45 Chapter III John Montague’s In-Between Journeying ............................................ 59 Chapter IV Michael Longley: The Pilgrim Soul in the North ................................. 73 Chapter V Derek Mahon: Painting History and Placelesness ................................ 87 Chapter VI Paul Muldoon: A Playful Approach to Irishness .................................. 101 Chapter VII Tom Paulin: Centos of Commitment (to Art) ....................................... 115 Chapter VIII Ciaran Carson: Troubles in the City .................................................... 125 Chapter IX Eavan Boland: The Mythical Suburban Irish Woman .......................... 135 Chapter X Medbh McGuckian: Ballerinas and Other Storyless Characters .......... 157 9 Chapter XI Richard Murphy and Mary O’Malley: The West in Irish Ecopoetry 173 Chapter XII Eamonn Wall: Journeys of the New Irish across the US ...................... 185 Conclusion ............................................................................................. 199 Works Cited .......................................................................................... 217 10 INTRODUCTION Mapping Ireland (Essays on Space and Place in Contemporary Irish Poetry) will focus on spatiality and the place of postcolonial and feminist Ireland and Irish America as envisaged in contemporary poetry, illustrated by writers such as John Hewitt, John Montague, Thomas Kinsella, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin, Eavan Boland, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, Richard Murphy, Mary O’Malley and Eamonn Wall. I have chosen the concept of the map for literary and cultural analysis due to its openness, versatility, polyvalence and suggestiveness and due to the presence of this trope with Irish writers in general, i.e. in expressing the sense of place: The map is open and connectable in all its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a mediation. (Deleuze and Guattari qtd. in Tally 6) Consequently, the writer can be seen as a mapmaker and the writing as mapmaking. Space is relational, ideal and subjective; it is a mental construction. Relying on critics such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Erich Auerbach and Georg Lukacs, Tally reaches the conclusion that through writing the author projects a map onto what seems the chaotic surrounding world, the map having the role to rescue the reader from a condition of loss and alienation, the existential homelessness or Heidegger’s “not-at-home-ness” (Tally 66). Jameson equally calls cognitive mapping a way to overcome the existential alienation of modern world (Tally 67). Soja and Lynch use terms such as “imageability”, “wayfinding” and “thirdspace” to represent an urban space characterized by confusion and the existential anxiety of Heidegger and Sartre (Tally 71). To guide readers, maps tell stories: “To ask for a map is to say, “Tell me a story”” (Tuchi qtd. in Tally 46). Storytelling makes possible images of the world. Poems are maps maybe more than narratives spatial forms, in the former all the parts being present together, whereas in stories the temporal dimension being focused as well. Literary cartography is a means of giving form to the world. According to Tuchi in Maps of Imagination, cartographic 11 and literary practices overlap: selection and omission, conventions, inclusion and order, shape and the balance of intuition and intention (in Tally 50). One cannot describe a place without telling the story embedded in the place. The writer will select the particulars of a place to make the map meaningful. Certain aspects will be omitted to emphasize others, so the reader has to read between the lines the space on the map. “To trace our personal maps we move through the world with words and through words in the world” (Williams 73). Thus, re-conquering the sense of a place could be done by remapping it, whether this is local, national, post-colonial or global space. Maps are not external to these struggles to alter power relations. The history of map use suggests that this may be so and that maps embody specific forms of power and authority. Since the Renaissance they have changed the way in which power is exercised. In colonial North America, for example, it was easy for Europeans to draw lines across the territories of Indian nations without sensing the reality of their political identity. The map allowed them to say, “This is mine; there are the boundaries.” Similarly, in the innumerable wars since the sixteenth century it has been equally easy for the generals to fight battles with coloured pins and dividers rather than sensing the slaughter of the battlefield. Or again, in our own society, it is still easy for bureaucrats, developers, and “planners” to operate on the bodies of unique places without measuring the social dislocation of “progress”. While the map is never the reality, in such ways it helps us to create a different reality. (Harley qtd. in Tally 26) Map-making, in its physical sense as the manner in which a society views the world, and mapping, as a mental interpretation of the world, have also been related to colonization and empire building, which are of relevance in terms of Anglo-Irish relations and maps have been seen as at least the equal of guns and warships. Ideology and central cultural values of the native population and colonizers have come to be wrapped in the landscape of Ireland, manifested through its occupants, place names, stories and legends. Land/ landscape/ space have thus become layered and the map is only a guide, a doorway into a narrative of the nation. Thus, tracing has remained vital for the Irish people so that they may understand their world, find information on their ancestors and land histories. The ancient Gaelic sense of mapping is connected to memory and maps were initially memorized not drawn: 12 this land memory involved not only a recognition of the history and landholding patterns amongst families but also knowledge over the middle and long term of how the names of places are actually changed to reflect these oscillations in kin-group power. (Smyth qtd. in Wall 24) English map-making followed as official cartography or, in Wall’s view, gave the perspective of the outsider: the ‘outsider’ view of the perspective map that links Ptolemy, Mercator, Bartlett, Raven and Petty [and that] created a very different Ireland. It was this ‘outsider’ perspective-backed by innovative surveying instruments – that completed the mapping of plantation of Ireland in the seventeenth century. (Smyth qtd. in Wall 25) Symbolically for the fate of the Irish people in the aftermath of the English cartographying the land, the tool used for measurement was the chain: the laying of the chain was like a mystical rite, the agrarian equivalent of baptism or coming-of-age, which gave binding force (almost literally at the moment of survey, metaphorically forever) to the process of perambulation and which put the seal on one Irish townland after another as ready to be owned, occupied and civilized. (Smyth qtd. in Wall 26) In a space embedded with narratives, poets have been finders and keepers, to use Seamus Heaney’s terms, of layers of interweaving Irish maps, given as clues in relation the links between geography, cartography, history and literature. The reader, in his turn, must make sense of the map through “literary geography” (Tally 8), by discovering the “spirit of the place” (D.H. Lawrence), rural and urban space (Raymond Williams, Charles Baudelaire, Michel de Certeau), postcolonial space (Edward Said), feminist and global geography. Just as literature is a means of mapping the world, the place itself represented in a literary text is full of a literary history that determines or at least influences the manner in which that place is going to be mapped and read by the future generations. For instance, Eavan Boland inherits an Ireland already “mapped” by Yeats in a masculine mode or Paul Muldoon remaps an Ireland already drawn by Heaney, Mahon and Longley, to mention only the generation of poets whose careers started in the 1960s. 13 In his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), D.H. Lawrence mentions this “spirit of the place”, intended by him to capture the character of the people living there (Tally 82), but actually being more connected with the way in which generations of readers have mapped that place. Hence, contemporary Irish poets have had to struggle with a very rich tradition of literary maps of Ireland starting from the ancient myths and folktales. In the same context of the spirit of a place, Virginia Woolf can be discussed with her essay “Literary Geography”, in which she sees readers as sentimental or scientific pilgrims in connection to the places evoked by Thackeray or Dickens, for instance (Tally 82). Therefore, John Hewitt can be considered an Ulster poet, Ciaran Carson a Belfast poet, Richard Murphy and Mary O’Malley are Western Irish, regional poets, and Eamonn Wall an Irish American, as there is this tendency to associate the landscapes evoked with the writer. Fundamentally, the spirit of the place emerges from “the writer’s literary cartography which the reader uses to give imaginative form to the actual world” (Tally 85). Raymond Williams, in The Country and the City (1973), claims that literature embodies “structures of feelings” associated with places and spaces (in Tally 87). The nostalgia for a simple past, a rustic organic community, timeless rhythms, a pastoral ideal – for the countryside opposes a shifting sense of experience, miscelleneity and randomness, a “world of strangers” (Lofland qtd. in Tally 89), of cities, in which the individual is just the “man of the crowd” of Edgar Allen Poe’s or Baudelaire’s lost and isolated urban citizen and Walter Benjamin’s flâneur. According to Michel de Certeau, the poet-pedestrian writes the city in “a long poem of walking” (101), the city being a reservoir of energy and offering a continuous bombardment of perceptions. There are two instance of the poet-flâneur’s relation to the surrounding world, both visible in Irish contemporary poets’ texts when they identify with the victims of the Troubles (Motague, Kinsella, Mahon, Longley) and when they keep their distance, tragedies being reported as events (Muldoon): His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world – such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. [...] Thus, the lover of universal life enters into the 14 crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life. He is an “I” with an insatiable appetite for the “non-I” at every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures more living than life itself, which is always unstable and fugitive. (Baudelaire 9-10) The contemporary Irish poet registers all the nuances of life in the streets of Dublin or Belfast, especially in Belfast during the Troubles. In the window of the coffee-house there sits a convalescent, pleasurably absorbed in gazing at the crowd, and mingling, through the medium of thought, in the turmoil of thought that surrounds him. But lately returned from the valley of the shadow of death, he is rapturously breathing in all the odours and essences of life; as he has been on the brink of total oblivion, he remembers, and fervently desires to remember everything. Finally he hurls himself headlong into the midst of the throng, in pursuit of the unknown, halfglimpsed countenance that has, on an instant, bewitched him. Curiosity has become fatal, irresistible passion. (Baudelaire 7) Identifying with the victims of violence, after returning from the “valley of the shadow of death”, the Irish poet wants to give a thorough account of such experiences. To give himself a break from the city, the poet withdraws to the West of Ireland, with its vast seaside landscapes (in the poetry of Longley, Murphy and O’Malley). According to Eamonn Wall, contemporary Irish Western writers stand in the shadow of giants, such as Augusta Gregory, W.B. Yeats and Synge. These writers associated the precariousness of local inhabitants of the West, with creativity, anti-materialism and a spiritual dimension, in general, allowed contemporary poets to enter a dialogue with them. The tramp or wanderer in Yeats’s poems is one who knows ‘the exorbitant dreams of beggary’, the relation between imaginative sumptuousness and material destitution. If Augusta Gregory was impressed on her visits to Galway workhouses by the contrasts between the poverty and the splendour of their tales, Yeats could see in these deracinated figures an image of Anglo-Ireland on the skids. 15 So did Synge, who signed his love letters to Molly Allgood “Your Old Tramp”. (Kiberd qtd. in Wall xvi) Since the poems discussed in this book will be seen in relation to place/space/city/countryside/suburbia/maps/journeys, it is mandatory that we look at ideas introduces by ecocritical criticism as well, especially since authors such as Murphy and O’Malley have been considered by Eamonn Wall ecopoets of the West of Ireland. “Eco” comes from “oikos” = house and the OED makes reference to “oecology”, which gave “ecology” (1876), as a branch of biology that deals with the relationships between living organisms and their environment. Thus, ecocriticism means the criticism of the “house” as represented in nature (Johnson, “Greening...”). Among the essential ecocritical views and conceptual representations, relevant for the understanding of the Irish landscape in contemporary poetry, we mention: John Elder’s Imagining the Earth, in which the theoretician considers the wholeness of the world in which poetry becomes “a manifestation of landscape, just as the ecosystem’s flora and fauna are” (in Philips 581) and we only need the skill to read this natural manuscript, if the skill has not been lost, as claimed in Montague’s poem “A Lost Tradition”; Jay Parini’s idea that the ecocritical approach marks “a reengagement [of literature] with realism, with the actual universe of rocks, trees and rivers that lies behind the wilderness of signs” (in Philips 580) – Ireland’s Western fishermen in Murphy’s poems are real not only symbols of spirituality, as in Yeats’s aestheticized approach; Donald Worster’s view that nature should be perceived as “a landscape of patches of all sizes, textures, and colours, changing continuously through time and space, responding to an unceasing barrage of perturbations” (in Philips 580), just like the Irish landscape colonized and regained, remapped and renamed – nature in relation to humans – spaces built and unbuilt, to use Lawrence Buell’s terms in The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (in Johnson 8); Serpil Opperman’s ideas related to nature’s wholeness and interconnectedness, the multidimensional characteristic of nature, gulls, the wind and rocks as eco-literary devices not mere elements of the natural framing (38-39). Though culturally constructed in literature, nature is also real and keeping a balanced approach would pay its duty to it. These may be some of the concerns of Irish (American) contemporary poets. Greg Garrard, in his Ecocriticism, describes, through ecocritical lenses, the major literary loci of the environment: pastoral, wilderness, apocalypse, dwelling, animals and the Earth. Garrard’s ideas are of great importance in the context of this study in which Kinsella is concerned with 16 representations of wilderness; Longley, Murphy and O’Malley focus on the pastoral West of Ireland; violence and an apocalyptic vision of the city are present in both Mahon and Carson’s texts; Boland and McGuckian have challenged women representations as nature and the existence of some feminine essence grounded in biological sex, in accordance with ecofeminists; contemporary Irish poets, whether male or female, have all contested a masculine (English) colonizer’s conquest of the feminine (Irish) “primitive” land. The pastoral tradition involves a contrast with the city and an idealizations of the countryside. The classical, Hellenistic influences could be traced further in literary representations through the spatial distinction of town (frenetic, corrupt, impersonal) and country (peaceful, abundant), and the temporal distinction of past (idyllic) and present (fallen); it was then that the “poetry of place” was born (Garrard 39). Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City also draws attention to the nostalgia associated with the country, which has been traditionally a major feature of Irish place poetry. Garrard establishes three directions of the pastoral, the first two being especially applicable to Irish poetry: “the elegy looks back to a vanished past with a sense of nostalgia; the idyll celebrates a bountiful present; the utopia looks forward to a redeemed future” (42). Longley, for instance, a graduate of classical studies, writes in the classical style revisiting contemporary Irish events through the lens of famous stories in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Wilderness is a term derived from the Anglo-Saxon “wilddeoren”, where “deoren” means beasts living beyond the boundaries of domesticated land (Garrard 67). Wilderness rather fits settlers’ experiences, possibly traditionally the English views of Irish landscape (and people). Confronted with it, the viewer may feel fright, danger, like the English colonist, but also admiration for its vastness and overwhelming power, like the (Irish) city poet on the Western Aran Islands. Wilderness is an extremely complex concept. After Adam and Eve were chased from the pastoral Eden, their exile was in wilderness. But wilderness could be also interpreted in terms of early (Irish) monastic tradition: “to escape both persecution by Roman authorities and the temptation of the world early Christian hermits went to the deserts” (Garrard 68). Critics have also identified an otherness of wilderness in terms of its separation from civilization and the urban space, hence its appeal to Irish poets: Wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization that has lost its soul. It is a place of freedom in which we can recover our true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences 17 of our artificial lives. Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity. (Cronon qtd. in Garrard 77) Thomas Kinsella, with his examples of universal natural voracity paralleled in the society as well, shares ideas with the American “poet laureate of deep ecology”, Gary Snyder, according to whom, since our bodies are wild, our responses at critical moments are: “the heart-in-the-throat in a moment of danger, the catch of the breath”; “the wild requires that we learn the terrain, nod to all the plants and animals, ford the streams and cross the ridges, and tell a good story when we get home” (Snyder qtd. in Garrard 91-92). Dwelling represents, according to Garrard, “long-term imbrications of humans in a landscape of memory, ancestry and death, of ritual, life and work” (117), a kind of marriage between man and place, to use a metaphor cherished by Seamus Heaney. Wendell Berry’s explanation for this close relationship between man / a community and land is also the stories of and by those people that ultimately go into the soil or, with the Irish, their souls may go into trees, bushes, inhabiting the land of the faeries: A human community, too, must collect leaves and stories, and turn them to account. It must build soil, and build that memory of itself ... that will be its culture. These two kinds of accumulation, of local soil and local culture, are intimately related. (Berry qtd. in Garrard 124) Places are also tightly connected to family, family home, genealogy, which ensure a passage into a source of life and identification and poetic inspiration, as expressed by Seamus Heaney in his comments related to his family house and its roots in the soil of Ulster: The pump that marked the original descent into earth, sand, gravel, water. It centred and staked the imagination, made its foundation the foundation of the omphalos itself. So I find it altogether appropriate that an old superstition ratifies the hankering for the underground side of things. It is a superstition associated with the Heaney name. In Gaelic times, the family were involved with ecclesiastical affairs in the diocese of Derry, and had some kind of rights to the stewardship of a monastery site at Banagher in the north of the country. There is St. Muredach O’Henry associated with the old church at Banagher; and there is also a belief that sand lifted from the ground at Banagher has beneficent, even magical properties, if it is lifted from the site by one of the Heaney family. Throw sand that a Heaney has lifted after a man going into court, and he will win the 18 case. Throw it after your team as they go out on the pitch, and they will win the game. (Heaney qtd. in Tobin 260) Unlike Heaney, who emphasizes the connection between the land and the family history and his own personality, John Montague’s sense of genealogical identity is breached and traumatized: I submit again to stare soberly at my own name cut on a gravestone & hear the creak of a ghostly fiddle filter through American earth. (“A Graveyard in Queens” in Tobin 261) Born in Brooklyn and reared by aunts in Ireland, Montague has had to bear the separation from his parents and the parents’ separation, his mother deciding to return to Garvaghey and his father remaining in America. This is the general condition that has shaped the genealogy of the modern world. What happens to these generations of Irish immigrants? How do they relate to the issue of genealogy and place in America? Eamonn Wall’s poem “The Class of 1845” gives an account of where we could place the Irish diaspora from the perspective of a New Irish immigrant: Those who were broken crawled by broken ditches into coffin ships In the new world they were known as filth, disease, and silence In their motherland wise men sang: “brothers and sisters in New York send us your loot.” In hell’s kitchen 19 on the lower east side turf-bedevilled irish fought against black and jew worked their skins away sent their money home. (in Tobin 286) Wall’s rapport with history is direct as he is himself a New Irish immigrant in America, now one of the leading poets of his generation, and he has been schooled in the Irish tradition of engaging history and challenging it. Thus, he recreates the atmosphere in the Irish American communities in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, with the remittances sent home regularly by the immigrants, the poverty in the slums in Hell’s Kitchen and Five Points, the tensions with the Blacks and the Jews once the Irish “became white”. The actual place of Ireland had changed in the 20th century, the landscape being increasingly industrialized and the population urbanized. The focus has fallen, consequently, on nostalgia for the rural and natural beauty as a possibility. The vales of Glendalough or the lakes of Killarney have become “cultural centres”, where nature and culture are blurred, reminding one of the past. Visiting such “natural” sites becomes like a trip to a museum that plays upon the received notion of rural Ireland as somehow more genuine than urban Ireland, triggering a self-reflexive nostalgia. (Frawley 137) Nostalgia and the divide between the country and the city still mark advertising and political strategies and have been taken over by contemporary writers. According to Neil Corcoran, mid-20th century Irish poetry made it clear how inseparable from matters of Irish history ideological representations of rural Ireland are: whether because the Famine is inscribed so deeply into the Irish landscape and psyche … or because of the de Valeran valorization of an impossible ideal, or because in a colonial and post-colonial country, matters of the land’s ownership are inevitably more fraught … In many other postYeatsian poets of Irish rural life, particularly those from the North, these recognitions are also made, even in the great act of establishing Irish topographies with great imaginative definition and richness. (After Yeats and Joyce 65) 20 Land, landscape, nature and place in the works of contemporary Irish poets attempt to suggest stability and continuity of identity, however hyphenated, during times when national Irish identity has been under pressure. Much of the relationship between Ireland and England was determined in the past by fights over land and territorial ownership; the Northern Ireland of the 1960s and 1970s witnessed by the poets of the ‘60s and ‘70s was marked by similar issues of rights over territory, civil rights movements and sectarian conflicts. It is not surprising, then, that their pastorals should be concerned with place, nature and landscape in the desire to establish a sense of continuity in a hybrid Irish/ English, rural/ urban space, within a hybrid Irish and global mode. Most often, these poets situate themselves on a border which is both literal and metaphorical. The experience which the poet imagines in the poem “Sandstone Keepsake” (Seamus Heaney, Station Island), for instance, is representative for contemporary Irish poetry from the North in general: the poet on the shore of Lough Foyle in Inishowen, Co. Donegal, is looking across the lake, to Magillian internment camp, where Republican prisoners lie in their cells, only to withdraw later in his free state of poetry. The poet stands literally on the border of the Irish Republic and looks over the lake to Northern Ireland and, figuratively, on the frontier of the “free state” of his art, apparently apart from the nightmare of history. The context described above presents the poet surrounded by a borderland community, which wants to look up to him. Such communities, guided by artists or politicians should get involved in the perpetuation of a dual cultural tradition through a strategy of doubleness, a certain way of viewing the world and the self from two perspectives simultaneously. They ought to cultivate an awareness of a dual tradition and a consequent “doubleness of focus”, a capacity to live in two places at the same time and at two times in one place, in the Republic and in Northern Ireland, in Ireland and in America. For Ireland, the syndrome of the political leader operating between two systems of loyalty, the writer responsive to two cultural traditions and the place named differently by various peoples has become the norm. Under the circumstances, the role of the Irish artist has been one of an articulator of place, frontiers and borderlands and of the Irish border consciousness. In this respect, one could draw a parallel between the contemporary Irish poet’s dual attachment and a similar experience coined by Edward Said: The sense of being between cultures has been very, very strong for me. I would say that’s the single strongest strand running through my life: the fact that I’m always in and out of things, and never really of anything for very long. (Criticism in Society 123) 21 One tradition established by critics in connection to representations of the Irish border has been that of literature deployed to challenge or consolidate partitionist identities, the goal being separation (between the north and the rest of Ireland) or reintegration (of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom or of the entire island of Ireland). Literature in the Irish Free State after the partition (1920-1921) was meant to consolidate the newly created state, whereas in Northern Ireland, there was no literary revival, the statelet being and being treated as a regional outpost of the British Empire. This is why Seamus Heaney may have felt the need to explain the use of the terms “Britain’s Ireland” and “Ireland’s Ireland” in a context in which in the north there is a minority who prefer not to think of themselves as British although they do live in Britain’s Ireland, and in the republic there is a section of the population, quite vocal at the present time, who would regard the phrase ‘Irish Ireland’ as reactionary, triumphantly nationalistic and part of a historical baggage which they would prefer to shed. But whether the north and the south are to be regarded as monolithic or pluralist entities, the fact of the border, of partition, of two Irelands on one island, remains the salient fact. (Redress of Poetry 189) Other critics and writers have considered that Ulster literary regionalism may be regarded as a counterpart of the literature that developed in the Republic. An account of regionalist literature in general is given by Roberto Dainotto in his study Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities. According to him, boundaries, tightly linked with identity, act as shelters from the historical outside and as symbols of purification. And when real, external frontiers are not enough, such as the one between the Republic and Northern Ireland, inner boundaries are born, e.g. the ones separating the Catholics from the Protestants in the north. Later, in the 1960s, critics have questioned themselves on the issue of a Northern Renaissance, illustrated by poets, such as, Seamus Heaney, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian. This has been seen as controversial, as a Renaissance movement, yet nationalist and politically assertive, due to its links with the Gaelic literary tradition. In conclusion, Northern Ireland could not be considered to have produced a distinct new proto-nationalist literature. What is essential at present is the support for cross-border literary exchanges and the fact that “Irish Ireland” and the “British Ireland” agendas have collapsed while the alliance between culture and nation-state is shifting between culture and the global market, as 22 everywhere in the Europe and America (Stanca, Duality of Vision in Seamus Heaney’s Writings 66-70). Apart from rural-urban dichotomy explained previously in the chapter from various perspectives, there is the third space, the semipheriphery (Wallerstein 91), which is the suburban in Eavan Boland’s poetry, as she considered that both the rural and the urban are imbued by male poetic discourses and do not respond to female needs. Engendering space and femininity has been tackled in various studies (Domosh and Saeger’s Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World, 2001 and Rose’s Feminism and Geography, 1993). Since male geographical discourse subordinates the “Other”, this creates strategies of resistance: Feminist explorations of the different spaces of the contemporary city often reject the search for totality from a position of complete knowledge. Their work is more tentative, more grounded in the details of the everyday, and more likely to interpret social life and spaces in the city of a radical heterogeneity. (Rose qtd. in Tally 134) Besides the countryside-city and male-female dichotomies discussed previously, there is the centre – periphery duality, especially in the case of Irish literature, which lends itself to post-colonial mapping and reading. With Edward Said, core and periphery are figured out in an imaginative geography in terms of “our” space, delimitated by familiar boundaries, and “their” space, beyond the boundaries (54). “Dispossession by othering” (Gregory qtd. in Tally 93) is practiced by those at the centre, with the civilizing mission to be inflicted upon those at the margin. In order to make sense of their relationship with England and of the wider world context at the same time, Irish poets have had to resort to disparate locations, sources and cultural heritage. In his study on Spatiality, Tally mentions four spatiopolitical zones emerging out of historical process: the national (or the space of the state), the extraterritorial (the periphery, including colonial spaces), the local (especially the urban space of the capital) and the global (the space of the world-system) (22). In Irish literature, the focus has been on the national aspect in the context of the country’s fight for freedom, on the post-colonial one in the context of the long and intricate relationship with England, on the local element with poets that have written about Ulster, Belfast, Dublin of the West of Ireland and on the global one with many contemporary Irish voices living and creating transatlantically. In the early decades of post-colonial Ireland, the Irish people constantly thought of their sacred struggle for independence. The 23 educational system produced a people that lacked self-confidence. “No Irishman can ever assume he is at the centre of anything” (Donoghue qtd. in Kiberd 553). Interestingly, while England in the 1940s-1950s adopted an approach of the welfare state and a modernized educational system, Ireland seemed to have remained more conservative and English-oriented than England itself. Daniel Corkery complained not only of the lack of Irish forms in the period, but of the absence of any solid foundation for them. “Everywhere in the mentality of the Irish people are flux and uncertainty. Our national consciousness may be described, in a native phrase, as a quaking sod. It gives no footing. It is not English, nor Irish, not Anglo-Irish ...” (qtd. in Kiberd 555). The commitment to the English texts explains the self-estrangement and divided consciousness of the Irish people. Therefore, one response by certain writers to the negative mood in the society was exile. Another theoretician, who focused on post-colonialism in Ireland, trying to find answers to what was happening at the time in the Irish society was Conor Cruise O’Brien; he represented liberal European Ireland, free of the past, committed to the present, against a background of injustices in the North and underdevelopment in the South. Beginning 1960s, there were tremendous changes in Ireland. Yet, the Irish myth of rebellion survived even if it clashed with present day modernization and consumerism. So, traditional Ireland was divided about these changes. Some positive aspects were related to the revival of traditional music and folk dancing due to the successful television and the establishment of a tradition of writing critically about the Irish “wounded woman” stereotype (Kiberd 566). Confronted with deer economic conditions in Europe, Ireland could only survive “as a gigantic theme-park, retirement commune and cemetery for European industrialists”, as Friel put it in his satire The Mundy Scheme (Kberd 567) or as O’Malley satirically claims in her verse. The number of emigrants was still high in the 1980s, when the country was facing financial difficulties; that was the generation of the New Irish emigrating to the US, Eamonn Wall included, but many retuned under better auspices in the 1990s. At the same time, a campaign for the revival of the Irish-speaking areas began as part of a global countercultural movement of “small is beautiful” principle and the learning of Irish started being supported in city schools as well. The foundation of the Field Day was meant to make Derry and the North an important cultural centre by bringing together the work of artists acknowledged nationally and internationally, such as Brian Friel, Stephen Rea, Seamus Deane, Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and David Hammond. Regarding perceptions of the human body in the Irish society, the focus was dual, the female body and the victim body in the context of 24 challenging Catholic Church principles and the Troubles’ reality. The position of the Catholic Church remained strong in the 1970s with fierce debates over issues such as abortion, divorce and contraception. As far as the hunger strikers were concerned, they used their bodies as instruments for negotiation and weapons to fight abuse and injustice, confronted with the refusal of the authorities to acknowledge their status as political prisoners (Pierce 219-260). The most serious problem for Ireland at the time continued to be in the North, i.e. the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In 1972, the political scientist Richard Rose claimed that it was one of the few spots on earth for which no solution could be imagined (in Kiberd 575). Ireland’s imagination was entirely dominated by the North in the 1980s. By 1980, 2.297 people had been killed, out of which 1.291 were civilian deaths (Pierce 241). People hoped that the bloodshed would finally lead to more peaceful days. More recently, all the political and social forces and structures have undergone a conversion seeking better solutions for peace. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement claimed that the executive and legislative power was to be granted to a local Assembly and Executive in Northern Ireland. The membership of the Assembly had a wide representation and enjoyed popular support: The Irish peace process was based on a transformation of politics, by means of a consociational power-sharing model, with strong and institutional recognition of Irish nationalist identity and desire for all-Ireland unity and formalised co-operation between the Irish and British governments. (Doyle 2) There were structures for co-operation between Ireland and Britain, a Council to join the two governments, the Northern Ireland Executive and the various structures in the UK and a series of measures for the release of prisoners, demilitarization of the society, recognition of the Irish language and a reform of the criminal justice system. An Independent Commission on policing for Northern Ireland has been set to come up with solutions for a more representative policing structure in the area, respecting the demographic profile of nationalists and unionists, men and women1. However, the differences are still there: nationalists have not given up their ideal of unity with Ireland, while unionists would like to remain part of the 1 The results of the work of this commission were gathered under the name The Patten Report, according to the name of its chair. The Patten Report is fully discussed in the work edited by John Doyle, Policing the Narrow Ground: Lessons from the transformation of policing in Northern Ireland. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2010. The title of the book points at the intensity of the conflict on the “narrow ground” of Northern Ireland. 25 UK. Yet, both sides have also agreed on a form of government and crossborder cooperation. And the key found in Northern Ireland is only a possible model for post-conflict circumstances. In this context, what is the impact of the colonial legacy on contemporary Irish poets? Does it still have a pressure on these artists as an unfinished business or is it just distant music? How do the poets discussed throughout the volume relate to common postcolonial topics, such as identity, nationhood, the relation to the ex-colonial power, finding a critical and creative language, engagement, renewal, recuperation, exile and immigration? Interestingly, Sartre uses a metaphor, the nervous condition, to describe the condition of the colonized in the Preface to Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth: “the condition of the native is a nervous condition”, the colonial inheritance involving doubts, oppression, sickness and death (in Wisker 21). Also, the concern with language is extremely important for the postcolonial condition: The struggle for the power to name oneself and one’s state is enacted fundamentally within words, most especially in colonial situations. So a concern for language, far from indication a retreat, may be an investigation into the depths of the political consciousness. (Kiberd qtd. in Wisker 55) Answers are offered by poets ranging from Mahon, with a sense of living in the shadow of the past, to Longley and Heaney resorting to classical and Irish mythology to challenge the inheritance, to McGuckian, writing about Matisse going through the war by drawing ballerinas, to Muldoon, as an expert in reconstruction of the past and present side by side. In terms of space and the analysis of coloniser/colonised relations, Bhabha mentions the interdependence of the construction of their subjectivities. According to Bhabha, all systems and statements are constructed within a space he calls the “third space of enunciation” (37). The appreciation of this ambivalent space of cultural identity leads to the recognition of a hybridity which cultural difference may use: It is significant that the productive capacities of this Third Space have a colonial or postcolonial provenance. For a willingness to descend into that alien territory ... may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. (Bhabha 38) Since the nineteenth century, Irish literature has defined itself as nationalist and anti-colonial to show its post-colonial condition in a larger 26 globalizing context. According to Franz Fanon, the condition of the native writers after the European decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s has generally involved three stages: assimilating the culture of the occupying power, the phase of disturbance and the fighting phase (in Crump 31-32). In the case of Irish literature, five levels are distinguished: the radical, conservative nationalist literature that revives the pre-colonial culture in an effort to celebrate racial difference; a literature of delegitimation exposed by continental and exile writers; after political independence, there was a demythologizing of the literature of the first phase, which engenders neocolonialism and cultural conservatism; the fourth stage involves a continuation of the process of demythologizing doubled by a continental vision of the writers from the second stage; women writers challenging the “double colonialism” by rewriting the male canon (in Crump 31-32). Nationalist literature in Ireland emerged after the native Gaelic culture had almost been destroyed (with the Act of Union, 1800) and the Potato Famine did the rest to cause ruin in the Gaelic-speaking area. The Irish Literary Revival implied translating, retelling ancient Celtic myths and folklore, with the purpose to focus on a deliberately national literature to engender a spiritual identity for Ireland to unite all Irish citizens. But there was a division between nationalist writers such as Douglas Hyde and Patrick Pearse (supporters of the Irish language and the Gaelic League) and the Protestant colonial elite, the Ascendancy, which represented the great majority of the Revivalists. For Hyde, the essence of the Gaelic nature was not heroic, like for Yeats, Lady Gregory and O’Grady, but it was given to “excessive foolish mirth or [to] keening and lamentation” (in Crump 33). Pearse saw an ideal in the Catholic rebellion and was executed by the British after leading the 1916 Easter Rising. The Celtic/ Gaelic identity of the Revival as a construct of difference was derived from Arnold’s idea of the Celtic racial difference in his book On the Study of Celtic Literature, 1867, labeling the sentimental, impressionable, feminine Celt. By adopting Arnold’s views, the writers of the first phase of postcoloniality celebrated their otherness as an “exoticized otherness” (in Crump 34). The audience could only encourage such opinions as they were British cultural tourists (like Haines in Joyce’s Ulysses, the one who brought Hyde’s The Love Songs of Connacht). The idea of otherness was reshaped by perpetuating feelings of inferiority, dependency and nostalgia in a neocolonial Ireland after it gained its independence. During the second stage, characteristic of Joyce’s writings, there was a rejection of the Celtic/ Gaelic concepts as archaic and rural for modern Ireland. Joyce presented the “paralysis” of the Irish colonial subject, cut off from the Gaelic culture, ruled by London and Rome, embittered by a sense 27 of alienation and disempowerment. Dubliners were celebrated as Europeans. Joyce was writing from exile, where he sought to be free of the spiritual, political and religious binds of (neo)colonialism in Ireland, producing a literature of delegitimation, “reinventing the English language and representing a more inclusive European identity for the Irish” (Crump 34). In Ulysses, characters transcend the political and spiritual colonialism with Bloom, the wandering Jew and modern Ulysses, with multiple facets and a larger background. The Irish Free State witnesses the third stage with a Counter Revival and a sense of disillusionment and demythologizing of the values of the divisive politically, materialistic, dominated economically by Britain new state, in which the expectations of the writers such as O’Casey, Flan O’Brien, Kavanagh clashed with reality. Beckett started by criticizing the state but later chose exile to avoid “becoming trapped in the Counter Revivalists’ sterile dead end” (Crump 37). The fourth and fifth stages have taken place against the background of Ireland’s economic independence since the 1960s and the cultural reconnection since its joining the European Community in 1972. During the fourth phase, writers have been influenced by the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Literature for them has been a reexamination of colonialism in Ulster and neo-colonialism in the Republic, in an attempt to deconstruct Revivalist and Republican ideologies, which may have been the key issue in the partition. Neo-colonialism suggests that although independence has been achieved at various levels, economic, educational, political, cultural, old values may still operate and people find it difficult to shake off the colonial bahaviour and views; the Irish writers’ task is precisely to challenge them in this neo-colonial and international stage. If Thomas Kinsella diagnosed that “the divided mind” of the modern Irish poet who writes in English stems from the loss of the native Irish tradition, then Montague adds to that diagnosis by articulating the exile’s loss of home not only as a matter of linguistic dispossession but also as a matter of physical and metaphysical disruption. To “the grafted tongue” of English Montague adds the exile’s experience of displacement. (Tobin 123) The fifth stage of Irish post-colonial literature involves women writers and a phenomenon of “double exclusion”. The post-colonial woman writer is not only involved in making herself heard, in changing the architecture of male-centered 28 ideologies and languages, or in discovering new forms and language to express her experience, she also has to subvert and demythologize indigenous male writing and traditions which seek to label her. An entrapping cycle begins to emerge. (Susheila Nasta qtd. in Wisker 123) These women writers have rejected the Catholic-inspired ethos of woman as Madonna or fallen, the political image of Ireland as an old woman, Cathleen Ni Houlihan made young by the blood of the sacrificed young men. Their response has been an unwriting of the male canon and a highly personal female vision. Edna O’Brien, for instance, replaces Joyce’s Stephen with two Irish girls; Eavan Boland rewrites in her “The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish” Yeats’s “Song of the Wandering Aengus”, the point being that a romantic image of the woman deprives her of her femininity; Medbh McGuckian shows her private emotions. Irish post-colonial literature is bound to continue its struggle against colonialism, neo-colonialism and double colonialism. For these woman poets remembering the past, recovering lost histories through a recourse to the Imaginary/ Semiotic, and thus breaking down a synthetic homogenous history into a plurality of different histories, led to a radical rewriting of historiography. (Birkle 358) In order to explain Irish feminism and this double colonialism one finds in women’s writings, Molly Mullin starts from the 1988 Dublin Millennium celebrations, whose texts and images excluded women representations. The critic also resorted to historical views regarding feminism in general in order to prove the case of Ireland and its treatment of women. For instance, Simone de Beauvoir claimed in 1949 that the difficulty of women reaching a political subjectivity as a group lies in their finding themselves dispersed among men (Mullin 31). Thus, one needs to build a common tradition and a common consciousness. In Ireland, feminist consciousness was born out of a series of defeats or failures, such as the 1983 constitutional “Fetal Rights” amendment, the 1986 campaign for divorce, the 1988 Supreme Court against clinics providing women with advice about abortions. There were also divisions among women, but it all led to a blossoming cultural expression of and by women through painting, publishing, theatre and writing. These lady writers did not have a feminist agenda proper, but they were only dissenters from the hegemonic ideologies of gender (Mullin 33). The stone sculptures of the sheela-na-gig found on the doorways of medieval churches and castles, rediscovered in the nineteenth century, were 29 used by a woman journalist in a humorous way as a sample of counterculture on the occasion of the Millennium celebration. In the 1930s, the sheelas were connected with fertility, symbolizing the family, a value dear to the Irish conservative state. But there was a danger of identifying women primarily with fertility and motherhood in a country in which the state and the church had control of reproduction and sexuality. Since the image of sheelas is so overt sexually, they were reclaimed by feminists to celebrate otherness, they allowing the subversive possibility of vulgarity instead of the adoration of the body of the mother (Mullin 38). Nell McCafferty, the journalist using the image of the sheela-na-gig, produced an expression of feminist consciousness in a humorous, subtle, cultural way in the 1980s to protest against any form of over censorship of information on the body and sexuality. If you have not by now heard of Síle na Gig [the Irish spelling], you cannot tell your arse from your elbow. Then again, given the nature of Catholic-controlled education in the Republic of Ireland ... it is possible that that is precisely what you cannot do. (McCafferty qtd. in Mullin 38) Recovering the sheela-na-gig from a censored post constructs a positive political identity. The otherness of the sheelas, their pagan, ancient, precolonial condition shows continuity in Irish feminist tradition. Interestingly, the symbol also carries the meaning of “backward” and “primitive” as well. The popular images of the Irish past, on cards, textbooks, tourist attractions, represent a version of Irish history with absent women or domestic servants, which legitimized the present social order, whereas the sheelas were represented as lewd ladies that fit uncomfortably on the doorways of medieval churches. The mixture of these images shows the necessity of revisiting clear-cut oppositions between primitive and medieval, past and present and Christian and pagan (Mullin 40), but it also leads to difficulties in accommodating feminism and the accepted cannon of Irish literature: On the one hand, within the history of great literature, being Irish is to have a language, if vicarious, share in great triumphs. On the other hand, to women newly conscious of themselves, being Irish is neither here nor there, except to know that a vicarious share in male triumphs is no share at all. Inside feminism there is a desire to wipe history out: it was not ours, but the future might be. But inside feminists there are women, and women have always been forced to be reasonable and to compromise with the given facts. What is the 30 relationship between conscious women and any history? (Nuala O’Faolain 41) The gaps in the tradition could be bridged by rewriting history and the past and these women have used the richness of the Irish representations of feminine figures to shape their aspirations: Few people have as rich preserved, and recorded a tradition of gynocratic myths, legends, and religio-philosophical beliefs as do the Irish ... Irish Folklore is a dense tapestry of faerie figures (such as the goddess faerie Niamh and the magic witch Scatbach, Queen of Darkness), legends and spells which encoded political and religious records of reverence for the female. (Robin Morgan qtd. in Mullin 41) This allows a very complex revisitation of representations of gender within a national history. Women’s suffragette movement in Ireland is as old as the 1870s. The 1937 Irish Constitution tried a counter movement by defining the family as heterosexual and nuclear and the role of women as mothers and domestic workers. The document must have come as a response to British colonization and the Great Famine because the nuclear family had not been exactly part of the Irish tradition. In 1926, there were the lowest marriage rates, the tradition of celibacy in the rural areas allowing men to keep the little land they possessed in the family. The Catholic orders had also registered a growth in number in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There were also many cases of separation of couples even if divorce was not granted. Academic and historical texts, traditional historiography have always benefitted from the support coming from other sources and forms of representation, such as the title of a feminist newsletter in Dublin in the 1970s: “Banshee”, the term referring to figures who mourn the dead in traditional Irish folklore, but the newsletter also dealt with articles on pornography, contraception, women in trade unions. Another example is the play Shady Ladies by Mary Halpin, the “shades” of folklore being connected with modern ideas of sexual transgression and predation; in the play characters like Grace O’Malley, the sixteenth century pirate says “History is an incestuous old man who has raped every one of his daughters” and “they’ve wrenched women out of history or left us as pale shadows”, and St. Brigid, who protests that it was St. Patrick who was exported round the world as a symbol of Ireland and not her. 31 Therefore, the task of feminists has been to come up with alternative counter-hegemonic versions of Ireland, of essentialist Catholic and patriarchal Ireland, constructed as a form of resistance to British oppressions. Hence, the necessity of expanding historical representation to alternative productions and the imperative of keeping the feminist cultural politics flexible, diverse and experimental: We must include all the ways in which a sense of the past is constructed in our society. These do not necessarily take a written or literary form. Still less do they conform to academic standards of scholarship and truthfulness. Academic history has a particular place in a much larger process ... (the Birmingham School “Popular Memory Group” in Mullin 47) In connection to the flexibility, diversity, fluidity and openness of feminist cultural discourse, Helene Cixous mentions these qualities as the major characteristic of feminine writing to make a difference from the male one. According to her, a woman writer is willing to admit the existence of the other and her love for the other. By writing, the woman comes out of herself to go to the other, a traveler in unexplored places; she does not refuse, she approaches, not to do away with the space between, but to see it, to experience what she is not, what she is, what she can be. Writing is working; being worked; questioning (in) the between (letting oneself be questioned) of same and of other without which nothing lives; undoing death’s work by willing the togetherness of one-another, infinitely charged with a ceaseless exchange of one with another – not knowing one another and beginning again only from what is more distant, from self, from other, from the other within. A course that multiplies transformations by the thousand. (Cixous 95) The quality of her writing resides in the creation of the passages to the other and the dwellings she creates in the other, without focusing self-centeredly on her-self and her body: If there is a self proper to woman, paradoxically is her capacity to depropriate herself without self-interest: endless body, without ‘end’, without principal ‘parts’; if she is a whole, it is a whole made up of parts that are wholes, not simple, partial objects but varied entirety, 32 moving and boundless change, a cosmos where eros never stops travelling, vast astral space. (96) A woman’s writing materializes carnally; she inscribes her writing with her body and she wants to involve her story in the big history as shown by poets such as Boland and McGuckian. Contemporary women poets draw a dialectic between the outer world and the inner landscape. Women in exile becomes the metaphor for many contemporary Irish poets, poets in search of imaginary maps and countries because the real ones are inhospitable. The words spoken by them are explosions ever since the central stage has pushed them backstage or offstage. Their fragility and vulnerability matches their intensity. Texts written by women cannot be other than subversive because they seek her liberations after censorship. To write – the act that will ‘realize’ the un-censored relationship of woman to her sexuality, to her woman-being giving her back access to her own forces; that will return her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her vast bodily territories kept under seal; that will tear out the superegoed, over-Mosesed structure where the same position of guilt is always reserved for her (guilty of everything, every time: of having desires, of not having any; of being frigid, of being too ‘hot’; of not being both at once; of being too much of a mother or not enough; of nurturing and of not nurturing ...). (Cixous 103) Spivak, in her famous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, wonders whether postcolonial studies really help the suppressed ones to gain a voice, since she considers that it is almost impossible to escape the language that first constructed them as subaltern (in Wisker 206). The chapters in this book will aim to show how contemporary Irish poets re-draw maps of contemporary Ireland and Irish America, in a dialogue with the past or challenging the male and colonial discourse and the postcolonial inheritance. Ultimately the weapons of these poets are the words, with which they discover and conquer landscape in Ireland, in America, in the whole world, mapmaking being a lifelong experience for poets: I am Eratosthenes’ heir, the librarian who measured the earth. He took an obelisk, a well, the sun, and made a triangle: geometry simple and accurate. A cartographer of sorts – I measure earth with words. I have drawn roads 33 and made them impassable. I have laid railroad tracks to serve as escape routes. I have surveyed rivers and seas by touch and taste. And yet, I ignore my point of departure or destination, only know the lands that lie in between. Growing up under an obelisk’s shadow I heard the story of genocide, of World War II, read geography, poems, Swallowed the whole and learned-but this journey never ceases. Mapmaking is a life-ling task. (Carol Traynor Williams 77-78) Beyond geographical location, Ireland and Irish America are presented in poems as textually mediated constructs, subject to revision. For these poets the paradise of Boland’s “lost land” is another image meant to revise, revitalize and relativize given ethnic, national and gender identities. The desire for participation in these revisions ensures the decolonization and survival of communities whose very flexibility and instability guarantee the persistence of this desire and constant renewal of the Symbolic in the future. (Birkle 359) 34 CHAPTER I JOHN HEWITT: COLONIES OF THE PAST AND PRESENT John Hewitt was born in Belfast in 1907, the son of a Methodist schoolteacher, and was educated at the Methodist College and Queen’s University Belfast. He worked for many years at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery, where he was promoted to the position of director, thanks to his non-sectarian politics. In 1957, he moved to Coventry as director of the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum. He retired in 1972 and returned to Belfast. John Hewitt died in 1987 (Croty 66). According to Vance, his work was not largely known outside native Ulster until the 1990s, when the John Hewitt Summer School was established (223). According to Dawe, the most important dimension of Hewitt’s poetry is his “Protestant” characteristic and his aloofness related to any tradition, Irish, English, Anglo-Irish. “I may appear Planter’s Gothic but there is a round tower somewhere inside, and needled through every sentence I utter” (Hewitt qtd. in Croty 66). The poet’s desire may have been to encompass all these trends which had been an integral part of the Ulster tradition for generations: “Irish Methodism cut across divisions between Planter and Gael, Anglo-Irish and Scots-Irish” (Vance 224). The volume Kites in Spring. A Belfast Boyhood (1980) reviews his peaceful childhood against the background of sectarian violence in Ulster. The sonnet “The Irish Dimension” is dedicated to his neighbour, William Morrissey, a Catholic boy he befriended and who offered him an insight into another culture. The title of the poem makes reference to a political catchphrase in the 1970s and 1980s used to describe the future of the problematic Irish and British Ulster. Interestingly, the poet’s father preserved his association with the Irish National Teachers’ Organization even after a Protestant Ulster Teachers’ Union was founded (Vance 225). Reflecting another side of Ulster heritage, the volume Kites in Spring. A Belfast Boyhood also includes poems about the parades of the Orangemen on the Twelfth of July (“Twelfth of July” and “The Eleventh Night”). These poems show a less innocent version of the golden childhood background but the speaker makes sure to distance himself from the actors of symbolically violent gestures, using the pronoun “they”, not the inclusive “we”: 35 Their painted banners flaunt the bearded faces of founding fathers, flicker and array of famous fighters in embattled places like Derry, Enniskillen, Dolly’s Brae. (“The Eleven Night” in Vance 226) Troubled by the confusion and disturbing events in present day Ulster, Hewitt wrote in the 1970s poems which he characterized as “intuitions, intimations, imaginative realisations, epiphanies” (qtd. in Vance 227), in a way responding to the difficult situation in a Wordsworthian and Joycean manner. For instance, “Encounter Nineteentwenty” (Time Enough, 1976) describes a meeting of young Hewitt playing with a football in the street with a “stiffly striding man”, actually the former bumping into the latter, when he noticed a rifle hidden under the coat of the man. The gun has become symbolical of the danger that each Irish child, Catholic, Protestant or Methodist, may have had to face. Hewitt could be seen as a paradoxical poet born in the north of Ireland, since he speaks both about the lack of any tradition and the need for roots, as his background. In an interview with Timothy Kearney, he claims: John Hewitt: You have been asking whether we think our poetic role is analogous to Yeats’s frequent public stand. Well, I, for example, have written poems which are relevant to the political situation. Yet, they are quoted in the Irish Times but not in the Belfast Telegraph. I am not speaking to my people. They are public utterances but they are taken up by a more distant audience than that for which they are intended. Timothy Kearney: Is that an inescapable thing? John Hewitt: Yes, it is inescapable thing. But linked with it is the important fact of the total lack of literary interest amongst unionists of the north, the lack of any fixed literary tradition. (in Dawe 90-91) On the other hand, in a 1945 article entitled “The Bitter Ground: Some Problems of the Ulster Writer”, he discusses roots and the idea that the writer must be a rooted man, “must carry the native tang of his idiom like the native dust on his sleeve; otherwise the poet is an airy internationalist, thistledown, a twig in a stream”: I do not mean that a writer ought to live and die in the house of his fathers. What I do mean is that he ought to feel that he belongs to a recognisable focus in place and time. How he assures himself of that 36 feeling is his own affair. But I believe he must have it. And with it, he must have ancestors. Not just of the blood, but of the emotions, of the quality and slant of the mind. (qtd. in Dawe 91-92) Accordingly, in the collection The Rain Dance (1978), Hewitt praises or criticizes, through intertextual references, fellow writers like William Conor, Robert Frost, who are rooted enough, and Wallace Stevens, who is not, according to the poet’s appreciation. Put this artificer of chiaroscuro on the high shelf with all those phrase-bound poets, padded with pedant’s resonance, ballooned with bouncing echoes of their paladins. Give me, instead, the crisp neat-witted fellows, sharp and laconic, making one word do, the clipped couplet, the pointing syllables, the clean-beaked sentence, the exact look. (“On Reading Wallace Stevens’ Collected Poems after many years” in Dawe 92) So, Conor, take our thanks for what you’ve done not through those harsh abstractions whose despair of finding teeming earth forever fair strip to a disc what we would face as sun, nor lost in lonely fantasies which run through secret labyrinths and mazes where the dream-drenched man must find but few to share the tortured forms his agonies have won. (“William Conor, R.H.A. 1881-1986” in Dawe 92) There are many poems in which Hewitt deals with the intricacies of the notions of identity and belonging, such as in the popular text “Colony”: hoping by patient words I may convince my people and this people we are changed form the raw levied which usurped the land, if not to kin, to co-inhabitants, as goat and ox may graze in the same field and each gain something from proximity; for we have rights drawn from the soil and sky; 37 the use, the pace, the patient years of labour, the rain against the lips, the changing light, the heavy clay-sucked stride, have altered us; we would be strangers in the Capitol; this is our country also, no-where else; and we shall not be outcast on the world. (“The Colony” in Croty 72) Thus, the poet insists on growing roots to hold on to concrete, solid things that matter and he sees his kin as no less than the Irish Catholic. Interestingly, the poem quoted above makes references to the idea of the colony and it is relevant to consider it taking into account the Irish postcolonial tradition. In the essay “No Rootless Colonist” (1972), the poet defines the term colony the way in which it had been used in the poem: I have not attempted to predicate by what means we may isolate the moment when a colony set among an older population ceases simply to be simply [sic] a colony and becomes something else, although I have not hesitated to take that ‘something else’ to be a valid region with inalienable right to choose its place within a smaller or larger federation. (qtd. in Dawe 94) Though starting from the plantation of Ulster, paradoxically, Hewitt regards the colony in the Greek sense, as an independent city founded by emigrants, rather than in the Roman Empire way, a garrison settlement in a conquered territory, yet, he mentions the Capitol and the Roman implications, which are immediately obvious. Thus, one becomes aware of the connection between the colony and the region, rootedness and being part of a community. And, secondly, this must have been Hewitt’s response to the long invoked Irish native myth of dispossession; settlers and natives are moulded together by the same place in a hybrid identity, such as it has happened in most parts of Ireland. Another poem bridging the Roman colonial times and present day Ireland is “The Roman Fort” (1971). The source of inspiration was the reconstruction by soldiers of the timbered gateway to an old Roman fort that had protected the Fosse Way against (British) barbarians (Vance 235). The same soldiers were supposed to be sent to Northern Ireland, to that troublesome province and the question is who are the barbarians now? The Catholics, the Protestants in Northern Ireland or the soldiers? The role of roots and the community stands as even more prominent in these texts taking into account the fact that Hewitt has always been 38 considered an outsider as regards the Irish tradition and stereotypical rural imaginary in poetry. “Hewitt stands as a reminder of the unassimilated Protestants” (Dawe 95). I think I have a pretty clear grasp of it now. I couldn’t, for instance, happily belong to the Gaelic-speaking Irish republic, because that’s not my native tongue, and I don’t want to separate it from Britain because the complete body, the corpus of my thought, has come from Britain. The ideas I cherish are British ideas ... my intellectual ancestry goes back to the Levellers at the time of Cromwell. England had become a republic, and they believed that people should be levelled, should be equal. (Hewitt qtd. in Dawe 96) Confronted with the fundamental rootlessness of the modern individual, the poet has relied on home, the past, the family and the cultural background (the Glens of Antrim, Belfast, Coventry or Greece) or rather on a quarrel with them to create an identity vision capable to respond to his inner urgencies and not to outer biases. Once walking the country of my kindred up the steep road to where the tower-topped mound still hoards their bones, that showery August day I walked clean out of Europe into peace. (“Freehold” in Vance 228) Hewitt often turned to the landscape as he was disappointed with individuals. He also responded to the ancient belief in the healing powers of nature: The healing well by Rathray’s cliff that answers to the tide, the blessings of the gentle bush deep in my pulse abide. (“Rite; Lubitavish, Glenaan” in Vance 236) But these regional poems do not make him to belong. This attitude has made the poet a dissenter, a personality that could be compared to the behaviour of a hedgehog, which rolled up in a ball as a protection against human presence, from an ecocritical viewpoint (Hewitt, “Hedgehog” in Vance 227). 39 In 1932, Hewitt published the poem “Ireland”, which appeared in his Collected Poems. The poet wrote it with the Ulsterman’s sense of difference from the Celtic tradition and also with the feeling that the native myth of the Irish became more divisive than it had been before the partition: We Irish pride ourselves as patriots ... We Irish vainer than tense Lucifer are yet content with half-a-dozen turf, and cry our adoration for a bog. We are the keltic wave that broke over Europe and ran up this bleak beach among these stones: but when the tide ebbed were left stranded here... (“Ireland” in Vance 234) The term “keltic” is used, according to the Greek keltoi, the word employed by Herodotus to refer to an ancient European people, and not the word Celtic, the Latin one denoting the romantic Celticism of Thierry, Renan, de Jubainville in Revue Celtique and which constituted the foundation of the Irish Celtic Revival. Just like Hewitt, who feels like an immigrant and a settler, disconnected from the Celtic tradition, the Celts were once settlers on the island of Ireland. We are not native here or anywhere ... and what we think is love for usual rock or old affection for our customary ledge, is but forgotten longing for the sea that cries far out and calls us to partake in his great tidal movement round the earth. (“Ireland” in Vance 235) Hewitt’s great-grandmother died when she caught the famine fever after she helped a starving man who had travelled from the “stricken west”. This gesture, says the poet, “Conscribed me of the Irishry forever”. The term “Irishry” was used to look down upon the “Wilde Irish” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the poet did no adopt a derisive attitude (Vance 237). In “Conacre”, he makes his comments regarding identity and affiliation: This is my home and country. Later on perhaps I’ll find this nation is my own but here and now it is enough to love this faulted ledge ... (“Conacre” in Dawe 93) 40 The poet pondered long on his ancestor’s gesture as he stated in old age that “in that woman’s death I found my nation” (Hewitt qtd. in Vance 237). Other Irish characters that Hewitt evokes in his poems are the legendary Finn and Oisin and St. Patrick. He is especially fascinated with Oisin, the warrior and bard, whose stories of a life of passion and action represent a model. Presumably, Oisin was buried in the Antrim Glens, but the standing stones of the grave are considered to be pre-Christian, an opinion shared by Hewitt, and which is responsible for the complexity and the appeal of the legend of Oisin. In the article “Planter’s Gothic: An Essay in Discursive Autobiography” (1953), published in the Bell under the name John Howard, Hewitt discusses his family past and the sense of freedom he experienced at not being baptized: “a sense of liberation, spiritually I have felt myself to be my own man, the ultimate Protestant” (qtd. in Dawe 97). He had never been baptized because his father hated the attitude of the local minister who was also the principal of the school where he was teaching, so this event determined symbolically the freethinking attitude conscientiously adopted later. Therefore, another poet, John Montague, called him the “first (and probably the last) deliberately Ulster, Protestant poet” (qtd. in Dawe 97) in an article entitled “Regionalism into Reconciliation: The Poetry of John Hewitt” (1964). Thus, as claimed throughout this chapter, Hewitt’s poetry is based on tensions and a dissenting mode, such as in “Sonnets for Roberta” or “The Faded Leaf: a chapter of family history”: I have let you waste the substance of your summer on my mood; the image of the woman is defaced, and some mere chattel-thing of cloth and wood performs the household rites, while I, content, mesh the fine words to net the turning thought. or eke the hours out, gravely diligent, to draw to sight that which, when it is brought, is seldom worth the labour. (“Sonnets for Roberta” in Dawe 98) I know the grave, the headstone; the text I am proud of, for its honesty; We all do fade as a leaf, no easy hope, no sanctimonious, Pentecostal phrase, 41 simply a natural image for the fact. I’ve written verses of the failing leaf. (“The Faded Leaf: a chapter of family history” in Dawe 98-99) Moreover, the poet becomes self-critical when he considers that he had kept quiet and remained shy in his verse when confronted with the situation of the decline of the textile industry in Ulster as a result of the Industrial Revolution. The poet’s sense of responsibility and regionalism caused him to voice the suffering of the weavers: He followed their lilting stanzas through a thousand columns or more, and scratched for the splintered couplets in the cracks on the cottage floor, for the Rhyming Weavers fell silent when they flocked through the factory door. He’d imagined a highway of heroes and stepped aside on the grass to let Cuchullain’s chariot through, and the Starry Ploughman pass; instead of Gallowglass. And so, with luck, for a decade down the widowed years ahead, the pension which crippled his courage will keep him in daily bread, while he mourns for his mannerly verses that had left so much unsaid. (“A Local Poet” in Croty 74-75) Hewitt’s poetics has been born out of forms of struggle and tensions between issues of art and morality, freedom and restraint or constraints, roots and liberation from the Ulster (family) background. Hewitt’s experience in the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery enabled him to do research and produce studies such as “Painting and Sculpture in Ulster” (1951). Among other artists, he praised William Conor for presenting the essence of Ulster life, the painter being a counterpart of his in the arts: the “pity and the laughter of the poor, the colour and quality of life in the textile 42 mills and the shipyard irradiated by neighbourly cheerfulness, the best self of self-tormenting urban Ulster” (Vance 231). Furthermore, during the 1930s, Hewitt felt the need to continue the tradition of great dissenters before him, such as Thomas and William Drennan, Joseph Priestly, the Quaker George Fox, the Digger Gerrard Winstanley, the poet William Blake, the Donegal Deist John Toland, and more secular radicals, such as William Cobbett, William Morris, George Russell (‘AE’). Thus, he worked with the Left Book Club, the Belfast Peace League and the British Civil Liberties Union and he held speeches at the Sunday afternoon meeting in York Street Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church. In the Presbyterian tradition of free questioning, a wide variety of issues were tackled (Vance 231). The poet’s works and activity are about a sense of regionalism, which was described by the poet from the Bell article “Writing in Ulster” to his afterword in Judith C. Wilson’s Connor: 1881-1968. Basically, without being limited by affiliations, he praises the virtues and the livelihood of regional culture. Hewitt wanted to invent something distinct from Daniel Corkery’s eighteenth-century Gaelic Munster or Yeats’ aristocratic AngloIreland which was different also from the militarist Ulster of the new Unionist mythology, the land of the heroes of the Somme and the generals of England’s wars. (Vance 228) So be the poet. Let him till his years follow the laws of language, feeling, thought, that out of his close labour there be wrought good sustenance foe other hearts than his. If no one begs it, let him shed no tears, five or five thousand – none will come amiss. (“Ars Poetica” in Dawe 103) The legacy left by Hewitt consists precisely in the ability to transmit to future generations the meaning of the regional cultural background, Irish, of Planter stock, in his case, of roots and a sense of belonging doubled by a belief in the idea of remaining a dissenting spirit. 43 44 CHAPTER II THOMAS KINSELLA: UNIVERSAL VORACITY AND HISTORY Thomas Kinsella was born in Dublin, in 1928, and was educated at University College Dublin. He worked as a civil servant from 1948 until retiring from senior position in the Department of Finance in 1965. He taught at University of Southern Illinois (1965-1970) and at Temple University, Philadelphia for more than twenty years from 1970. He now lives in Co. Wicklow (Croty 159). Among his works we mention the major volumes of poetry: Another September (1958); Downstream (1962); Nightwalker and Other Poems (1968); Butcher's Dozen (1972); Notes from the Land of the Dead and Other Poems (1973); Fifteen Dead (1979); One and Other Poems (1979); Peppercanister Poems 1972-1978 (1979); St Catherine's Clock (1987); Blood and Family (1988); Madonna and Other Poems (1991); The Pen Shop (1997); Citizen of the World (2000); Collected Poems 1956-2001 (2001); Man of War (2007); Selected Poems (2010); Love Joy Peace (2011). As he has been an extremely prolific author, we could add his prose: The Dual Tradition: An Essay on Poetry and Politics in Ireland (1995); Readings in Poetry (2006); Prose Occasions: 1956-2006 (2009). His prose writings are enlightening regarding his views on his ars poetica. In the Irish tradition of bridging the Irish and the English languages, he devoted himself to translation as well: The Táin, translated from the epic Táin Bó Cúailnge (1969) and An Duanaire - Poems of the Dispossessed, An Anthology of Gaelic Poems, edited by Seán Ó Tuama (1981). By looking at the titles of his volumes year after year, one realizes a permanent questioning of art, his poetic gift and the challenges of it. Kinsella’s work could be characterized in general terms as a struggle towards awareness against the background of a (pre)historical process. Poetry writing has always been hard work for Kinsella: “I could never honestly see how anybody, even the most Romantic of poets, could escape the bonds of hard work which man must face as a result of Adam’s sin” (Kinsella qtd. in Dawe 114). And he shares the same views in an interview with John Haffenden: 45 ... the poetry I’ve most recently finished is part of a continuing investigation into the given human beings in my past – parents and grandparents – who seem to me very valuable instances, and to have undergone some very positive as well as negative experiences. The poetry is growing, I think, in response to these things. (Kinsella qtd. in Dawe 114) Another September, an early volume, includes love poems and works meditating between various individuals and general considerations on life and death. Among the best anthologized texts in the volume is “Baggot Street Deserta,” which, set in nocturnal Dublin, one of Kinsella's favorite locations, is concerned with loss, which is bound to be part of life, reminding one of Eliot’s atmosphere in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. All ultimately goes “flaring down to Baggot Street”. Kinsella's preoccupation with isolation and loss frequently results in efforts to establish order approached, particularly in his earlier writings, through poetic structure: Dreamers’ heads Lie mesmerized in Dublin’s beds Flashing with images, Adam’s morse. A cigarette, the moon, a sigh Of educated boredom, greet A curlew’s lingering threadbare cry Of common loss. Compassionate, I add my call of exile, halfBuried longing, half-serious Anger and the rueful laugh. We fly into our risk, the spurious. (“Baggot Street Deserta” in Muldoon 150-2) In this context of a commitment to explore the past, family ties, history in general and the self, the key trope of his verse consists of the idea of voracity or the devouring of the weaker by the stronger, at all levels, biological, political; the universal will towards survival in the organic sphere is paralleled, in his verse, by a tendency towards structure and architecture through words. “I would rather settle for the facts and let them speak among themselves. I don’t think graceful postures are adequate; you have to deal with the raw material” (Kinsella qtd. in Dawe 114). One example illustrative of this metaphor is found in the volume One Found Embrace (1981): 46 And all this place where (it occurs to me) I never want to be anywhere else. Where the particulars conspire Which is not to say serenity and interplay of friends. but the brick walls of this sagging district, against which it alerts me to knock my head. With a scruffy Nineteenth Century history of half-finished colonials and upstarts. Still with us. With a half charm, Half gracious, spacious, and a miscellaneous vigour. Sniffed at. Our neighbourhood developer thinking big in his soiled crombie The rodent element bidding out -and who will deny them a desirable nest, semi-detached, and a pound in the pocket? ................................................ And I want to throw my pen down And I want to throw my self down and hang loose over some vault of peace. (from One Found Embrace in Croty 175-177) Voracity takes here the shape of the greediness of Dublin’s ruling class, seen by the poet as an epitome of materialism. What Kinsella does is to translate the laws of primary nature into the field of culture and the suffering comes from the inability to match the two. Voracity, which attacks and creates order and life, is very well connected with the memory of a painful event in Irish history, affecting both the bodies and the minds of the people, the Famine. In 1990, a tourism consultancy agency study suggested five themes as Irish attractions: landscapes, making a living, saints and religion, building a nation and the 47 spirit of Ireland (Pierce 11). This enumeration shows the limits of tourism to include certain themes which are nevertheless inextricably Irish. Among these left aside is the spirit of the Great Famine, which Kinsella speaks about in a poem as being impossible to simplify. The facts may appear simple, many died, many emigrated, but the story resists being told in a conciliatory manner: Perspective is what the historian seeks but there is something unyielding about the Famine. The Great War in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe has been partly absorbed by annual commemorations and monuments to the dead, but the victims of the Famine are only fitfully recalled in Ireland and their identity remains for the most part unknown. (Kinsella qtd. in Pierce 11) Therefore, for Kinsella, the Famine is represented through silence and a loss of the Irish language and the colonial encounter. [S]ilence, on the whole, is the real condition of Irish literature in the nineteenth century – certainly of poetry .... If I look deeper still, further back, in the need to identify myself, what I meet beyond the nineteenth century is a great cultural blur. I must exchange one language for another, my native English for eighteenth century Irish. After the dullness of the nineteenth century, eighteenth century Irish poetry seems to me suddenly full of life: expertise in the service of real feeling – hatred for the foreign land-owner; fantasies and longings rising from the loss of an Irish civilization (the poets putting their trust in the Stuarts or the Spanish fleet or even the Pope of Rome); satires; love-songs; lamentations: outcries of religious fervour or repentance ... there, in all this, I recognize simultaneously a great inheritance and a great loss. The inheritance is mine, but only at two enormous removes – across a century’s silence, and through an exchange of worlds. The greatness of the loss is measured not only by the substance of Irish literature itself, but also by the intensity with which we know it was shared; it has an air of continuity and shared history which is precisely what is missing from Irish literature, in English and Irish, in the nineteenth century or today. (Kinsella qtd. in Pierce 73-76) According to Kinsella, modern Irish literature is the product of this gapped tradition and Yeats, like many of his followers, is isolated in tradition, away from a people who spoke another language than his and 48 from whose lives he was separated. So, what remains for the poet to undertake is a journey through Irish history. In the volume Nightwalker and Other Poems the opening reference is a reflection on Joyce’s Martello Tower in Sandymount as reflective of dispossession. This seems to trigger in the second section the evocation of a school lesson during which he was taught by the Christian Brothers about Her Majesty the Queen, who: Gave us the Famine – the starvation, as Bernard Shaw, A Godless writer, called it more accurately. A hand is laid on my brow. A voice breathes: You will ask are we struck dumb By the unsimplifiable Take these ... Bread of certainty; scalding soup of memories, From my drowsy famine – martyrs in a dish Of scalding tears: food for dragon men And my own dragon half. (Kinsella, Nightwalker and Other Poems in Pierce 76) The poet raises the issue of the Famine as trauma in Irish culture. The “soup of memory”, the image of the soupers trying to convert the victims to Protestantism, all these memories that scald the mind suggest that the retelling of the Famine is in danger of losing its power to disturb and perhaps it is only the image of the victims as martyrs that will continue to push the coming generations towards a critical, questioning approach of the gapped legacy of the Famine. What is to be done with the Irish legacy? The volume also ponders on the Holocaust as a benchmark against which the ideals of the Republic of Ireland are measured and from the point of view of someone who grew up with the shadow of the war present. The Dublin cityscape of the Nightwalker is a “’Necropolis’ in which the Nightwalker is ‘Patrolling the hive of his brain’, his restless peregrinations propelled by the desire to elicit order from the ‘shambles’ of contingent experience” (Davis 85). Equally, in his volume The Pen Shop, echoing Joyce again through the style of the “Lotus-Eaters” episode in Ulysses, the poet drowsily roams around the city of Dublin, passing nationalist and colonial sites and arriving at a pen shop for a black refill, an image suggestive of the urge to rewrite traditional literature; familiar themes are to be reworked by contemporary Irish poets under the same pressure on cultural critics and historians to puzzle over the intricacies of postcolonial and nationalist legacy, remapping Dublin in poetry equals redrawing the complex Irish tradition. 49 Another answer provided by Kinsella to the voracity of Irish history and of history in general is well embedded in the Irish literary tradition: the body as a trope in Irish writing. In the Celtic period, the body was praised as a source of wisdom and beauty; later, Catholicism saw only negation of the spirit and temptation of the believer in it; Irish nationalism re-read it as the landscape on which trauma had been inscribed. Whether in the pre-Christian context of the overbearing earth goddess or as a replica of Virgin Mary, Mother Ireland has been constantly written as a woman’s body to be revered, cherished, repossessed, traumatized. Contemporary Irish poetry, according to Gilsenan Nordin (1-15), reconsiders representations of the body and desires starting from a more general philosophical and critical perspective created by Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and continued by Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray. Thus, the body appears as an agent of political, social and spiritual empowerment; in particular, in Irish poetry, it has been introduced as a site on whose limits Irish identity is constructed and challenged. With Kinsella, the embodied subject faces victimization by historical, political and metaphysical forces as a site of mediation between individual and human condition; the body offers one answer to the quest for knowledge in relation to otherness. For instance, Robert Brazeau considers that Kinsella uses the body as a site of contestation of dominating and hegemonic forces or, to put it in Foucault’s words, as “local knowledges”, which signify the claims of the oppressed against the dominant ideology (55-78). Kinsella reads history from the effects on the body of the victims of various traumatic events and contests the ethical, rational excuses served as ideology. In “Old Harry” (Downstream 1962), Kinsella ponders on Harry Truman’s decision to have Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombed. There is tension between the individual and progress, history as an eternal engine lacking humanity. The sympathy goes to the victims of the American military action: The greater terror for the lesser number. With rounded cheeks he blew the moral blast And the two chosen cities on the plain Lost their flesh and blood – tiles, underwear, wild cries Stripped away in gales of light. Lascivious streets Heightened their rouge and welcomed baths of pure flame. 50 In broad daylight delicate creatures of love Opened their thighs. Their breasts melted shyly And barred the white bone. (“Old Harry” in Brazeau 66) In “The Good Fight”, in the 1973 volume bearing the same title, the protagonist is John F. Kennedy. The man’s bodily self is opposed to his campaign speeches; it is the same tension as in “Old Harry”, this time between Kennedy as an agent of historical change and an embodied victim of it (Brazeau 66-67). The president’s mind presses history, while history presses back on his body: Fumbling from doubt to doubt, One day we might knock Our papers together, and elevate them (with a certain self-abasement) -their gleaming razors mirroring a primary world where power also is a source of patience for a while before the just flesh falls back in black dissolution in the box. (“The Good Fight” in Brazaeu 67) The body is finally giving in the face of the monstrous power of time. This is the trauma of all individuals, which Kinsella wants to draw attention to, to fall victims to the destructive action of history. President Kennedy’s assassination is a brutal act which destroys unrealistic hopes of perfection, thus contributing to deeper knowledge (Deane 142). The poet’s father shares the heroic stature of the American presidents and their fate as well. In “The Messenger” (The Messenger 1978), the father is introduced as a leader of the trades union of the Guinness brewery, as imposing as a hero, yet the focus shifts to body erosion and loss of youth and vigour snatching John Paul Kinsella: And it befell that summer, after the experimental doses, that his bronchii wrecked him with coughs and the muffled inner heartstopping little hammerblows began. (“The Messenger” in Brazeau 67) 51 The volume The Messenger is dedicated to the relationship between the poet and the father, comprising verse on the city the latter grew up in, his work, aspirations and finally his death. As far as body victims and Irish history are concerned, we could also mention the volumes A Technical Supplement (1976) and Butcher’s Dozen (1972). The former is dedicated to Irish colonial history, with the introductory sequence centred on “William Skullbullet”, who is actually William Petty, the seventeenth century cartographer who conducted the mapping and naming survey of County Down. Blessed William Skullbullet glaring from the furnace of your hair thou whose definitions – whose insane nets plunge and convulse to hold thy furious catch let our gaze blaze, we pray, let us see how the whole thing works. It would seem impossible to peel the body asunder, to pick off the muscle and let them drop away one by one writhing until you had laid bare four or five simple bones at most Except that at the first violation the body would rip into pieces and fly apart with terrible spasms. (A Technical Supplement in Brazeau 68-69) The Irish population has been victim of various experimental forms of control out of which map-making and renaming have been extremely efficient for the colonizer; yet, colonialism does not admit its drawbacks. “Butcher’s Dozen” contains references to the Bloody Sunday massacre on 30 January 19722 and its whitewash by the Tribunal of Inquiry led by Lord Widgery, another event controlled by the English colonists. The text contains both the victims’ response to the report of the massacre and accounts on the English-Irish relations at the time. 2 The original Bloody Sunday was a massacre of Russian protesters on 9 January 1905. Its first Irish namesake was on 21 November 1920 when IRA men in Dublin killed thirteen men and injured six others, most, though not all, of whom were British Intelligence service. More recently, the name has been applied to an event on 30 January 1972, when paratroopers sent to make arrests following a banned civil march in Derry shot dead fourteen civilians (Connolly 51). 52 There in a ghostly pool of blood A crumpled phantom hugged the mud: ‘Once there lived a hooligan. A pig came up, and away he ran. Here lies one in blood and bones, Who lost his life for throwing stones.’ More voices rose. I turned and saw Three corpses forming, red and raw. The group was silent once again. It seemed the moment to explain That sympathetic politicians Say our violent traditions, Backward looks and bitterness Keep us in this dire distress. We must forget, and look ahead, Nurse the living, not the dead. (“Butcher’s Dozen” in Brazeau 72-73) The victims appear as ghosts and are urged to forget history and the suffering inflicted. Colonialism, contemporary military history and the authorities show the same indifferent approach to politics in Northern Ireland. However, in a reparatory gesture, the Widgery report was revised through the Saville Inquiry, in 1998, commissioned by Tony Blair, and the findings were shocking: Patrick Doherty and Bernard McGuigan were shot while withdrawing and they were not armed (Brazeau 72-73). The body as site of desire, denial and suffering in order to reach selfunderstanding with Kinsella are studied by Lucy Collins in her article ‘Enough/ is Enough’: Suffering and Desire in the Poetry of Thomas Kinsella”, published in The Body and Desire in Contemporary Irish Poetry, edited by Irene Gilsenan Nordin. In “A Lady of Quality” (Downstream), the patient is the loved one, being hospitalized and showing bodily frailty, whereas in “Visiting Hours” (Madonna and Other Poems 1991), the patient is the speaker, at the mercy of medicine, and the woman he longs to return to is the visitor. In the latter volume, feminine presences are often captured in sensory and sensuous terms, as disturbing presences, on the border between the private and the public, strange and familiar, pointing out the illusion of seeing the self as a whole of body, spirit and mind. “The Familiar” sequence welcomes the lover muse into the poet’s space as an erotic, disturbing, destabilizing and devouring presence. To counter their force, the poet often embarks on travelling to the Dublin of his upbringing, of his formation into an adult, which are also 53 journeys into knowledge (“Self-Release” and “Self-Renewal” in Songs of the Psyche 1985). The volume Notes from the Land of the Dead proposes travelling to the underworld to equate bodily decay with social decline in contemporary society. The poem “Downstream” (Downstream) tells of a traveler’s quest to find “ancient Durrow,” a center of learning and devotion; the downstream direction of the journey also indicates the imminence of death: Something shifted in sleep, a quiet hiss As we slipped by. Adrift ... A milk-white breast A shuffle of wings betrayed with a feathery kiss A soul of white with darkness for a nest. The creature bore the night so tranquilly I lifted up my eyes. There without a rest A limb-lightness, a terror in the glands, Pierced again as when that story first Froze my blood: the soil of our hands Drank lives that summer with a body thirst; Nerveless by the European pit -Ourselves through seven hundred years accurstWe saw the barren world obscurely lit By tall chimneys flickering in their pall, The haunt of swinish man – each day a spit That, turning, sweated war, each night a fall Back to the evil dream where rodents ply Man-rumped, sow-headed, busy with whip and maul Among nude herds of the damned. (“Downstream” in Muldoon 156-157) The journey by boat through darkness becomes a nightmare bringing forth the memory of a man who had died at the river edge and whose corpse had been found later half-eaten. We are struck by the necessity of facing that experience; the journey into terror is necessary for identifying trauma and the ability to move on beyond the hollowness left by any war (Deane 136-7). 54 In “38 Phoenix Street” (One and Other Poems), the journey moves through the self, the family, history and the landscape in general, from the tiniest organism to great history, as if the volume were in search of some origin (“one”), a point of departure, only that each discovery prompts further search. It seems as if Ireland was an initial paradise ruled later by dark forces and the pattern from the first invasion to the Bloody Sunday has been one of continuing aggression of the centre, in a long sequence of crisis: Look I was lifted up past rotten bricks weeds to look over the wall. A mammy lifted up a baby on the other side. Dusty smells. Cat. Flower bells hanging down purple red. Look The other. Looking. My finger picked at a bit of dirt on top of the wall and a quick wiry redgolden thing ran back down a little hole. (“38 Phoenix Street” in Croty 167) Kinsella may have been inspired in picking up certain themes by the poetry of E. Pound, W.C. Williams and R. Lowell, especially the last one mentioned due to his exploration of the emotional and cultural inheritance of his family and country. In “Poetry since Yeats: An Exchange of Views”, he refers to these influences in the following terms: “in American poetry a seriousness that is fruitful and that is embodied [in] William Carlos Williams’ poetry and Robert Lowell’s public progress” (Kinsella qtd. in Dawe 115); regarding the latter’s change from Mills of the Kavanaghs (1951) to Life Studies (1959), Kinsella notices “a notable achievement”, which could actually be applied to his poetry as a freeing into the visions of volumes such as Nightwalker and Other Poems, with poems such as “Hen Woman”, “Ancestor”, “The High Road” or “A Hand of Solo” being completely exploratory. According to Kinsella, Irish poetry is a sort of verse at odds with the idea of structure, so his effort has been to elaborate structures of response and for that he often looked for parallels in other spaces, such as America and the poetry of Pound. A pattern based on a dialectics of order and dissolution is similar to Pound’s vortex in The Cantos. 55 The meaning is a matter of vortices eddying about us as we possess ourselves of the contents of the poet’s mind. Everything is dramatic and immediate, concerned with ideas only in so far as they manifest themselves in action. (Kinsella qtd. in Deane 142) In the volume Notes from the Land of the Dead, for instance, the central analogy is the common one, that between biological and imaginative processes and he finds inspiration in the early Celtic Book of Invasions, which mixes myth and history to establish patterns of invasion, violence and recovery; at another level, it is about the history of Kinsella’s family with cycles of birth, death, transmission of knowledge from generation to generation; they all become related in an attempt to allow the creator/ poet to set order and attain knowledge. Kinsella’s project was that of a whole generation trying again to free Ireland from provincialism by turning it towards Europe and in this he may have been influenced by poets such as Eliot and Auden rather than his fellow countrymen writers, according to Kiberd (586). The literature of the 1930s and 1940s was characterized by disillusion and disappointment in Ireland under the circumstances of two states formation, economic difficulties, emigration and the deaths of Yeats and Joyce. This is the generation of Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Austin Clarke and Kavanagh. Irish neutrality during WWII increased the fear of provincialism and isolation which was to haunt the Irish writers. Kinsella’s first volumes give a sense of Ireland’s marginal role in the European experience as understood by the poet, a civil servant under Sean Lemass, who was Eamon de Valera’s successor. If some of his Irish colleagues found meaning in continuity, in the traditional Gaelic culture, Kinsella’s attention is directed, as proved so far, towards the gaps, traumas ad losses, especially of nineteenth century Ireland. In 1971, in his lecture “The Divided Mind”, Kinsella claims that English is not exactly home; Yeats meant the beginning of the Irish tradition in English, silence was the characteristic of nineteenth century Irish literature and beyond it all there is a world full of voices waiting to be discovered, as some hidden Ireland of ancient Irish language: I recognize that I stand on one side of a great rift, and can feel the discontinuity in myself. It is a matter of people and places as well as writing – of coming from a broken and uprooted family, of being drawn to those who share my origins and finding that we cannot share or lives. (Kinsella qtd. in Kiberd 587) Thus, Kinsella tried to bridge the gap translating from Irish poetry and prose; The Táin and An Duanaire - Poems of the Dispossessed, An 56 Anthology of Gaelic Poems had a certain value for an Irish literary renaissance, for a people yearning for a language that had been lost. Kinsella was however less unsure that everything could be translated; he could sense around himself “states of peace, nursed out of wreckage./ The peace of fullness, not emptiness” (“Worker in Mirror at his Bench”, Kinsella qtd. in Kiberd 591). If culture is in a state of illness and weakness, affected by violence, then poetry must be culture in a state of convalescence. What he said of Joyce was also true of his own achievement that he took the fragments of Irish experience and somehow found a language in which they could be depicted. (Kinsella qtd. in Kiberd 591) The poet shared Joyce’s opinion that sin, pain and suffering are most useful to man. Seamus Heaney made the same claim about Kinsella: “the poet who affirms an Irish modernity, particularly in his treatment of psychic material which is utterly Irish Catholic” (Heaney qtd. in Kiberd 591), as his project and Heaney’s project is to “translate the violence of the past into the culture of the present” (Kiberd 591). His volume the Nightwalker, with its dual focus, meant to capture the “the madness without/ the madness within”, anticipates the Butcher’s Dozen, in which he shows his disillusion with the killings in Derry on Bloody Sunday and the Good Fight, in which there is the elegy for J.F. Kennedy. A Technical Supplement extends the metaphor of the slaughterhouse and Notes from the Dead and One further explore the madness within the vortex. “The attraction of violence for Irish poets is perhaps especially strong not merely on account of its pervasiveness but also because as a theme, it provides an exit from provincialism” (Deane 137). Thus, we get back to such key issues as the fear of parochialism understood in a narrow sense and of imagination that lives off violence, voracity, devouring and feeding, at natural level, from an ecocrtical viewpoint, and at the historical one, such as in “Leaf Eater” and “Ballydavid Pier”, in which a foetus of an animal floating in the water in the harbour turns into a monstrous image: On a shrub in the heart of the garden, On an outer leaf, a grub twists Half its body, a tendril, This way and that in blind Space: no leaf or twig Anywhere in reach; then gropes Back on itself and begins To eat its own leaf. (“Leaf Eater” in Muldoon 162) 57 Small monster of true flesh Brought forth somewhere In bloody confusion and error And flung into bitterness, Blood washed white: Does that structure satisfy? (“Ballydavid Pier” in Muldoon 161) Nature is violent, and so is culture; they betray voracity and imagination is between them. Violence takes the shape of the blind force of destiny, blind hunger and the famine, the conqueror that destroys everything, love feeding on pain, English language reviving itself on the Irish language. The volume Notes from the Land of the Dead contains references to Darwin and Renan, personalities associated with research in the field of biological evolution and violence. The poem “St. Paul’s Rocks: 16 February, 1832” rewrites an entry in Darwin’s voyage journal The Beagle, describing an island paradise and the idea that violence is at the root of the blessed isle. “The Dispossessed” is based on an account of Renan’s Vie de Jésus, a description of the Christian paradise of love preached by Christ in Galilee before John the Baptist’s death. Jesus’ sacrifice is associated with an image of dissolution because of the violence of crucifixion; in a similar matter, it is the violence of the Civil War that gave birth to the Irish Free State. In a way, Joyce and Yeats’s influence on Kinsella could be related to an ambition to integrate modern Ireland parochial disorder into a cosmopolitan order (Deane 144). By integrating autobiographical, historical and mythical elements, Kinsella achieves this intricate tissue. Thus, in Notes from the Land of the Dead, ancestors alarmingly mutate into archetypes, as fearful grandmothers become avatars of the male psyche’s anima, while, in One, reminiscences of family history are interlarded with accounts of the legendary origins of Ireland. (Davis 85) Kinsella’s merit, according to Dawe (121), is to have liberated Irish poetry into “an anti-eloquent diction”, to free it from what he saw as a previous obscurity of diction. Compared to the Italian Montale and the Greek Seferis, “one [Kinsella] discovers a European setting profoundly engrained with a national character (Italian or Greek), torn by political division (civil war), but dependent upon a deeply personal and selfanalytical imagination, conscious all the time that, in the making of art, a poet stands out and up against the ignominies of history” (Dawe 121) and realizes his most valuable characteristic, that of being an inquisitive spirit. 58 CHAPTER III JONH MOTAGUE’S IN-BETWEEN JOURNEYING John Montague was born in 1929 in Brooklyn and raised in Co. Tyrone, Ireland, by his aunts since 1933. He was educated at St. Patrick’s College, Armagh and University College Dublin, where he began to write yet, with the exception of Kavanagh he did not like the literary circles of Dublin, as claimed in the introduction to the volume Poisoned Lands, reprinted in 1977. He also took postgraduate courses and writers’ courses in the U.S. (1953-1956). He worked as publicity officer for Bord Fáilte3 (1956-1959) and later, in 1961, he settled in Paris. For a year, 1964-1965, he returned to America to teach at Berkeley, California, and was back at University College Dublin for the academic years 1967-1971. In 1998, he became the first Ireland Professor of Poetry. The journey in between Ireland and America has remained a characteristic of his existence, with the position of lecturer of University College Cork, 1972-1988 and the job he took at the State University of New York in 1987 (Croty 178). The American experience was also extremely rewarding as he befriended poets such as Bly, Snyder and Ginsberg. Among the works published, we mention Forms of Exile (1958), Poisoned Lands (1961, 1977), A Chosen Light (1967), Tides (1970), The Rough Field (1972) - the volume for which he was mostly acclaimed, A Slow Dance (1975), The Great Cloak (1978), The Dead Kingdom (1984), Mount Eagle (1988), New Selected Poems (1989). Besides these volumes of poetry, his literary production includes editing The Faber Book of Irish Verse (1989), a collection of short stories Death of a Chieftain (1964, 1968), an autobiographical prose work The Lost Notebook (1987), a collection of essays The Figure in the Cave and Other Essays (edited by Antoinette Quinn, 1989), The Drunken Sailor (2004) and a memoir The Pear is Ripe: A Memoir (2007). Montague began his literary career at a moment when the dispute between cosmopolitanism and native loyalism was stronger than ever. So, one answer consisted of his sense of homecoming; exile meant openness, energy, freedom, on the one hand, and on the other hand, home was lost and 3 Tourism Ireland was established under the framework of the Good Friday Agreement 1998 to coordinate the work of the two tourist boards on the island, Fáilte Ireland and the Northern Ireland Tourist Board (Ireland in Brief). 59 exile offered only a temporary solution. Dislocation has remained important with him and whenever he returns to Tyrone, Dublin or Paris to find the dear sites broken, he uses feeling to recompose his wholeness. Montague’s works could be interpreted as a permanent imaginative engagement with Irish history and politics in a global context. Aware of his status as the first Northern Catholic poet of international stature since 1922, he showed an almost bardic sense of responsibility towards the North’s minority and the dispossessed Catholic world. Thus, his verse has been an effort to “measure the broken history of the poet’s family against the disruption of centuries of conflict in Tyrone and Ireland generally” (Croty 178). Montague’s answer to issues of history consisted of an artistic combination of an account of historical events and personal poems meditating on the long-lasting suffering of the province of Ulster: ... the Elizabethan conquest; the flight of the earls; the siege of Derry; his own forebears, grandfather a Catholic J.P. in the postFamine years who supported Home Rule; father a Northern republican who emigrated to Brooklyn; some events of the sixties in the Republic and again in Derry. (Martin 381) In the essay “The Figure in the Cave” in The Figure in the Cave and Other Stories, Montague appears as an autobiographical poet for whom the political and social turmoil in his country are extensions of his family’s history. In the same essay he tries to establish his place among Irish writers and is proud of having restored John Hewitt and Patrick Kavanagh within Irish poetry tradition. Brooklyn-born, Tyrone-reared, Dublin-educated ... [...] And the chaos within contrasted with the false calm without: Ireland, both North and South, then seemed to me ‘a fen of stagnant waters.’ And there was no tradition for someone of my background to work in; except for the ahistorical genius of Kavanagh, just across the border, there had not been a poet of Ulster Catholic background since the Gaelic poets of the eighteenth century. So when I described myself as ‘the missing link of Ulster poetry’ I am not only joking, for hard as it may be to understand today, there was no Northern dimension to Irish literature then ... (Montague qtd. in Dawe 128) In the 1980s, for instance, there was a genuine cultural renaissance on both sides of the border which Montague was part of: the founding of the Field Day with the intention of making Derry and the North a vital centre for 60 theatre and arts and in London in February-March 1980 was organized a festival, “A Sense of Ireland”, meant to commemorate both “the startling upsurge of creative activity in all areas of arts as well as the transformations then occurring in both parts of Ireland” (Pierce 222); there were plays, exhibitions of conceptual installations, modern painting, print and sculpture, photography, craft exhibitions of weaving, patchwork and Irish pipes shows. The festival also included readings by writers among whom John Montague and by then younger writers, such as Paul Muldoon, and Irish classical films and Irish music. The tradition Montague embraces as a poet is wider than Irishbound, a tradition including, according to the poet, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Hugh MacDiarmid, Robert Graves, Samuel Beckett, Austin Clarke, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, Charles Tomlinson, W.B. Yeats, Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney and Octavio Paz. Montague’s poetry developed differently after his sojourns at Yale, Iowa and San Francisco in the 1950s, after the workshops with Lowell and Berryman and due to his friendships with Duncan and Roethke. America gave the poet back an honorary doctorate and a welcoming in New York for his childhood and Tyrone has moulded him into the poet he is today: It is like a fairytale, the little child who was sent away being received with open arms. But while awed at the reappearance of this golden cradle to rock my dotage, I am grateful to have explored Ireland so intimately. Standing-stones and streams are not part of Brooklyn nor are cailleachs. To judge by my contemporaries I would probably have been a writer, certainly a journalist, had I stayed in America. But who cut the long wound of poetry into my youth? Was it my mother who chose for her own good reasons to cast me off? (Montague qtd. in Dawe 129) Montague “brought back a sensibility that joins American objectivism with its love of the plainspoken and particular to a mythopoetic urgency that underlies a substantial part of the tradition of Irish verse” (Tobin 132). Montague played the role of a dissenting Irish Larkin in literature: At the Flead Cheoil in Mullingar There were two sounds, the breaking Of glass, and the background pulse Of music. Young girls roamed The streets with eager faces, Shoving for men. Bottles in 61 Hand, they rowed out a song: Puritan Ireland’s dead and gone, A myth of O’Connor and O’Faolain. (“The Siege of Mullingar, 1963”, Selected Poems 62) Poets like Auden and Larkin were influential on Montague as poets of postimperial England, so of a post-heroic phase, which was the case with Montague’s generation. Ironically, England was becoming again the model for this self-ironical mood, as in Montague’s “Speech for an Ideal Irish Election” (Selected Poems 10-11). For the volume The Rough Field the frame is represented by Montague’s return home, on the family farm of Garvaghey (in Gaelic “rough field”), Co. Tyrone, an allusion to the rough land of the province in Kavanagh’s tradition of the stony soil of Monaghan. Bumping down towards Tyrone a few days later by bus, I had a kind of vision, in the medieval sense, of my home area, the unhappiness of its historical destiny. And of all such remote areas where the presence of the past is compounded with a bleak economic future, whether in Ulster, Brittany or the Highlands of Scotland. I managed to draft the opening and the close, but soon realized I did not have the technique for so varied a task. Although living in Berkeley introduced me to the debate on open-form from Paterson, through Olson, to Duncan, I was equally drawn by rooted poets like MacDiarmid. (Montague qtd. in Tobin 116) Local and personal, in the beginning, the volume The Rough Field extends beyond Ulster and into the Gaelic past; they are poems of coming to terms with the local and legendary past, of trying to fit history into his own poetic idiom. The medieval vision of which the poet speaks in his comments regarding his creation represents an account of his origins and development. Jamie MacCrystal sang to himself A broken song, without tune, without words; He tipped me a penny every pension day, Fed kindly crusts to winter birds. When he died his cottage was robbed, Mattress and money box torn and searched Only the corpse they didn’t disturb. ......................................................... Ancient Ireland indeed! I was reared by her bedside, 62 The rune and the chant, evil eye and averted head, Fomorian fierceness of family and local feud. Gaunt figures of fear and of friendliness, For years they trespassed on my dreams, Until once, in a standing circle of stones I felt their shadow pass Into the dark permanence of standing stones. (in Ormsby 97-98) The much anthologized “Like Dolmens4 Round my Childhood, the Old People” begins with an evocation of a local scene of humble poverty of ordinary people and ends in the visionary manner characteristic of Yeats; the trauma of the Irish people is thus set against an impersonal history. The persona in Montague’s verse being often a poetically repatriated self, it takes the form of a victim, like the cailleachs (“old women” in Irish Gaelic) in “The Wild Dog Rose” (The Rough Field), the “old bitch” in Dowager (A Slow Dance), a miserable Anglo-Irish and nurse Mullen in “Herbert Street Revisited” (The Great Cloak), who, before dying, prayed suffering for the affliction of her fellows in the country. Their attitude is one of acceptance and resignation. Both his mother who left her husband and youngest son and the strange old woman, the cailleach, Minnie Kearney, considered a witch and raped, live on the margins of the society. There are a number of possible answers for the mother’s choice of isolation: the father’s alcoholism, the authorities in Northern Ireland who pushed the family towards exile, both parties in Northern Ireland, Protestants and Catholics, who were unable to find a peaceful solution to the problems, the English imperial attitude, the economic situation into which the child was born and which contributed to the break of the family in America. Images of loss (of the language as well), wounds and pain are recurrent throughout Montague’s poems: “The Sound of a Wound”, “The Cage”, about his father, “Sands”, about hunger-strikers perishing in prisons (The Rough Field). Some of his texts focus on the transformations brought about by mechanization as a change from the past and tradition is lamented as lost, like in Thomas Hardy’s works. In other texts, other symbols of the past are evoked, like the fiddler playing traditional reels and hornpipes, weeping about the violent events in Ulster and Kinsale: 4 A dolmen is a structure regarded as a tomb, consisting of two or more large, upright stones set with a space between and capped by a horizontal stone. 63 We have killed, burnt and despoiled all along the Lough to within four miles of Dugnanon ... in which journeys we have killed above a hundred of all sorts, besides such as we have burned, how many I know not. We spare none, of what quality or sex, and it had bred much terror in the people who heard not a drum nor saw a fire of long time. (Chicester to Mountjoy, 1607 qtd. in Martin 384) Sacrifice is the mode of Irish poetry as it has been received in Ireland, Britain and America, after all Montague preparing the way for Seamus Heaney’s volumes Wintering Out (1973) and North (1975). Especially after 1968, the old dispute between being an Irish poet and being merely a poet returned and his decision was to carry the legacy of the Northern crisis in the volume of short stories Death of a Chieftain and the volumes of verse The Rough Field and Poisoned Lands. The Montagues, his ancestors, voiced in the nineteenth century through music and language, are now muted, represented only by the poet’s speech; the stories are of a degraded people and a lost civilization. Lost Gaelic Ireland, Irish republicanism and privately his own family life are depicted as communities under pressure (Deane 146-155). About Montague’s sense of place, Seamus Heaney said that it is cultural and historical, “redolent ... of the history of his people, disinherited and dispossessed” (Heaney qtd. in Martin 383). The names and legends attached to places reconnect him to what he knew as a child, what he returned to as an adult and which served his exploration of the past. Volumes, such as The Rough Field, are written within the tradition of revaluing the lore of the place, of historicizing geography. The placenames on the imaginary map of Tyrone that the poet recreates had to be revived through poetry; it is as if they belonged to an ancient Gaelic manuscript impossible to be deciphered by a contemporary reader but they are speaking to Montague as he finds in them his own geography of disinheritance. Scattered over the hills, tribalAnd placenames, uncultivated pearls. No rock or ruin, dun or dolmen But showed memory defying cruelty Through an image-encrusted name. The heathery gap where the Rapparee, Shane Barnagh, saw his brother die On a summer's day the dying sun 64 Stained its colours to crimson: So breaks the heart, Brish-mo-Cree. The whole landscape a manuscript We had lost the skill to read, A part of our past disinherited; But fumbled, like a blind man, Along the fingertips of instinct. The last Gaelic speaker in the parish When I stammered my school Irish One Sunday after mass, crinkled A rusty litany of praise: Tá an Ghaeilge againn arís . . .* (We have the Irish again) Tír Eoghain: Land of Owen, Province of the O'Niall; The ghostly tread of O'Hagan's Barefoot gallowglasses marching To merge forces in Dun Geanainn Push southward to Kinsale! Loudly the war-cry is swallowed In swirls of black rain and fog As Ulster's pride, Elizabeth's foemen, Founder in a Munster bog. (“A Lost Tradition”, http://www.irishcultureandcustoms.com/Poetry/Monta gue.html) Montague’s volume The Dead Kingdom represents a reshaping of the Irish tradition of the dinnseanchas or place names poetry, expanding on the same traveling across Ireland from Cork to his childhood’s Tyrone, where the poet was brought up by his aunts. Born in Brooklyn in an Irish immigrant family, Montague was drawn by the lore of the place of origin of generations of ancestors once back in Ireland, registering nuances of exile, such as estrangement, loss and changes brought by time and distance throughout his volumes. The poet’s double birth, his real one in Brooklyn and the rebirth once in Ireland at four years old instills in him this heritage of dispossession: “Brooklyn born, Tyrone reared, Dublin educated constituted a tangle, a turmoil of contradictory allegiance it would take a lifetime to unrevel” (Montague qtd. in Tobin 115). 65 Exile as a metaphysical condition, a more complex phenomenon than the mere physical change, is a permanent concern. Montague is a poet of exile, suspended between worlds, for which it often becomes impossible to return. Exile leaves the emigrant in a condition of uncertainty, which would be denied in the context of staying home as well, so the father “was right to choose a Brooklyn slum/ rather than a half-life in this/ by-passed and dying place”, which was Ireland in the 1920s (“Stele for a Northern Irish Republican” in Tobin 117). The American dream contradicted reality for the Irish immigrants. Thus, the poet also remembers, for instance, his father’s return with his sons from New York to Co. Tyrone: A small sad man with a hat he came through customs at Cobh carrying a roped suitcase and something in me began to contract but also to expand. We stood, his grown sons, seeking for words which under the clouding mist turn to clumsy, laughing gestures. At the mouth of the harbor lay the squat shape of the liner hooting farewell, with the waves striking against Spike Island’s grey. (“At Last”, The Dead Kingdom 71) The father arrived on Spike Island, where there is today Cobh Heritage Centre, dedicated to Irish emigration. From 1848 – 1950 over six million adults and children had emigrated from Ireland – over two and a half million departed from Cobh, making it the single most important port of emigration, according to what is posted on the official site of the centre (http://www.cobhheritage.com/)5. 5 Located outside the Cobh Heritage Centre is the statue of Annie Moore and her two brothers. Annie Moore became the first ever emigrant to be processed in Ellis Island when it officially opened on 1st January 1892. Annie and her brothers sailed from Queenstown on the SS Nevada on the 20th December and arrived after 12 days of travelling in steerage. The statue outside Cobh Heritage Centre was unveiled by President Mary Robinson on the 9th February 1993. A similar statue of Annie can be found in Ellis Island, New York which represents not only the honour of her being the first emigrant to pass through Ellis Island but also stands as a symbol of the many Irish who have embarked on that very same journey. (http://www.cobhheritage.com/) 66 The journey back of the father anticipates the return of many Irish people in the 1980s at a time when Ireland had received the nickname the Celtic Tiger to express the economic boom characterizing the country. Only that with the poet’s parents, the focus is the typical one on the difficulties of the life in America rather than on the achievements: And warmly under a crumbling brownstone roof in Brooklyn to the clatter of garbage cans like a loving man my father leant on the joystick & they were reconciled made another child a third son beats out this song to celebrate the odours that bubbled up so rank and strong from that muddy cup my mother refused to drink ..... (“A Muddy Cup”, The Dead Kingdom 66) After the mother leaving the New World, the poet himself is sent back to Tyrone to live with his paternal aunts, separated from his parents: Sing a last song for the lady who has gone, fertile source of guilt and pain. The worst birth in the annals of Brooklyn. that was my cue to come on, My first claim to fame. Naturally she longed for a girl, and all my infant curls of brown 67 couldn’t excuse my double blunder coming out, both the wrong sex, and the wrong way round. Not readily forgiven ... (“The Locket”, The Dead Kingdom in Tobin 119) The woundedness that is present early in his life is symbolized by the father’s existence as an immigrant in America: Christmas in Brooklyn, the old El flashes by. A man plods along pulling his three sons on a sleigh; soon his whole body will vanish away. My long lost father trudging home through this strange, cold city; its whirling snows, unemployed and angry living off charity. (“A Christmas Card” in Tobin 120) The son suffers as an unwanted child, whereas the father is equally afflicted by the loss of his family: How can one make an absence flower, lure a desert to a sudden bloom? Taut with terror, I rehearse a time When I was taken from a sick room: as before from your flayed womb. ........................................................... There is an absence, real as presence. in the mornings I hear my daughter chuckle, with runs of sudden joy. Hurt, she rushes to her mother, As I never could, a whining boy. All roads wind backwards to it. An unwanted child, a primal hurt. 68 I caught fever on the big boat that brought us away from America -away from my lost parents. (“A Flowering Absence” in Tobin 120) The separation from his parents, away from America, renders the world “unhomely”, to use Bhabha’s term, for the poet. Since home and identity are ruptured, the need for reconstruction and reconsideration becomes pressing. The poet is Odysseus reinvented, the son of exile who can neither return to nor wholly abandon his home, and whose birth fates him to be caught between the desire for a home lost before his birth and the recognition that the consciousness of being homeless may afford him a painful though privileged vantage by which to survey the world and also to live within it. (Tobin 123) Thus, since, Montague’s poetry very often encompasses Ireland and America, a sense of dislocation pervading it and a search for a real, emotional and an imagined, cultural home, imagination becomes a symbolical water diving rod used by the poet to find, in The Great Cloak and The Rough Field, poetry to shape and be shaped by the history of the province affected by moral, political and cultural divide. In Selected Poems (1982), texts like “Process”, “The Well Dreams”, “The Music Box” express a mode of acceptance and provide the “healing harmonies” missing: Everyone close in his own world of sense and memory, races, countries closed in their dream of history, only love, or friendship, an absorbing discipline – the healing harmonies of music, painting, the poem – as swaying ropeladders across fuming oblivion while the globe turns, and the stars turn, and the great circles shine, gold and silver, sun and moon. (“Process”, qtd. in Deane 154) 69 However, the self remains in a constant state of transition, such as in “Bus Stop, Nevada”: Travelers raise their bored and famished eyes/ To where snow and forest limn the weightless skies” (in Tobin 122) or in “Molly Bawn”: Emigrating anywhere, suburban England, prohibition Brooklyn the embittered diaspora of the dispossessed Northern Republicans scorning their State Pensions; a real lost generation. (in Tobin 122) The effort of the poet has been to transform exile from non-belonging, unhomely and woundedness into a condition of creativity and imagination. In this context, Montague celebrates his uncle and godfather, an exiled country fiddler, by the same name, John Montague: “So succession passes, through strangest hands” (“The Country Fiddler” in Tobin 129). In “A Graveyard in Queens”, the poet sees his “own name/ cut on a gravestone” and listens to “the creak of a ghostly fiddle/ filter through/ American earth”. What this poem presents is the “true Catholic world” in America, which is not men drinking in a pub but a graveyard in which “Greek, Puerto-Rican,/ Italian, Irish” are buried side by side; this is an alternative to the “rough field” of home limited by borders. the rough field of the universe growing, changing a net of energies crossing patterns weaving towards a new order a new anarchy always different always the same (“A Graveyard in Queens” in Tobin 130) The American lesson consists in ethnic diversity, in a world emblematic of emigrant multiplicity and plurality, to which Montague responded with an “unpartitioned intellect”, a cast of mind that would “declare an end to all narrowness” and remain open to “the many voices, agreeable and 70 disturbing, which haunt our land” (in Tobin 129). The poet’s conviction is that in his dual heritage “Ireland’s tragic past is yoked to America’s modern sprawl” (Tobin 134). There has been an idea in the Irish tradition of Ireland as a nation, repossessed through nationalism and with the poets as its guardians. With Montague, this idea includes the relation between past and present, an autobiographical search for a father figure and an idealized community and a bridge between American, European and Irish cultures. His memoir The Pear is Ripe contains accounts of his time in the US where he witnessed the flower-power movement, his staying in France with his wife Madeleine during the revolutionary events of the 1968 and his return to Ireland, where he continued his academic and creative career. Some chapters are dedicated to the personal and professional encounters with figures such as Patrick Kavanagh, Allan Ginsberg and Seán Ó Riada, to mention only a few names of those who inspired his poetry; the epilogue gives details of a moving encounter with a suffering Beckett in Paris. Perhaps most importantly, in an age when the work of too many prominent writers is inward-looking and thus of marginal public significance, Montague powerfully makes the case for the centrality of the poet’s role as both the unacknowledged legislator of the race and its social conscience. (The Pear is Ripe, front cover) So the poet has at least “three umbilical cords”: Ireland, America and France. Besides personal life, the poet was bound to France through the literary ties of predecessors like Beckett and Joyce, who looked for answers to their Irish questions of identity during exile in Europe. In conclusion, Montague continued the nationalist agenda set by Yeats from a northern republican viewpoint, in a non-English, European manner. The only literary art in which we have not made our presence felt is the one in which we are supposed to excel: this is, poetry. Yeats apart, few Irish poets have been accepted as international figures in the way that Pablo Neruda is, or Octavio Paz, or Ungaretti. (Montague qtd. in Dawe 138) Maybe the most representative image of Montague is that of the mountain eagle, the spirit of the mountain, a figure of his destiny, revising moments of crisis, going on against the experience of solitude and finally, showing aloofness and austerity, reaching a mythical dimension and reconciliation at a price: 71 It was a greater task than an eagle’s Aloofness, but sometimes, under his oilskin of coiled mist, he sighed for his lost freedom. (“Mount Eagle”, Mount Eagle 68) “The bird’s flight and the poet’s independent drive constitute parallel journeys in which the exile’s woundedness becomes the occasion for the artist’s ecstasy – his own free flight into the risk of poetry” (Tobin 131). In his introduction to The Faber Book of Irish Verse, the poet imagines an international poetry with national roots, which would come from an encounter between an English and a Gaelic tradition. His double vision unites order and chaos, identity and difference, the history of his own province and the metaphysics of the universe, within a single reality that can be expressed only as a coincidentia oppositorum - a vision of simultaneity on the grandest scale. (Tobin 130) Montague could be thus seen as a traditionalist, as displaced as he may have been as well, re-establishing the ancient rite, self-consciously wanting to prove something of the past, displaying the bardic strain of Gaelic poetry, derived from nationalist ideas and the heritage and ideals of the Irish state. 72 CHAPTER IV MICHAEL LONGLEY: THE PILGRIM SOUL IN THE NORTH Michael Longley was born in 1939 in Belfast, of English parents. He was educated at the Royal Belfast Academic Institution (“Inst”) and Trinity College, Dublin, where he read the classics. He worked for a while as a secondary school teacher in Dublin, London and Belfast (1963-1970) and for many years with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland before retiring from the post of Combined Arts Director in 1991. He won the award of the American Irish Foundation in 1985 (Ormsby 307 and Croty 220). He has lived in Belfast since the 1960s, spending summers in Co. Mayo. Among the works edited, we mention a volume of reminiscences of the painter Paul Henry, Tuppenny Stung: Autobiographical Chapters (1994), Over the Moon and under the Stars (with the Arts council of Northern Ireland, 1971), Causeway: The Arts in Ulster (with the Arts council of Northern Ireland, 1971) and Louis MacNeice’s Selected Poems (1988) (Ormsby 307 and Croty 220). The volumes of poetry include: No Continuing City (1969) – on urban themes, An Exploded View (1973) – on the war in Northern Ireland and other wars including the WWI in which context his father is evoked, Man Lying on a Wall (1976) – on the beauty of Mayo landscape, The Echo Gate (1979) – including elegies in the Latin vein on the violence in Northern Ireland, Selected Poems 1963-1980 (1981), Poems 1963-1983 (1985), Gorse Fires (1991) – featuring community rituals, rites of passage, images of the Holocaust, various figures, from Ulysses and Laertes to his own father, engrossed in an adventure of the universal man (Fairleigh 56), The Ghost Orchid (1995), featuring Homeric incidents, Cenotaph of Snow: Sixty Poems about War (2003) – on his challenge of the tradition of war poetry and The Weather in Japan (2000), in which poems take “patchwork quilting, sewing, embroidery, as controlling metaphors” and women’s traditional work as power (Brown “Mahon and Longley...” 148): You love your body. So does Sydney. So do I. Communion in blankets and eiderdown and sheets. All I can think of is a quilt called Broken Dishes And spreading it out on the floor beneath his knees. (“Broken Dishes” in Brown “Mahon and Longley ...” 148) 73 Most of Longely’s elegies, interweaving the personal and the communal, tackle love, death, nature, art and history, in a context of division intensified by the tragedy in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s to the 1980s and in relation to a sense of belonging and a tradition in which to feel home. Home becomes his characteristic trope standing for a “hard-won fragile civility” and a problematic sense of belonging, typical of an Ulsterman (Croty 220). The title of his first collection, No Continuing City, evokes departure and a pilgrim soul. “Michael Longley’s poems have matched a sense of history and the brutal present with a recurrent feeling for the lyrical moment and the fragility of experience” (James Fenton qtd. in Longley, Poems 1963-1983). I stand between the pillars of the gate, A skull between two years that reconstructs Broken voices, broken stones, history And the first words that come into my head Echoing back from the monastery wall To measure these fields at the speed of sound. (“The Echo Gate”, Poems 1963-1983, 160) The context in which Longley and his fellow poets have been writing has been an extremely complex one, at least during the Troubles. After the Partition of 1920-1921, the situation had grown worse in Northern Ireland.6 The Catholic minority experienced discrimination in the local government, employment and housing. In the late 1960s a civil rights campaign began to organize protest marches. Although initially non-sectarian, the situation deteriorated, fighting broke out between Catholics and Protestants. British troops were called in to keep peace. Provisional IRA began a bombing and shooting campaign to oust the British troops from Ireland. On the one hand, there was the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which was illegal and committed to the unification of Ireland and the removal of the British political and military presence in Northern Ireland as it was its legal political wing, Sinn Fein. On the other hand, there were the Protestant paramilitaries groups and their Unionist Parties committed to the British Crown. They insisted that they remained part of the United Kingdom, 6 See John Ardagh. Ireland and the Irish: Portrait of a Changing Society. London: Penguin Books, 1995, Terence Brown. Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922-1985. London: Fontana Press, 1990, Roy Douglas et al. Ireland since 1960: A Concise History Belfast. The Blackstaff Press, 1999 and Richard Kearney. Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy. London & New York: Routledge, 1997. 74 refusing to give the Catholics genuine participation in the Northern Ireland’s political and public life. Their extremist members, partly in retaliation for the IRA activities perpetrated atrocious murders. The sectarian killings continued in the late 1970s. The nationalist prisoners’ ‘blanket protest’ turned into a hunger strike in 1976, increasing the publicity for the republicans in Europe and America. Various powersharing assemblies failed because of mutual mistrust and misconception of each other. The 1983 New Ireland Forum Report clearly illustrates the dichotomies of conceiving “the other” in the region. The Protestants believed ‘that their civil and religious liberties … would not survive in a united Ireland in which Roman Catholicism would be the religion of the majority of the population’ (Brown 342-345). In 1985, an Anglo-Irish Treatment was signed by representatives of London and Dublin governments. Republicans opposed the agreement because of its continuing support for the Northern Irish State while the loyalists were outraged at the way they had been excluded from negotiations and also they saw it as a first step towards reunification of the island. Violence sill occupied the center stage: IRA bombings followed by Protestant retaliation. In 1993, the British and Irish Prime ministers signed a Joint Declaration on Northern Ireland, a complex and well-balanced document which stated that a united Ireland could be achieved only with the consent of the majority in Northern Ireland. The Declaration created the premises for a peace process consisting of IRA cease-fire and decommissioning (1994). In spite of the ending of the IRA cease-fire in 1996 and the annual clashes in July because of the Protestant Orange Order march through Catholic areas, all parties (including Sinn Fein) entered peace talks. The result was the 1998 Good Friday Agreement which gave fair representation to Northern Ireland through its assembly, allowed cooperation between Dublin and Belfast and proposed the establishment of a British-Irish Council with members from both parts of Ireland and Westminster, the agreement being the key to all forms of cooperation up to the present. Meanwhile, Northern Ireland remained posited between the hope of firm peaceful beginnings and the memory of old hatreds. The maintenance of the new and just society ultimately depended on the ingenuity, goodwill and spirit of compromise of its people and their leaders, which have been shown by more recent generations contributing to the reconciliation process. Such sentiments were expressed by Seamus Heaney: If revolution is the kicking down of a rotten door, evolution is more like pushing the stone from the mouth of the tomb. There is an Easter energy about it, a sense of arrival rather than wreckage, and 75 what is nonpareil about the new conditions is the promise they offer of a new covenant between people living in this island of Ireland. For once, the language of the Bible can be appropriated by those with a vision of the future rather than by those who sing the battle hymns of the past. (Garland “An Interview with Seamus Heaney” 16) The hope for a non-violent outcome lies in the dual Irish inheritance, in the interaction between different cultures on the Irish soil (Stanca, Duality of Vision in Seamus Heaney’s Writings 51-54). Longley’s volume An Exploded View contains dialogues with other Northern Irish poets of his generation as responses to the Troubles. There are poems dedicated to Derek Mahon, James Simmons and Seamus Heaney, these texts offering the poet the possibility to express his political views at the outbreak of violence and also his literary preferences. “To James Simmons” urges a kind of bravado in front of violence; in “To Derek Mahon”, the poet guiltily admits that they have responded insufficiently or inadequately to “the stereophonic nightmare/ Of the Shankill and the Falls” (Brown “Mahon and Longley ... 142”). “To Seamus Heaney” also draws attention to the danger of looking for a refuge in a pastoral landscape, “The the small subconscious cottage where/ The Irish poet slams his door/ On slow-worn, toad and adder” (Brown “Mahon and Longley ... 142”). The poems in which the poet confronts the violence in Northern Ireland, such as “Wounds” and “Wreaths”, focus on victims rather than on heroes. In the poem “Wounds” the murdered Irish dead are evoked with reference to the father’s death as a “belated casualty” of the war in which the “Ulster division” fought on the Somme: Here are two pictures from my father’s head – I have kept them like secrets now: First, the Ulster division at the Somme Going over the top with ‘Fuck the Pope!’ ‘No surrender!’: a boy about to die, Screaming ‘Give’em one for the Shankill!’ ....................................................................... I bury beside him Three teenage soldiers, bellies full of Bullets and Irish beer, their flies undone. .................................................................... Also a bus conductor’s uniform – He collapsed beside his carpet slippers 76 Without a murmur, shot through the head By a shivering boy who wandered in Before they could turn the television down Or tidy the supper dishes. To the children, to a bewildered wife, I think ‘Sorry Missus’ was what he said. (Poems 1963-1983, 86) Personal pain experienced when touching the dying father is meant to mediate public pain of witnessing the victims of brutal murders in Northern Ireland conflicts. The father and the other victims (three soldiers and a bus conductor murdered in front of his family in his house) are buried with military honours, but that does not matter, it is their ordinariness and their awe in front of a force they cannot cope with or understand that matter. Thus, the soldiers die “bellies full of beer, their flies undone” and the bus conductor dies “beside his carpet slippers” (Brown “Mahon and Longley ...” 144). The father is again evoked in the text “In Memoriam” with reference to the WWI. The killing fields of the Great War in which his father was a soldier in the British Army represents for the poet a site of conflict in general, evoked in poems such as “No Man’s Land”, “Master of Ceremonies”, “Second Sight”, “The War Graves”. Between the corpses and the soup canteens You swooned away, watching your future spill. But, as it was, your proper funeral urn Had mercifully smashed the smithereens, To shrapnel shards that sliced your testicle. That instant I, your most unlikely son, In No Man’s Land was surely left for dead. Blotted out from your far horizon. As your voice now is locked inside my head, I yet was held secure, waiting my turn. (“In Memoriam”, Poems 1963-1983 48) The sequence “Wreaths” elegises three ordinary victims of atrocity on the streets of Northern Ireland during the Troubles; they are so common that they are identified according to their occupations: “The Civil Servant”, “The Greengrocer” and “The Linen Workers”. The grief of the dependents becomes extremely powerful: 77 They rolled him up like a red carpet and left Only a bullet hole in the cutlery drawer: Later his widow took a hammer and chisel And removed the black keys from his piano. (“The Civil Servant”, Poems 1963-1983 148) Corcoran considers the third poem in the sequence one of the strongest written by Longley (186). It starts in a fantasy mode and ends in a realistic manner: Christ’s teeth ascended with him into heaven: Through a cavity in one of his molars The wind whistles: he is fastened for ever By his exposed canines to a wintry sky. (“The Linen Workers”, Poems 1963-1983 148) One may read the stanza in relation to one of Dali’s hallucinatory representations of Christ; it is a haunting image of Christ suspended with grinning teeth as a symbol of religious divisions causing sectarian murders. The teeth of Christ are superimposed on the image of his father’s false teeth and the teeth of the victims fallen in the road: I am blinded by the blaze of that smile And by the memory of my father’s false teeth Brimming in their tumbler: they wore bubbles And, outside of his body, a deadly grin. When they massacred the ten linen workers There fell on the road beside them spectacles, Wallets, small change, and a set of dentures: Blood, food particles, the bread, the wine. (“The Linen Workers”, Poems 1963-1983 148) The linen workers killed in a notorious incident debated on in the Northern Irish media are given a chance to a proper burial through the references to the Eucharistic symbols and the consolatory image of the father being taken care of before burial. The violence perpetrated on the bodies of the Northern Irish conflicts is discussed by Brewster in terms of abjection and the attraction in an article dedicated to representations of the body in Northern Irish poetry (21-39); Kristeva also sees abjection as a “vortex of summons and repulsion”: 78 These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons us and ends up engulfing us. (in Brewster 22) Regarding the horror generated by the poet viewing the brutalized dead bodies in Northern Irish poetry, Tom Herron detects three modes of dealing with the abjection and attraction of the fragmented body: the body as a spectacle or as a site on which we can read violence, sanctifying the body through a ritual and conveying a sense of immediacy though witnessing death and elegizing it (in Brewster 22), all of which are employed by Longley. Another critic, Peter McDonald sees Northern Irish poetry in complicity with violence as if after Yeats’s “terrible beauty” of “Easter 1916” Irish poets tried to aestheticize pain, death and war. Personal or classical narratives are therefore employed by the poet, an ex-Classics scholar, as means of indirection for the approach of contemporary bloody conflicts, such as in “Peace” (after Tibullus), in which Longley draws a parallel between classical Rome and contemporary Ireland (Corcoran 186). The pastoral conclusion of the text seeks the healing powers to facilitate distance from the political context: I would like to have been alive in the good old days, Before the horrors of modern warfare and warcries Stepping up my pulse rate. .................................................................................... But punch-ups, Physical violence, are out: you might as well Pack your kit-bag, goose-step a thousand miles away From the female sex. As for me, I want a woman To come and fondle my years of wheat and let apples Overflow between her breasts. I shall call her peace. (Poems 1963-1983, 169-171) The volumes Gorse Fires and The Ghost Orchid contain parallels regarding contemporary events in Ireland and Homeric episodes. The poem “Ceasefire” draws another parallel between an encounter between Achilles and Priam and the ceasefire of the IRA in 1994; the text focuses on the need for forgiveness by and towards those with bloody hands. “The Butchers” 79 also rewrites a passage from Homer in which Odysseus is coming back and kills the suitors and the disloyal servant girls, involving his son in the act as well: Odysseus, spattered with muck and like a lion dripping blood From his chest and cheeks after devouring a farmer’s bullock, Ordered the disloyal housemaids to sponge down the armchairs And tables, while Telemachus, the oxherd and the swineherd Scraped the floor with shovels, and then the portico And the roundhouse stretched a hawser and hanged the women So none touched the ground with their toes, like long-winged thrushes Or doves trapped in a mist-net across the thicket where they roost, Their heads bobbing in a row, their feet twitching but not for long. And when they had dragged Melanthios’s corpse into the haggard And cut off his nose and ears and cock and balls, a dog’s dinner, Odysseus, seeing the need for whitewash and disinfectant, Fumigated the house and the outhouse ... (in Volsik 677) In the introduction to Cenotaph7 of Snow: Sixty Poems about War (2003), a volume gathering his poems over four decades, Longley is again keen on putting some distance between himself and war poetry, in spite of his preoccupation with this topic: These are poems about war, not war poems. You have to be a war poet to write war poems. I am a non-combatant drawn to the subject for a number of reasons, including: 1) my father fought in the First World War, was decorated for bravery and – an old-fashioned patriot – joined up again in 1939; 2) my native Ulster has been disfigured for thirty years by fratricidal violence; 3) I revere the poets of 19141945 (Owen, Rosenberg, Sasson, Sorley, Blunden, Thomas, Jones) and their successors of 1939-1945 (Douglas, Lewes); 4) in my forties I rediscovered Homer, first the Odyssey and then the Iliad which is the most powerful of all war poems as well as being the greatest poem about death ... These, then, are the preoccupations behind Cenotaph of Snow. (qtd. in Christie 553-554) Although Longley offers this literary lineage regarding his poems about war, the issue is more complex due to his dual heritage, namely an Anglo7 Cenotaph means “empty tomb”. 80 Irish one. According to Christie, in the Irish tradition, he is marginalized for his Englishness (Protestant literary Unionism), whereas in the English tradition, he is marginalized for his Irishness (554), to which the Jewish roots from his grandmother’s side could be added to augment the outcast dimension. Thus, he does not fit any definite pattern, being: obviously involved in an Irish tradition but he also builds on an English tradition. In fact he is in the tradition of dealing with tensions between traditions. He is constantly talking about Englishness and Irishness, urban and pastoral ... It was much easier to recognize Heaney as rural Irish Catholic ... And even some like Mahon was more easily identifiable with his urban Belfast angst. Longley didn’t fit either of those patterns and so it made it more difficult for him to find a niche. (Brearton qtd. in Christie 554) Therefore, Longley felt his resemblance with Isaac Rosenberg and his Anglo-Jewish tradition. And he wrote a poem initially entitled “For Isaac Rosenberg”, which later became “No Man’s Land”, focusing on marginalization and identity politics in family and literature. The poet brings together his literary father and real father through what he considers a common heritage: The “two World Wars were part of my family history before they became part of my imaginative landscape. Sometimes I listen to Owen and Rosenberg as though they were my dad’s drinking and smoking companions, sharing a Woodbine behind the lines during a lull. (qtd. in Christie 555) Moreover, Longley connects, in the same text, his Anglo-Irish ancestors with Rosenberg’s. He pays homage to his Jewish grandmother, Jessica Abrahams, by picturing her as marginalized in family history as Rosenberg was marginalized in literary history: I Who will give skin and bones to my Jewish granny? She has come down to me in the copperplate writing Of three certificates, a dog-eared daguerreotype And the one story my grandfather told about her. He tossed a brick through a rowdy neighbour’s window As she lay dying, and Jessica, her twenty years 81 And mislaid whereabouts gave way to a second wife, A terrible creature, a circle of Christian names. II I tilt her head towards you, Isaac Rosenberg, But can you pick out the echo of splintering glass From under the bombardment, and in No Man’s Land What is there to talk about but difficult poems? Because your body was not recovered either I try to read the constellation of brass buttons, Identity discs that catch the light a little. A shell-shocked carrier pigeon flaps behind the lines. (in Christie 556) The silence surrounding these characters prompts Longley to try and put pieces together and tell their stories, of early death and obscurity in family and literary history. The tragedy of the Holocaust is remembered through the poems “Buchenwald Museum” (The Ghost Orchid) and “Ghetto” (Gorse Fires), whereas further victims of the conflict in Northern Ireland appear in “The Ice-cream Man” (Gorse Fires) and “The Fishing Party” (The Ghost Orchid). Remembering tragedies through ceremony and commemoration in “War Graves” in the volume The Weather in Japan also acknowledge the dangers of sanitizing violent events. According to Fran Brearton, Longley could not be accused of aestheticizing suffering and tragedy; on the contrary: “the effective elegies are those which are anti-elegiac. They do not impose meaning or consolation on the inconsolable or incomprehensible, but instead point the inadequacy of traditional elegiac resources (in Brewster 24). Yet, Longley is strict about the demands of mourning: If we are not ever to know who bombed Enniskillen, Birmingham, Dublin and Monaghan, we can at least go on asking ‘Where are all the missing bodies of the last twenty-five years? Where have they been buried?’ In the ghastly paramilitary argot these are the ‘bog jobs’. (Longley qtd. in Brewster 26) Gerald Dawe discusses filiative and afiliative relationships, as defined by Said, and applies this theory to Longley’s verse (153-168); the filiative relationships mean the ties called family, home, class and country, the traditional links, which may be problematic and therefore replaced by 82 afiliative ones “a compensatory order that, whether it is a party, an institution, a culture, a set of beliefs, or even a world-vision, provides men and women with a new form of relationship” (Said qtd. in Dawe 153). Thus, Longley seeks to regain the family, home, class and country links following the example of Louis MacNeice as “a touchstone of what an Ulster poet might be” (Longley qtd. in Dawe 154): The grammar school I moved onto had enjoyed a radical reputation in the 19th century, and it remained a tolerant and pleasantly secular place. There I encountered that tough scepticism and disenchanted liberalism with which many educated and moderate Protestants who cannot accept either Nationalism or diehard Unionism fill the vacuum – qualities which have been most deeply articulated in the imagination of Louis MacNeice. (Longley qtd. in Dawe 154) In terms of tradition, besides MacNeice and Rosenberg, we can identify an “English” literary tradition which Longley has followed: Edward Thomas, Samuel Johnson, John Clare and the WWI poets and an artistic tradition including L.S. Lowry and Gerard Dillon. However, the literary antecedents are considered questionably English tradition, since it is about “mad” peasant Clare, Jewish Rosenberg and Johnson, a spokesman for the ordinary cultivated individual. Longley identifies with them as outsiders like himself, yet, Longley also retains his Northern Irish dimension as he has accepted his past (the Protestant city, the cultural ‘duality’, the shaky identity) (Dawe 161). The preoccupation with the poetic act itself is proved by many of Longley’s poems considering “Ars Poetica”, debating with enthusiasm the generative capacities of language and form: III I go disguised as myself, my own beard Changed by this multitude of distortions To stage whiskers, my hair a give away, A cheap weak, and my face a mask only – So that, on entering the hall of mirrors The judge will at once award the first prize To me and to all of my characters. V Someone keeps banging the side of my head Who is well aware that it’s his furore, 83 His fists and feet I most want to describe – My silence to date neither invitation Nor complaint, but a stammering attempt Once and for all to get him down in words And allow him to push open the door. VI I am on general release now, having Put myself in the shoes of all husbands, Dissipated my substance in the parlours Of an entire generation and annexed To my territory gardens, allotments And the desire – even at this late stageTo go along with the world and his wife. (Poems 1963-1983 139) Thus, the poet is constantly in search of the best form to render the plight of the people of Northern Ireland confronted with the Troubles, the elegy being usually his choice to mix personal grief and public speech. The poet’s ultimate goal has been to find some kind of truth, which is poetry itself, and to find values that matter on a personal and also general level. If the city is ordinarily evoked in a context of violence, nature and the landscapes of the West prove their healing powers. In poems like “Weather”, the poet faced nature becoming mesmerized and accepting solitude. With a wet sky low as The ceiling, I shelter Landmarks, keep track of Animals, all the birds In a reduced outdoors An open my windows, The wings of dragonflies Hung from an alder cone, A raindrop enclosing Brookweed’s five petals. (Poems 1963-1983 120) The five petals may stand for the five senses and they help in perceiving the beauty of wonderful nature. 84 The west of Ireland is presented as a compensatory space, a “home from home” (Longley qtd. in Dawe 164). The west is both home, family place, the familial ties, commitments, ideas and beliefs and a place of imagination, an icon recreated, a combination between reality and a dream world, in dialogue with other physical, social and cultural terms, as a means of revitalization for the nation. Miles from the brimming enclave of the bay I hear again the Atlantic’s voices, The gulls above us as we pulled awaySo munificent their final noises These are the broadcasts from our holiday. (“Leaving Innishmore”, Poems 1963-1983 54) Or watch myself, as through a sandy lens, Materialising out of the heat-shimmers, And finding my way for ever along The path to this cottage, its windows, Walls, sun and moon dials, home from home. (“The West”, Poems 1963-1983 94) Then a slow awakening to the swans That fly home in twos, married for life, Larks nestling beside the cattle’s feet And snipe the weight of the human soul. (“In Mayo”, Poems 1963-1983 119) Nature is a miracle to the poet, allowing a way of belonging, remembering and placing oneself in relation to a complex legacy. “The fauna and flora of the Irish countryside are reverently itemised and described with a naturalist’s knowledge and precision”: “wings, feathers, petals, birds’ eggs, nests, bones, wild flowers, pebbles, footprints and traces” (Brown “Mahon and Longley ...” 143). Imaginatively, the centre remains in Irish west and in the poet’s engagement with this world. In an interview mentioned by Pierce (52), Longley shows a hope that his Mayo poems may “irradiate the Northern darkness”; however, in his title poem “The Ghost Orchid” (1995), he shows darkness with a positive value: “just touching the petals bruises them into darkness” (Pierce 52). De Vries’s Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery assigns various connotations to darkness, such as primeval chaos, the feminine principle, mystery, evil, death, the Great Void, terrible judgment, spiritual need and ignorance (129). 85 Loosely speaking, there are positive and negative symbols of the dark: on the one hand, death, loss, evil, sorrow, nothingness, guilt, and, on the other hand, the universal substance, the maternal principle and mystery. The dark has also been traditionally associated with night, mother of good counsel and rest, which begins each day but also sets free the monsters of the unconscious. The season of darkness is considered to be winter, which is a terminal phase of the cycle of nature, but winter snow also prepares the seeds that will sprout in spring. Darkness signifies both death and birth. It also represents a desire to return to the fullness of mother-earth, a desire for origin and withdrawal. The value of darkness may consist, with the poethermit, in the complete withdrawal in order to know nothing of the external world. The imaginative powers of the Romantics stemmed from darkness, dear for its mystery, i.e. Keats’s “embalmed darkness”, Coleridge’s “deep romantic chasm” and Shelley’s “awful shadow of some unseen Power”. According to Shelley, a poet is: a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why. (Preda 99) Thus, Longley may have been inspired to play a game on the binary opposition darkness – light in the attempt to reverse the ordinary meaning and assign darkness a positive meaning in relation to Irishness. [The writer] would be inhuman if he didn’t respond to tragic events in his own community, and an irresponsible artist if he didn’t seek to endorse that response imaginatively. This will probably involve a deflection or zig-zag in the proper quest for imaginative autonomy – an attempt under pressure to absorb what in happier circumstances his imagination might reject as impurities. (Longley qtd. in Brewster 24) Ultimately, Longley, fascinated by the North’s violent present, attempts to purify the consequences of those tragic events and resettle order, thus, reverse the meaning of darkness or else after going through the Inferno of the Northern Irish city during the Troubles, the poet can now free himself though a communion with the Western landscape. 86 CHAPTER V DEREK MAHON: PAINTING HISTORY AND PLACELESSNESS Derek Mahon was born in Belfast in 1941 and educated at the Royal Belfast Academic Institution and Trinity College, Dublin, just like Longley, and where he read French, English and philosophy. He worked for some years in London as a journalist and screenwriter, specializing in the adaptation of Irish novels for television. He has been a critic for the Listener, poetry editor for the New Statesman and a regular contributor to the Irish Times. He was poet-in-residence at the New University of Ulster at Trinity College, Dublin (Ormsby 311). After two years in Kinsale, Co. Cork, he moved to Dublin in 1988. He has lived in London, Dublin and New York with sojourns in France and Italy (Brown “Mahon and Longley...” 133). He now lives in New York and works as a freelance writer and lecturer (Croty 253). In 1980, the Taoiseach Charles Haughey had announced the establishment of Aosdána, a self-electing elite of about one hundred and fifty Irish artists who had a basic income guaranteed by the state and the prestige of the membership, of which Mahon became a member. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he held lectures in European and American universities. He has received awards such as the American Ireland Fund Literary Award and the C.K. Scott-Montcrieff Prize for translation. Mahon has also been acclaimed for his translations: Molière’s The School of Wives, Selected Poems of Plilippe Jaccottet, and Euripides’ The Bacchae. With Peter Falon, he edited The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1990). The title of his first collection, Night-Crossing, may have been inspired by the mail-boat crossing of the Irish sea in the past, and it signals, according to Brown, “a migratory imagination for which journeys away from and occasionally back to a native place would constitute a defining way of being in the world” (“Mahon and Longley...” 133). Though Mahon recoils from commitment and he often draws on the works of Hamsun, Villon, Uccello, Molière, Nerval, from whom he translated, the Northern crisis is present in his poetry; yet, there is a sense of scepticism about the value of poetry confronted with violence. Thus, Night Crossing (1968) negotiates the relationship of the self with the world. 87 The volume Lives (1972) brings a response to Seamus Heaney’s archaeological method and claims the impossibility of reconciliation with the past. Night Crossing and Lives share an attitude to history common among the friends to whom the volumes are dedicated and could be characterized as existentialist, foreign, exotic. The volume The Snow-Party (1975) considers the fragile balance between order and chaos, on the background of a historical and moral catastrophe of humanity. Mahon’s early poetry shows apocalyptic landscapes haunted by disembodied voices, artistic exiles and outcasts. Poems 1962-1978 (1979), Courtyards in Delft (1981) and The Hunt by Night (1982) resume the topics of war, loss and decline. Antarctica (1985) depicts a symbolical landscape, a marine deserted landscapes of Ireland (Fairleigh 86) and Selected Poems (1991) brings together major poems by Mahon. The poet’s recent collections have shifted to longer, looser lines, conversational tones, a distant observation of urban life in the US through the volume The Hudson River (1995) and of the corporate development of Dublin (The Yellow Book, 1997). Mahon has been a poet of the city, Dublin, Belfast or New York, yet his urbanism has always been estranged, gloomy and of homeless. The Collected Poems of 1999 point to this hollowness at the heart of the universe, with the past offering no comfort in a selfreflexive poetry. Critics have seen him as the most technical of the Northern Irish poets of the 1960s. With respect to the afiliative ties in Mahon’s verse, his poems include self-conscious meditations on human flaws and characters challenging the community and the passage of time. “Grandfather”, “My Wicked Uncle”, “A Refusal to Mourn” and “Father in Law” portray his rebellious, controlling ancestors, from a perspective full of tenderness but also of irony and “Autobiographies” creates a sense of himself as a child controlled by uncertainty and imagination, typical of youngsters. Each night His shrewd eyes bolt the door and set the clock Against the future, then his light goes out. Nothing escapes him; he escapes us all. (“Grandfather”, Selected Poems 13) I think we would have had a lot in common – Alcohol and the love of one woman Certainly; but I failed the eyesight test When I tried for the Merchant Navy, And lapsed into this lyric lunacy. (“Father-in-Law”, Selected Poems 55) 88 2. The Lost Girls Eileen Boyd, Hazel and Heather Thompson, Patricia King – The lost girls in a ring On a shadowy school playground Like the nymphs dancing together In the Allegory of Spring. ............................................. 4. The Bicycle It went with me to Dublin Where I sold it the same winter; But its wheels still sing in the memory, stars that turn About an eternal centre, That bright spokes glittering. (“Autobiographies”, Selected Poems 85-88) The centre, his source of balance, is offered by a sense of artistic consciousness, a state in between a detached and an involved observer, which defines the poet’s relationship to the historical world and the past. In his attempt to recreate an alternative home “that transcend filiative bonds” (Dawe 154), Mahon is indebted for his verse to Louis MacNeice, praised in the poem “In Carrowdore Churchyard”, for example, and seen as a representative voice of estrangement; MacNeice’s exclusion from the charmed circle ... of Irish poets” may be a result of his refusal to express the national ideas which “after all, include patriotic graft and pious baloney” (Mahon qtd. in Dawe 154). Mahon seems to have taken over, according to Corcoran, “something of MacNeice’s visitor’s or tourist’s attitude to Ireland” (187). MacNeice’s status as an outsider is liberating for Mahon, a Belfast Protestant, educated at Trinity, but spending a lot of time travelling out of Ireland. There are several attempts in the early poems [of MacNeice] to establish an Irish persona, but none is very convincing. Ryan, in ‘Eclogue from Iceland’, describes himself as an “exile”, but there is a measure of disingenousness here. ‘Exile’, in the histrionic and approximate sense in which the world is used in Ireland, was an option available to Joyce and O’Casey, who ‘belonged’ to the people from whom they wished to escape. It was not available, in the same sense, to MacNeice, whose background was a mixture of Anglo-Irish and Ulster Protestant (C of I).Whatever his sympathies, he didn’t, by 89 class or religious background, ‘belong to the people’. How then, not sharing the general constraints, could he free himself from them? (Mahon qtd. in Dawe 154) Mahon’s poems, in the line set by MacNeice, express detachment from the family values that are at the core of (Irish) combative families or clans. In “The Last of the Fire Kings”, he claims he is “through with history”, refusing to “perpetuate/ the barbarous cycle” (in Volsik 675). Mahon shows a wish to be free from history, in that he is typically Irish, yet, he also wants to be free from this association as well. So, he identifies with writers like Denis Devlin and Sean O’Faolain, who considered the intellect a means of escape from an Irish archaic tradition and Joyce, Beckett and F. Stuart, as exiles, characterized by a form of the artist’s suffering rather than an Irish form of alienation. Mahon stands in the middle ground, as a world citizen, with an urbanity which springs from Belfast. In the poem “The Spring Vacation”, dedicated to Michael Longley, Mahon creates an image of Belfast as a desperate city; throughout his poetry, Mahon works and reworks his relationship to the city as an artist and Belfast remains influential, though rejected as Protestant Ulster. Mahon displays a vision of the modern city after some great war; human voices were silenced and often replaced by objects and the world seems doomed. The Yellow Book suggests a Dublin characterized by modern decadence, “a dystopia for an ageing aesthete” (Brown “Mahon and Longley ... 139”). “A Refusal to Mourn” signals a return to Ireland and to an old man living alone in a country farmhouse, having survived his wife and now only the clock ticks to fill the silence. In time, he will be buried and the grave stone will be silent. Thus, afterlife threatens to annihilate any endeavor and encourage depression. “Afterlives” and “Ecclesiates” also considers the issue of the afterlife. The former ponders on a return to Belfast, which is now unrecognizable, a place made placeless, as is the modern destiny of places. God, you could grow to love it, God-fearing, Godchosen purist little puritan that, for all your viles and smiles, you are (the dank churches, the empty streets, the shipyard silence, the tied-up swings) and shelter your cold heart from the heat of the world, from woman-inquisition, from the bright eyes of the children. (Selected Poems 28) 90 Home, thus perceived from afar, is often associated with despair and displacement. Outcasts, outsiders and exiles of all kinds are praised in Mahon’s verse: Bertold Brecht, Knut Hamsun, Ezra Pound, Marylin Monroe, De Quincey, Van Gogh, Malcolm Lowry, Ovid and Villon. Mahon’s sense of exile is somehow associated with an attraction for France and French artists. He translated Corbière, Nerval, Rimbaud and Plilippe Jaccottet and admired European painting (Van Gogh, Renoir, Uccello and Pieter de Hooch). Therefore, he constantly defines his Irishness in relation to other places, France, America, London, Surrey and Canada. Neil Corcoran placed Mahon’s poems into two categories: the “science fiction” poems, such as “An Image from Beckett”, “Lives” and “Going Home”, in which characters view the present from a broad posthistorical perspective, typical of Beckett’s plays or of Ovid’s vision in Metamorphoses: They will have buried My great-grandchildren, and theirs, Beside me by now With a subliminal batsqueak Of reflex lamentation. Our knuckle bones Litter the rich earth Changing, second by second, To civilization. (“An image from Beckett”, Selected Poems 34-5) And often thought if I lived Long enough in this house I would turn into a tree Like somebody in Ovid -A small tree certainly But nevertheless a tree (“Going Home”, Selected Poems 96) and the poems of desolate places, usually in Ireland, such as “North Wind: Portrush”, “Rathlin”, “A Garage in Co. Cork”, “A Disused Shed in Co. Wicklow” (190). The deserted landscapes of Derry, Portrush and Rathlin 91 evoked in these texts appear to have the aura of paintings by Hooch8 or Uccello9, with which they share a real or illusory freedom from the pressure of history. The whole island a sanctuary where amazed Oneiric species whistle and chatter Evacuating rock-faced and cliff-top. Cerulean distance, an oceanic hazeNothing but sea-smoke to the ice-cap And the odd somnolent freighter. Bombs doze in the housing estates But here they are through with history Custodians of a lone light which repeats One simple statement to the turbulent sea. (“Rathlin”, Selected Poems 122) I shall never forget the wind On this benighted coast. It works itself into the mind Like the high king of a lost Lear-spirit in agony Condemned for eternity To wander cliff and cove Without comfort, without love, It whistles off the stars And the existential, black Face of the cosmic dark. We crouch to roaring fires. (“North Wind: Portrush”, Selected Poems 124) Both types of poems, the science fiction ones and those of the desolate places, use what Mahon himself calls, from a true ecocrtical perspective, “the mute phenomenon”, i.e. the elements, nature surrounding us and often ignored but on which we could read various lessons or morality or metaphysics. The alienated mind of the speaker finds its mode of expression 8 Pieter de Hooch, a painter belonging to the Dutch Golden Age, 17the century, famous for his genre paintings. 9 Paolo Uccello, Italian painter of the 15th century, famous for the new heroic style of early Renaissance. 92 in the evocation of storm, rain, wind, coldness, waves and an utter emptiness. In this context of places and the stories behind them, the literary references in “Beyond Howth Head” are centered on a search for freedom and pleasure. Mahon revisits Edmund Spenser’s Veue of the Present State of Ireland, an example of Tudor imperialism at its best, a text conceived when the latter poet was staying at Kilcolman Castle (Cork, 1587-1598), when the castle was burnt by the Irish rebelling. ‘Lewed libertie’, whose midnight work disturbed the peace of Co. Cork and fired Kilcolman’s windows when the flower of Ireland looked to Spain, come back and be with us again! But take a form that sheds for love that prim conventual disdain the world beyond knows nothing of; and flesh, an aisling, through the dawn where Yeats’s hill-men still break stone. (Selected Poems 45) For Spenser, “lewde libertie” designs the rebellion leading to the destruction of the castle. For both Spenser and Mahon, the background of a divided Ireland is the present heritage. For Mahon, however, “lewde libertie” means a quest for pleasure and freedom, which is difficult to define. Where is freedom? In the Celtic past, the Beckettian type, the war, structuralist linguistics or Georgian Dublin? Perhaps in the writing of humorous, knowing, sophisticate poetry. Another insight into the past is offered by “Courtyards in Delft”, which is an analysis of the Dutch Pieter de Hooch’s painting of 1659, irradiating an order immune to time passage. The painting is a portrayal of Dutch bourgeois propriety, of Protestant, colonial ideology, which represses everything. Finally, the provincial light of Delft10 envelops the poet himself, an inhabitant of Delft, as opposed by the chaotic image of the Maenads11 smashing crockery: I lived there as a boy and know the coal Glittering in its shed, late-afternoon 10 Historical town in the Netherlands, painted by Vermeer and de Hooch. The Maenads or Bacchantes are female devotees of god Dionysus, displaying a wild behavior and accompanying him in the rituals. 11 93 Lambency informing the deal table, The ceiling cradled in a radiant spoon. I must be lying low in a room there, A strange child with a taste for verse, While my hard-nosed companions dream of war On parched veldt12 and fields of rain-swept gorse; For the pale light of that provincial town Will spread itself, like ink or oil, Over the not yet accurate linen Map of the world which occupies one wall And punish nature in the name of God. If only, now, the Maenads, as of right, Came smashing crockery, with fire and sword, We could sleep easier in our beds at night. (Selected Poems 120-1) Mahon draws attention to the parallel between Delft and his contemporary Belfast, both offering scenes of dissenting, in the context of repression of admitting the violence which constitutes the basis of the social structures in late 1960s Belfast and South Africa. Violence of British and Dutch imperialism and its consequences, destruction, chaos and apocalypse, and its civilized repression are veiled, yet easy to guess for those who have witnessed the working of civilizations for ages from the inside. “Courtyards in Delft” and “Penhurst Place” show Irishness in a larger context of places juxtaposed. In the latter, the famous house of the Sidneys, celebrated by Ben Johnson in a poem ‘To Penhurst’ as an idyllic space of good life, is discovered as being less idealizing and a home of “intrigue and venery” an where the courtiers have nightmares about the Spanish ships around Kinsale, which disturb the English pastoral. A pearl face, numinously bright, shining in silence of the night, a muffled crash of smoldering logs, bad dreams of courtiers and of dogs, the Spanish ships around Kinsale, the screech-owl and the nightingale, the falcon and the turtle dovecome live with me and be my love. (Selected Poems 75) 12 Wide rural open spaces of South Africa. 94 “Penhurst Place” may be read in a pair with another poem, “Ford Manor”, which praises the flora and fauna of the countryside near Gatwick airport south London. Both poems seem to testify of a certain attraction of the English rural scenes depicted in a pastoral manner. Yet, as the former “evokes the origins of the modern world in its reference to early modern colonial buccaneering”, the latter is equally aware of modernity due to the flights from Tokyo, New York or Rome (Brown “Mahon and Longely ...136). Places as stabilizing points of reference seem dead to the modern world, hence, the poet’s obsession with them and the multitude of placename poems “Rathlin”, “Old Roscoff”, “Mt Gabriel”, “Achill”, “Kinsale”, etc.. Mahon invests places with the meaning of loss and it looks as if the separation from the native place has made “exile, homelessness, loneliness, the defining conditions of modernity” (Brown “Mahon and Longely ...137). There are many other examples of indirect approach to the historical background, besides the ones already mentioned on imperialism and colonialism. “Nostalgias”, “Songs of Praise” tell of the ancient times; “Death and the Sun” brings together Camus’ time of the plague and the disease of violence spreading during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The lights are going on in towns that no longer exist. Nigh falls on Belfast, on the just and the unjust, On its Augustinian austerities of sand and stone While Sisyphus’ descendants, briefly content, Stand in the dole queues and roll their own. Malraux described these preterite to you As no longer historically significant; And certainly they are shrouded in white dust. All souls leprous, blinded by truth, each ghost Steams on the shore as if awaiting rescue. (Selected Poems 192-3) “A Disused Shed in County Wexford” was called by Kiberd as “the finest poem written by his generation of Irish artists – the speaker seems to open a door onto those earlier victims imagined now as mushrooms” (600). The poem, dedicated to J.G. Farrell, author of the fine novel Troubles (1970), evoking the declining fate of the Anglo-Irish, was written before the Troubles, at a time when there was another attempt at economic cooperation between the Irish government and Stormont. The poet brings together a disparate trio of sites, Peruvian mines, the concentration camps at Treblinka and Pompeii, which are imagined as inhibited by spirits. A parallel is drawn between these sites and a disused shed in the backwater of South-East 95 Ireland. The poem is about listening to the past and allowing room for the mute. Lost lives are Mahon’s obsession. A half century, without visitors, in the dark – Poor preparation for the cracking lock And creak of hinges. Magi, moonmen, Powdery prisoners of the old regime, Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream At the flesh-bulb firing squad we wake them with Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms. Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms, They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith. They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way, To do something, to speak on their behalf Or at least not to close the door again. Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii! ‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say. ‘Let the god not abandon us Who have come so far in darkness and in pain. We too had our lives to live. You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary. Let not our naïve labours have been in vain!’ (Selected Poems 63) The poem, intertextual with Farrell’s novel, moves towards fantasy. The mushrooms, in the hands of a nightmare, patient, enduring, become symbolical of lives lived in prison, of the lot of the forgotten and decaying; the destiny of the mushrooms becomes intertwined with that of the AngloIrish. The poet, similar to a tourist, becomes an “accidental intruder on suffering which are not his own” (Corcoran 191); the poet-photographer had the role to share the suffering and not to close the door on them again. The mushrooms want to escape the darkness of history and their only refuge seems to be into art. “The sci-fi aspect of the poem gives it an eerie strangeness, as if the residually human, with its places, lives and histories, is an anachronism which nevertheless makes its claim on the present” (Brown “Mahon and Longley ... ” 141). In the attempt to pin down his place within a tradition, Mahon establishes a dialogue with contemporary fellow poets. For instance, “Lives”, the poem dedicated to Seamus Heaney, starts with the image of a 96 golden torc being buried for two thousand years in the earth before assuming various identities, such as a bump of clay on a Navaho rug, an oar, a tongue of bark in Africa or a stone in Tibet; the poem is a comment on the poet’s predicament and on Heaney’s attitude regarding violence and the poet as anthropologist. It all seems A little unreal now, Now that I am An anthropologist With my own Credit card, dictaphone, Army-surplus boots And a whole boatload Of photographic equipment. I know too much To be anything any more; And if in the distant Future someone Thinks he has once been me As I am today, Let him revise His insolent ontology Or teach himself to pray. (“Lives”, Selected Poems 36-8) Mahon, like Heaney, is in a constant struggle with his questions regarding violence, the function of poetry and contemporary violence. “Rage for Order” opens with a dream of structure, architecture and coherence, but despair and the ironies must not be ignored. “The Last of the Fire Kings” features the poet caught in politics and violence; the king chooses suicide rather than waiting to be ritually murdered by his successor and thus, he may put an end to the cycle of violence and barbaric ritual. Demanding that I inhabit. Like them, a world of 97 Sirens, bin-lids And bricked-up windows – Not to release them From the ancient curse But to die their creature and be thankful. (Selected Poems 58) According to Corcoran, the “poem poses at its most nakedly binary in Mahon the terms of the essential opposition: poet against people; free poem against commitment to tribal (or sectarian) mores; sophisticated selfsacrifice against atavistic feeling” (190). “The Snow Party” and “Thammuz” represent other meditations on the relationship between civilization and barbarity, like in the works of his fellow writers John Montague, Seamus Heaney and Thomas Kinsella; the writer under the pressure of contemporary circumstances claimed that “contact with violence is regarded by some as a stimulus to the deep energies of creation” (Deane 162). Mahon’s poetry enacts “a drama of belonging and not belonging to a county itself isolated from world history, divided within itself, obsessed by competing mythologies, Northern and Southern, ambiguously ensnared in the subtle politics of colonialism and independence, a central void with violent peripheries” (Deane 159). According to Terence Brown in Northern Voice: Poets from Ulster (1975), Mahon is included in the “Protestant poetry” group, yet the poet claims a disengagement from historical commitment. “If the end of this art is peace, its origin is in the violence of the actual” (Deane 164). Mahon’s example is similar to that of his fellow Northern poet Seamus Heaney, who comments on his exile from the North into Co. Wicklow, in the poem “Exposure” (North) for instance, and shows the paradox between his attempt to escape the North by isolation and the exposure to history which comes with it. “Exile may be a necessary condition for the writing of poetry but that the poetry is itself conditioned by the very history which made the exile necessary in the first place” (Deane 164-165). At other times, the poet, like Longley, withdraws into the West to look for a refuge (“Teaching in Belfast” and “Aran”) and a sense of belonging. I close the pub door gently and step out Into the yard, and the song goes out, And a gull creaks off from the tin roof Of an out-house, planning over the ocean, Circling now with a hoarse inchoate Screaming the boned fields of its vision. 98 God, that was the way to do it, Hand-clasping, echo-prolonging poet! (Selected Poems 31) Mahon’s poetry remains haunted with the possibility of establishing a sense of consecutiveness again by resorting to a globalised perspective, such as in “The Globe in North Carolina”, in which the planet is imagined like home for a moment, or to French landscape, as in “Four Walks in the Country Near Saint-Brieuc”, under the influence of Philippe Jaccottet: Suddenly, near at hand, the click of a wooden shoe An old woman among the primeval shapes Abroad in a field of light .... (in Brown, “Mahon and Longley...” 139) Mahon’s version of Jaccottet’s French landscape is calm, serene, ahistorical and ecopoetic, displaying the natural elements: trees, flowers, the sun, the moon, mountains, the wind, water, birds, roads, gardens, etc.. Regarding his responses and attitudes, Mahon sees them as “Protestant products of an English educational system, with little or no knowledge of the Irish language and an inherited duality of cultural reference. They are a group apart, but need not be considered in isolation, for their very difference assimilates them to the complexity of the continuing Irish past” (in Dawe 155). This is precisely the duality of the Northern Protestant identity that gives its distinctiveness from standard English and Irish references. Mahon insists on interpreting this distinctiveness as a statement of modern poetic sensitivity rather than a close involvement with the Irish society and he also insists on the idea of fragmentariness as a defining mode for himself and for his fellow poet Michael Longley. The poems “Jail Journal” and “The Attic”, dedicated to John and Evelyn Montague, show the world brooding on itself and the poet solitary. Silent by ticking lamplight I stare at the blank spaces, Reflecting the composure Of patient surfaces – I who know nothing Scribbling on the off-chance, Darkening the white page, Cultivating my ignorance. (Selected Poems 102) 99 The war “is not, of course, between Protestant and Catholic but between the fluidity of a possible life ... and the rigor mortis of archaic postures, political and cultural. The poets themselves have taken no part in political events, but they have contributed to that possible life, or the possibility of that possible life for the act of writing is itself political in the fullest sense. A good poem is a paradigm of good politics – of people talking to each other, with honest subtlety, at a profound level. It is a light to lighten the darkness; and we have darkness enough, God knows, for a long time” (Mahon in Dawe 166). 100 CHAPTER VI PAUL MULDOON: A PLAYFUL APPROACH TO IRISHNESS Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in Co. Armagh and grew up near the Moy, Co. Tyrone. He was educated at St. Patrick’s College, Maghera, Co. Armagh and then at Queen’s University, Belfast, where he was taught by Seamus Heaney. Muldoon worked as a radio producer for the BBC Belfast until he moved to the US in the late 1980s. He also taught at Cambridge, Columbia and Princeton Universities (Ormsby 314). He now lives and works in New Jersey, where he directs the creative writing programme at the University of Princeton (Croty 337). Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry, Muldoon offers a new perspective on the colonial legacy. His has been offering one of the post-nationalist, post-unionist and post-colonial responses of Northern Irish poets to the tradition of writing about place in Ireland. Muldoon’s poetry has been about resisting the pressures of accountability to place and assuming a political position. Among the works edited, we mention The Scrake of Dawn (1979), an anthology of poems for young people in Northern Ireland and The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1986). Muldoon is also the author of a libretto, Shining Brow (1992). Muldoon’s volumes of verse testify of a poet focusing on a postmodern perspective on personal identity, cultural differences and the conflict of identities because of the colonial legacy in Northern Ireland as he considers that the Troubles need careful handling. New Weather (1973) is followed by Mules (1977), centred on differences of life and language in the North. Why Brownlee Left (1980) and Quoof (1983) contain geographical and literary references that become symbolical. Then come The Wishbone (1984) and Selected Poems 1968-1983 (1986). With Meeting the British (1987), ordinary events, banality become mythology. Madoc: A Mystery (1990) displays a mixture of real and assumed cultural ties and puns; there are many episodes of macabre humour with grisly details featuring the body as a spectacle “speaking” violence; every impulse at coherence in the volume is disturbed by dirt and bodily destruction (Gilsenan Nordin 33). The poem “Madoc” by Robert Southey is a pretext for Muldoon’s text, which evokes Southey and Coleridge’s plans, a century earlier, to establish a pantisocratic community beyond the Atlantic, in New England. The Annals in Chile (1994), including an emotional dedication to 101 the artist Mary Farl Powers13 (Fairleigh 114), was followed in 2002 by Moy Sand and Gravel, a grand plan to bring his readers into confrontation with the dark matters of existence (MacFarlane in Warman 722), and in 2004 by Horse Latitudes. In his study of The Poetry of Paul Muldoon (2008), Jefferson Holdridge discusses Muldoon as a major poet of late twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century (Conner 71-73). Holdridge distinguishes a double approach to Muldoon’s works: a postmodern sense of play, satire and suspicion, possibly in the attempt to offer a critique of the conflicting versions of (Northern) Irish cultural identity, and, the second, “a traditionally romantic vision of the redemptive possibilities of art” (Holdridge qtd. in Conner 71). In relation to this ludic nature of Muldoon’s poetry, Heaney sees it is as a matter of excess; Frost was speaking of the art of filling a cup up to the brim or even above the brim, whereas Keats’s view of poetry is that it is excess that surprises the reader (Finders Keepers 395), these views characterising Muldoon’s verse. Holdridge also mentions the literary influences Muldoon’s creation has been impregnated with: the poetry of MacNeice, Auden, Frost, W. Stevens and Yeats. Regarding the poet’s resemblance to Heaney and his inclusion in the group of Northern Irish poets, who are writing their landscape and placing their own family histories into the land, the difference is that perhaps the other Irish Northern voices have resisted more the playful postmodern approach, which is profusely used by Muldoon. For the generation of poets of the early seventies (Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin, Ciaran Carson), Seamus Heaney appears as a figure of authority, to respect but also to challenge. Corcoran finds an example in Muldoon’s poem “The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants”, a response to Heaney’s poetry: Gallogly lies down in the sheugh to munch through a Beauty of Bath. He repeats himself, Bath, under his garlic-breath. Sheugh, he says. Sheugh. He is finding that first ‘sh’ increasingly difficult to manage. Sh-leeps. A milkmaid sinks her bare foot 13 Irish artist (1948-1992), died of cancer. 102 to the ankle in a simmering dung hill and fills the slot with beastlings for him to drink. (Selected Poems 1968-1983 84-109) Gallogly, the hero of this epic, is pronouncing the Northern Irish dialect word for ‘ditch’, ‘sheugh’. For Heaney, the ‘gh’ in his poem “Broagh”, which strangers found difficult to pronounce, becomes symbolical of the connection between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland in spite of all problems. Muldoon’s character, tramp-like, does not have any problems to manage the ‘sh’; that only emphasizes his stereotypical nature. Muldoon has adopted a habit of finishing his volumes with a long, concluding poem, such as “The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants” for Quoof and “Yarrow” for The Annals of Chile. In “The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants” the Trickster legends of the Winnebago Indians supply a framework for a reading of Northern Ireland in its contemporary crisis. Gallogly, the protagonist, travels from Belfast to New York starting from the statement he “has only to part the veil/of its stomach wall/to get right under the skin .../of the horse in Guernica” (in Warman 715). A few lines below, an account of the shooting of a soldier occurs, pointing to the mixture of tones and topics: You could, if you like, put your fist in the exit wound in his chest. He slumps in the spume of his own arterial blood like an overturned paraffin lamp. (in Warman 716) According to Kendall, the poem “obliquely conveys the terrible ‘Truth’ that in a violent society, perspectives quickly become lost, motives and identities obscure” (qtd. in Warman 717). Whereas, Edna Longley claims that the poem’s political message remains, above all, its medium, and its medium is metamorphic ... Muldoon’s metamorphoses melt or expand rigid understandings of history; make us experience history as an arbitrary kaleidoscope, a form of mental illness. (qtd. in Warman 717) 103 “Yarrow” brings a phantasmagorical view of the Troubles through the adventures of a shape-changing hero. According to Heaney, it is a text about the growth of a poet’s mind, postmodern in speed and structure, but traditional in its focus on home and land, a Joycean work through the blending of the everyday and the learned (Finders Keepers 396). “Yarrow” enacts a rite of cleaning that never cleans through focusing on an image of the family vegetable garden full of yarrow, a blight but also a herb with healing properties. The poem may be an echo of “Incantata”, the elegy to Mary Farl Powers, who trusted alternative medicine to combat cancer (Gilsenan Nordin 33). Muldoon’s inference must be that Heaney’s preoccupation with Northern placename and dialect can itself be recuperated by a dangerous and phony kind of ‘Irishness’ from which Muldoon himself, formed by a cultural complex almost identical to Heaney’s (Northern, rural, Catholic, Queen’s Universityeducated) (Corcoran 206) wished to keep his distance. In spite of staying aloof from the use of the Irish language, Muldoon is certainly familiar with it; he translated from the works of the contemporary poets Michael Davitt and Nuala Ni Dhomnaill and he mockingly revisited the old Irish poem Immramma Mael Duin, a voyage tell, through his “Immrama” poem: I, too, have trailed my father’s spirit From the mud-walled cabin behind the mountain Where he was born and bred, TB and scarlatina, The farm where he grew first hired out, To Wigan, to Crewe junction, A building-site from which he disappeared And took passage, almost, for Argentina. The mountain is coming down with hazel, The building-site a slum, While he has gone no further than Brazil. That’s him on the verrandah, drinking rum With a man who might be a Nazi, His children asleep under their mosquito-nets. (Selected Poems 1968-1983 52) 104 Answering to Heaney, Muldoon tries to avoid a sense of obligation and responsibility featured prominently in the former’s works, though actually Heaney’s poems also move towards a sense of liberation since the volume Field Work. The single authoritative centre and ‘voice’ of a Heaney poem is decisively rejected in favour of complex and complexly ironic kinds of fragmentation, intertextuality, formal experimentation, analogising, synthesising, tale-telling and gaming in which ‘Ireland’ is offered a series of alternative identities. (209) “Where Heaney gives earnest witness, Muldoon the ironist ducks and weaves, endlessly evasive, polyvocal and outlandish” (Wheatly qtd. in Warman 708); “Heaney’s poetry seems unforced, deep, natural ... Muldoon’s is tricky, clever, tickled by its own knowingness” (Carey qtd. in in Warman 708). For example, “Our Lady at Ardboe” treats a serious subject in a playful manner, advocating a mood of uncertainty, openness and tolerance: Who’s to know what’s knowable? Milk from the Virgin Mother’s breast, A feather off the Holy Ghost? The fairy thorn? The holy well? .................................................... Mother of our Creator, Mother of our Saviour, Mother most amiable, Mother most admirable. Virgin most prudent, Virgin most venerable, Mother inviolable, Mother undefiled. As I walk waist-deep among purples and golds With one arm as long as the other. (Selected Poems 1968-1983 29) Muldoon also responds to Derek Mahon’s text “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” through his “Gathering Mushrooms”, in which he recalls his father, a mushroom-farmer in Co. Armagh. The mushrooms induce a hallucinating state at the end of the poem, in which the self is turned into a talking horse’s head: Come back to us. However cold and raw, your feet were always meant 105 to negotiate terms with bare cement. Beyond this concrete wall is a wall of concrete. and barbed wire. Your only hope is to come back. If sing you must, let your song tell of treading your own dung, let straw and dung give a spring to your step. If we never live to see the day we leap Into our true domain, lie down with us now and wrap yourself in the soiled grey blanket of Irish rain that will, one day, bleach itself white. Lie down with us and wait. (Selected Poems 1968-1983 73) Corcoran reads these lines with reference to the IRA hunger-strikers who died in Long Kesh internment camp in 1981, beginning with Bobby Sands, who wrote verse on toilet paper. If we continue the dialogue with Mahon, the invitation is for the reader to wait for the right time to uncover the stories of these victims, but the whole idea of waiting is also ironical and hints to a certain extent to a state of passivity of which the Irish have often been accused. So, the poet’s attitude is ambivalent, showing both intimacy with the Troubles’ victims and detachment from the situation. Thus, Muldoon distances himself from the position of the one who suffered, often adopting an oblique approach. In his early poetry this indirect perspective resides in the manner in which victims of Northern Irish violence only register the events, keeping their distance and refraining from moral evaluation. In “The Field Hospital”, for instance, the only cause of the doctors is to save lives, which is however, questioned: Would this girl brought to our tents From whose flesh we have removed Shot that George, on his day off, Will use to weight fishing lines, Who died screaming for ether, Yet protest our innocence? (in Warman 709) “Good Friday, 1971. Driving Westwards” describes a car journey and an experience similar to a hit-and-run accident: 106 for a time I lost Control and she thought we hit something big But I had seen nothing, perhaps a stick Lying across the road. I glanced back once. And there was nothing but a heap of stones. In Gaoth Dobhair, I happy and she convinced Of the death of more than lamb or herring. She stood up there and then, face full of drink, And announced that she and I were to blame For something killed along the way we came. (in Warman 710) The text plays with the notions of responsibility and self-importance, being at the same time a critique of the Christian idea of guilt, blaming oneself and punishment. In the sonnet “The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife” (1987), the question is which story is prominent and which is secondary, the marriage between Strongbow14 and Aoife MacMurrough15, leading to the Norman conquest of Ireland, or the speaker’s meeting his dinner guest, Mary. The poet renders the historical event though the oblique lenses of the personal, in a way diminishing the importance of both. “Anseo” (Why Brownlee Left) also tackles the issues of sectarianism and violence in Northern Ireland without offering a moral interpretation of the situation. The character depicted in the text is Joe Ward, a classmate of the poet’s, who was reprimanded for failing to answer “Anseo” at roll-call as he was late; later, he joined the paramilitaries in the mountains, applying there the authoritarian system he had internalized: every morning at parade His volunteers would call back Anseo And raise their hands As their names occurred. (in Warman 713) 14 Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, important for his role of leading the Norman invasion of Ireland. 15 Daughter of Dermot MacMurrough, king of Leinster, who married Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, also known as Strongbow after the Norman invasion of Ireland. 107 “The Sightseers” shows the same playful, distant attitude towards an act of violence whose victim was an uncle, but the episode is listed together with other events – deaths in the family - in a natural, humorous manner: not to visit some graveyard – one died of shingles, one of fever, another’s knee turned to jellybut the brand-new roundabout at Ballygawley, the first in mid-Ulster. Uncle Pat was telling us how the B-Specials had stopped him one night somewhere near Ballygawley and smashed his bicycle And made him sing the Sash and curse the Pope of Rome. They held a pistol so hard against his forehead there was still the mark of an O when he got home. (in Warman 713) Though Muldoon insists that in the twenty-first century, “very little is as it seems” (in Conner 71), yet he still believes in the power of art to expresses suffering or happiness, such as demonstrated in his elegies to his mother’s death and the death of dear friends such as Mary Farl Powers or in the poem dedicated to the birth of his daughter or another one dedicated to his son. Again and again you'd hold forth on your own version of Thomism, your own Summa Theologiae that in everything there is an order, that the things of the world sing out in a great oratorio: it was Thomism, though, tempered by La Nausée, by His Nibs Sam Bethicket, and by that Dublin thing, that an artist must walk down Baggott Street wearing a hair-shirt under the shirt of Nessus. .......................................................................................................... I wanted it to speak to what seems always true of the truly great, that you had a winningly inaccurate sense of your own worth, that you would second-guess 108 yourself too readily by far, that you would rally to any cause before your own, mine even, though you detected in me a tendency to put on too much artificiality, both as man and poet, which is why you called me 'Polyester' or 'Polyurethane' ................................................................................................... Of the day your father came to call, of your leaving your sick-room in what can only have been a state of delirium, of how you simply wouldn't relent from your vision of a blind watch-maker, of your fatal belief that fate governs everything from the honey-rust of your father's terrier's eyebrows to the horse that rusts and rears in the furrow, of the furrows from which we can no more deviate than they can from themselves, no more than the map of Europe can be redrawn, than that Hermes might make a harp from his harpe, than that we must live in a vale of tears on the banks of the Lagan or the Foyle, than that what we have is a done deal, than that the Irish Hermes, Lugh, might have leafed through his vast herbarium for the leaf that had it within it, Mary, to anoint and anneal, than that Lugh of the Long Arm might have found in the midst of lus na leac or lus na treatha or Frannc-lus, in the midst of eyebright, or speedwell, or tansy, an antidote, than that this Incantata might have you look up from your plate of copper or zinc on which you've etched the row upon row of army-worms, than that you might reach out, arrah, and take in your ink-stained hands my own hands stained with ink. (“Incantata.” <http://thepoeticquotidian.blogspot.ro/2007/02/paulmuldoon-incantata.html) 109 “Incantata” (The Annals of Chile) deals with the premature death by cancer of a young, talented artist, commemorating her life and works and praising her struggle to reach spiritual and technical perfection. The poem is about the failure of controlling experience and the past. Unstable images of this love affair and their break-up are reconstructed by the poet’s memory, in a contemplation of how the two were actually never together; the breakdown of the lines on the pages is counterpart to the separation of the couple. The poet’s sorrow when confronted with the woman’s acceptance of fate is present, yet, it is diverted by references to Lucky’s “quaquaqua” monologue in Waiting for Godot and to the illogical speech in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (“quoiquoiquoiquoiqouiqouiquoiq”). I crouch with Belaqua and Lucky and Pozzo in the Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry, trying to make sense of the ‘quaquaqua’ of the potato-mouth; that mouth as prim and proper as it’s full of self-opprobrium, with its ‘quaquaqua’, with its Quoiquoiquoiquoiqouiqouiquoiq. (in Murphy 194) The poet expresses in “Sonogram” the joy at his daughter’s future birth in a surprising combination of ancient history, satellite technology and parental happiness. The idea of motherhood as centre involves a sense of failure through prenatal pictures changing into images of a woman hitchhiking and a satellite map of Ireland (Malone 1090). Only a few weeks ago, the sonogram of Jean's womb resembled nothing so much as a satellite map of Ireland: now the image is so well-defined we can make out not only a hand but a thumb; on the road to Spiddal, a woman hitching a ride; a gladiator in his net, passing judgment on the crowd. (“Sonogram”<http://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/poetr y_in_motion/atlas/newyork/sonogram/>) 110 In the poem “At the Sign of the Black Horse, September 1999” (Moy Sand and Gravel), Muldoon, father again in his fifties, writes, like Yeats in “A Prayer for My Daughter”, a poem to his son Asher, whose name in Hebrew means “blessed”, memorializing the Nazi Holocaust as well. The context is the aftermath of the Hurricane Flood in 1999, when the Delaware on the Raritan Canal broke the bank, somewhere close to where Muldoon lived with his wife (Pierce 270). As the river is carrying various items, the text tries to bring together the past and the present, the European and American-Jewish ancestors of Asher, Auschwitz being included in the frame of reference due to Muldoon’s newly acquired family. The flood gathers the fate of his child, Asher, the memory of the Irish people who built the canal and his Jewish family surviving the Holocaust. The poet’s son sleeps peacefully on the background of his ancestors’ traumatic history. Muldoon’s poems, while being “universal in significance, are also local in character” (Holdridge qtd. in Conner 72). In other words, individual poems on Irish characters, events and landscapes illuminate issues in society, culture and philosophy of general interest. Muldoon seeks to “create fables of social and political experience that uncover dark truths of human nature”, in a truly swiftian mode (Holdridge qtd. in Conner 72). The volume The Annals in Chile represents Muldoon’s heritage as a Northern Irish exile poet, permanently aware of the colonial relations that have moulded his world, in a mingling of codes and narratives, such as in “The Right Arm”: I was three-ish when I plunged my arm into the sweet-jar for the last bit of clove-rock. We kept a shop in English that sold bread, milk, butter, cheese, bacon and eggs, Andrews Liver Salts, and, until now, clove-rock. I would give my right arm to have known then how English was itself wedged between ecclesia and église. The English sky was its own stained-glass vault and my right arm was sleeved in glass that has yet to shatter. (Selected Poems 1968-1983 75-76) 111 Past and present are merged in an overwhelming atmosphere of displacement in which there are no more centres or controlling figures of authority with the exception of mother figures and father figures. The past has been usually engaged by contemporary Irish poets in order to show a new understanding of the present and traditional notions of identity but Muldoon’s viewpoints are different; they are about homelessness. The text helps the poet achieve a sense of distance from any sense of place associated with nationalist history. Another point worth mentioning is the failure of language to establish communication. Colonial encounters are treated from an ironical perspective; for example, in “Meeting the British”, there is an account of an encounter between A British general and tribe of Canadian Indians, the event being placed in the eighteenth century. The sharp allusion to colonial and imperial encounters in general and their Trojan gifts is the blankets offered by the general and which are embroidered with smallpox. We met the British in the dead of winter. The sky was lavender and the snow lavender-blue. I could hear, far below, the sound of two streams coming together (both were frozen over) and, no less strange, myself calling out in French across the forestclearing. Neither General Jeffrey Amherst nor Colonel Henry Bouquet could stomach our willow-tobacco. As for the usual scent when the Colonel shook out his handkerchief: C’est la lavande, une fleurmauve comme le ciel. They gave us six fishhooks and two blankets embroidered with smallpox. (in Ormsby 265-266) 112 Since his emigration to the US in 1987, Muldoon’s poetry has also been concerned with the tension between what the poet may leave behind and what he should bring with him to America. The volumes Madoc and The Annals in Chile show the poet’s engagement with American place and history even before his emigration; his poetry had been influenced by American poets such as Robert Frost and American popular culture and he imagined rural Ireland and America in similar terms. Madoc, for example, hints at a set of connections between the experience of the Irish and the native Indians of America (Kiberd 611-612). Throughout the volume The Annals of Chile, the poet is in search of healing alternatives and he reaches sites where “the boundary between the lost and the found, grief and recovery, is negotiated” (Batten qtd. in Gilsenan Nordin 34). According to Jacqueline Rose, mourning “no more comes to an end than history ... The idea that ... we sever our links with the dead does not seem to me an idea on which any kind of viable psychic or political future can be built” (qtd. in Gilsenan Nordin 35); thus, the solution could be an ambivalent attitude as memory comforts by confronting the pain. All in all, irrespective of his interest in Irish themes, Muldoon has been generally labelled as an exception to the usual Irish poetic development, represented by Montague, Kinsella, Longley, Mahon and Heaney. According to Corcoran (qtd. in Frawley 139), mid-twentieth century poetry made it clear how inseparable from matters of Irish history ideological representations of rural Ireland are: whether because the Famine is inscribed so deeply into the Irish landscape and psyche ... or because of the Valeran valorisation of an impossible ideal, or because, in a colonial and post-colonial country, matters of the land’s ownership are inevitably more fraught ... In many other postYeatsian poets of Irish rural life, particularly those from the North, these recognitions are also made, even in the great act of establishing Irish topographies with great imaginative definition and richness. Muldoon has denied or, at least questioned, this tendency he noticed in his fellow contemporary Irish poets: One way or another, it does seem that Irish writers again and again find themselves challenged by the violent juxtaposition of the concepts of ‘Ireland’ and ‘I’. Irish writers have a tendency to interpose themselves between the two ... either to bring them closer 113 together, or to force them further apart. It’s as if they feel obliged to extend the notion of being a ‘medium’ to becoming a ‘mediator’. (qtd. in Murphy 189) Muldoon’s poetry has been labelled a postmodern celebration of uncertainty, containing public and private spaces, unstable in relation to cultural memory in plain terms. Muldoon’s views can be related to those of Homi Bhabha, who imagines spaces as inter-national, deconstructing boundaries that limit difference within nationalist narratives. This approach differs from that of Seamus Deane and Terry Eagleton, for instance, as the two claim that it is necessary to preserve the memory of the colonial times in order to draw a lesson from it. Thus, his poetry is self-consciously fictional, creating a sense of community free from any foundational narratives (Malone 1103). While more straightforward (or perhaps more cynical) readers simply find, with Helen Vendler, ‘a hole in the middle where the feeling should be’, others will extrapolate from this absence an unspoken moral awareness all the stronger for its suspicion of the perils of articulation. (Warman 719) In a nutshell, beyond the playfulness of poetry a particular sense of uncertainty remains, similar perhaps to that in Heaney’s poetry: Muldoon’s bitter snarl behind his laugh, a certain tragic insistence that makes him to want to escape into poetry and makes him first disgruntled with poetry for not really offering an escape and, secondly, with himself for wanting to escape into the aesthetic at all. (Holdridge qtd. in Conner 73) The poet himself notices, and is keen on achieving it, that “the point in poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prode and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take out breath away” (Muldoon qtd. in Murphy 192). 114 CHAPTER VII TOM PAULIN: CENTOS OF COMMITMENT (TO ART) Tom Paulin was born in 1949, in Leeds, of an English father and a Northern Irish mother, and he grew up in Belfast, where he attended Annandale Grammar School. Later, he pursued his studies at the Universities of Hull and Oxford. He taught from 1972 at the University of Nottingham, where he was briefly Professor of Poetry, before being appointed lecturer in English at Hartford College, Oxford, in 1994. Paulin has also been a visiting lecturer at the University of Virginia, a founder-member and director of the Field Day Theatre Company and a prominent critic in print and media. Among the volumes published, we mention A State of Justice (1977), The Strange Museum (1987), Liberty Tree (1983), Fivemiletown (1987), Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (1992), Walking a Line (994), The Wind Dog (1999), The Invasion Book (2002). To these, we may add books of criticism (Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Perception, 1975, and Ireland and the English Crisis, 1985), plays (The Riot Act, 1985, rewriting Antigone’s story, Seize the Fire, 1990, rewriting Prometheus’s story, and The Hillsborough Script: A Dramatic Satire, 1987). He is also the editor of two controversial anthologies: The Faber Book of Political Verse (1986) and The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse (1990) (Ormsby 316). Seamus Deane considers that there is an antithesis between Paulin and Muldoon, the two poets being engaged in “a battle between a poetry of denial (Muldoon) and of commitment (Paulin)” (qtd. in Corcoran 208). This view could be applied especially to early Paulin: “an earnest, dour, tight-lipped, fricative poetry signalling an engaged Ulster conscience confessing” in verse (Corcoran 212). His poems are embedded in the political debate, showing a poet involved in the events during the Troubles in the North: Coffins are moored in its bays and harbours. A damp rag, it flies several flags – Bunting and boneyard streamers, the badges Of territory. In the waste, silent valleys Clans are at their manoeuvres. At the bottom of a cliff, on a tussock Of ground by a lean-to shed, a group Of men and women huddle, watching a man 115 Who tries, with damp matches, to light a board Washed on the coast by the grey sea. (“Cadaver Politic”, Ormsby 218) These poems offer a diagnosis of “cadaver politic”, constantly analysing the nature of the state in the first volume A State of Justice, through the use of concepts such as ‘history’, ‘spirit’, ‘form’ and ‘society’. The mottoes on the public buildings of Belfast are “emblems of failure”, which show us that “What the wrong gods established/ no army can ever save.” (“A Partial State”, The Strange Museum). The settings in the background of these political debates and violent events are appropriately bleak: urban wastelands, darkened border towns and deserted maritime areas. In the preface to The Faber Book of Political Verse, Paulin claims that poems [do not] exist in a timeless vacuum or a soundproof museum, and that poets are gifted with an ability to hold themselves above history, rather like skylarks or weather satellites. (qtd. in Murphy 196) Thus, Paulin’s first two volumes A State of Justice and The Strange Museum show his engagement with the political realities of Northern Ireland. Yet, the social engagement of his art is doubled by a belief in the ability of poetry to transcend historical contingency. An approach adopted by Paulin has been to merge the so-called objectivity of historical recording and the subjectivity of narrative. In “L’Envie de Commencement”, the poet imagines the historian as a painter in front of the blank canvas, “pure narrative before him”. In “Martello”, the speaker asks “Isn’t it a fiction that pretends to be fact/ like A Journal of the Plague Year?” (in Murphy 195). Thus, the poet, afraid of the limitations of a too obviously engaged poetry, resorts to certain elements meant to liberate the verse, such as gentle sexual relationships, references to Indian culture, rituals and ceremonies and a playful attitude, similar to a certain extent to that characteristic of Muldoon’s creation. The poem “The Other Voice” (The Strange Museum), for instance, shows a dialogue between the two tendencies in his verse: What does a poem serve? Only the pure circle of itself. Now, between two coasts, 116 The servants of the state Doze to the drum of engines. Hammered stars, a dark dream, The hard night in a dead bowl. Where a free light wakes To its spacious language Choice is still possible. I dream of a subtle voice, Stare in a mirror and pray To a shadow wandering Beyond the cold shores And the tides of the Baltic. (in Ormsby 223-224) The poem opens with biographical moments: a visit to an Anglican schoolmaster, a 1960s socialist prison cell in Belfast, which consider cultural identity connections and divisions to be extended into an account of another moment in history marked by revolutionary activity and the exemplary figures of Trotsky and Mandelstam. Trotsky’s self-sacrificial commitment and his revolutionary enthusiasm decrease in value when confronted with the “glossy brutalism” of “a regiment of clones” in contemporary Russia. Mandelstam, the great Russian symbolist poet murdered by Stalin, becomes, in Paulin’s text, the advocate of an art free of historical engagement (Corcoran 213): What cadences, what rich voices ‘Have you hardened against? What images have you broken? In the great dome of art ‘(It was this we longed for In our Petropolis) I am free of history. ‘Beyond dust and rhetoric, In the meadows of the spirit I kiss the Word.’ (in Ormsby 225) 117 Mandelstam’s presence triggers an image of release from the community responsibility for Paulin, in the debate between Trotsky’s engagement and Mandelstam’s aesthetic approach, the preference goes to the latter. The irony that remains, however, consists in the fact that, irrespective of how much Mandelstam may have tried to avoid involvement, he was inevitably drawn into the political entanglement and he lived as an inner exile in his country and eventually died a victim of the Stalinist state. If Yeats had his Ballylee Tower and Joyce his Martello Tower, Paulin responds to them, building his own liberating Northern Irish tower in poetry, in a dialogue full of vernacular urgency: -roofless since the state’s founding set on the hillside above Portnoo Post Office an entire deserted village even where the road gives up to its potholed ghost in a wilderness of scree and ironstone -from the dead martello down to the shed on the cement pier most any building in this squally clachan could quicken into newness -you can write them out in a verse or jump in a lorry rammed with cement and timber then bash bash bash till the day when you pain Wavercrest on the gatepost (in Croty 325) Paulin’s choice for liberation from history is prominent in the next volume, Liberty Tree, a book of the struggle for individuality in verse and of a protean approach between liberation and anger at feelings of responsibility. Fivemiletown resumes the intention of freedom through various means: playful syntax, overuse of historical and literary references, an explicit use of the post-structuralist language of Barthes, Derrida and de Man, a foregrounding of elements of nonsense and on a reliance on Northern Irish dialect (“fremd”, “senna”, “biffy”, “bistre”, “glooby”, “stramash”, “dayclean” and other), all in the attempt to redefine Northern Protestant consciousness from a more relaxed viewpoint. In the volume Fivemiletown, there is a comment on the Anglo-Irish Agreement, signed by the British and Irish governments at Hillsborough, 118 Co. Down on 15 November 1985. The poem expresses sympathy with Harold McCusker, the then deputy leader of the official Unionist Party16, a character invited to study not only his political affiliation but also his personal identity: All that Friday there was no flagno Union Jack, no tricoloron the governor’s mansion. (in Murphy 196) Paulin’s critique of Protestantism in his literary essays finds its counterpart in poems such as “Off the Back of a Lorry”, which offers a far from being idealistic image of the Protestant ethos: A zippo lighter and a quilted jacket, two rednecks throwing in a gleamy dinner, the flinty chipmarks on a white enamel pail, Paisley17 put pen to paper in Crumlin jail, a jumbo double fried peanut butter sandwich Elvis scoffed during the last diapered days – they’re more than tacky, these pured fictions, and like small ads in a country paper they build a gritty sort of prod baroque I must return to like my own boke. (in Croty 323-324) 16 As a political tradition, Irish unionism can be traced back to the 17th and 18th century patriotism which claimed that full political integration with Great Britain was preferable to a flawed or unattainable legislative independence (Connolly 596). 17 Ian Paisley, leader of extreme Protestant opinion in Northern Ireland, cofounder of the Democratic Unionist Party. 119 Excessive consumption is counterpart of Paisley in a show of selfmartyrdom in prison. “Desertmartin” (Liberty Tree) draws a parallel between Paisleyism and masculine Islam and the geometry of Egypt; it is an image of Ulster unionism devoid of any feelings, as forms of political extremism: It’s a limited nest, this place. I see a plain Presbyterian grace sour, then harden, As a free strenuous spirit changes To a servile defiance that whines and shrieks For the bandage of the letter: it shouts For the Big Man to lead his wee people To a clean white prison, their scorched tomorrow. Masculine Islam, the rule of the Just, Egyptian sand dunes and geometry, A theology of rifle-butts and executions: These are the places where the spirit dies. And now, in Desertmartin’s sandy light, I see a culture of twigs and bird-shit Waving a gaudy flag and curses. (in Croty 323) The Ulster Scots dialect “boke” (vomit) stresses a mixture of ironical distance and recognition, an overwhelming sense of baroque. The victims of such systems are sometimes made to feel abandoned by the very structures that once supported them and were in return reinforced by these people, like in “An Ulster Unionist Walks the Streets of London”: I grabbed a fast black – ack, I caught a taxi – to Kentish Town, then walked the streets like a half-foreigner among the London Irish. What does it feel like? I wanted ask them – What does it feel like to be a child of that nation? But I went underground to the Strangers’ House – 120 We vouch, they swore, We deem, they cried, till I said, ‘Out ... I may go out that door and walk the streets searching my own people’. (in Ormsby 227-228) Ulster Unionism is also perceived through a sense of the past, for instance, through a reading of the 1798 rebellion, a moment when the Presbyterian United Irishmen existed in an innocent foretime to the pact of Protestantism with imperialism: This poem by Rupert Brookeborough is all about fishing and the stout B-men (they live for always in our hearts, their only crime was being loyal), there is a lough in it and stacks of rivers, also a brave wee hymn to the sten-gun. (“A Written Answer” in Croty 324) Identity is defined with Paulin through the free space of the poem, which allows the I to ally, connect or dispute with the Other. Ultimately, the poet seeks to reach a stage where “the educated historical sense might recognise a more adequate future locked somewhere in the texts and wrong turnings of its Presbyterian tradition” (Corcoran 213). From Fivemiletown onwards, the volumes are dominated by soured sexual relationships and a rejection of the symbolic ground of the feminine, echoing ecofeminists. For example, “Mount Stewart” depicts an illicit affair hidden from the tribe; the poem is an ironic version of the tradition of dinnseanchas with the transformation of Mount Stewart into a Mount of Venus with the woman’s body as ground of representation. The poem “Breeze Marine” shows a Protestant Ulster’s ambivalent attitude to England though the failure of the connection between lovers. In the volume Walking a Line (1994), Paulin is travelling through darkness until reaching something more unpalatable “The Other England”, in which we witness lack of reverence, bodily decay and old age and an impotent body. The Wind Dog (1999) mocks reproductions of paintings in texts such as “Marc Chagall, Over the Town”. The Invasion Handbook (2002) represents a chronicle of the inter-war years in Europe with both sublime and nauseating moments and with historical catastrophes to be swallowed, as in “Albert 121 Speer at Berchtesgaden”, in which abjection is visited by the Third Reich (Brewster 31-33). Paulin goes against any idea of rigidity, fixity and authority. There are several texts that tackle this theme through the symbol of imprisonment: the “patterned god” (“Trine”); the poet lives in “a frozen state” (“What Kind of Formation are B Specials”); the poet revisits a text by André Chénier in the context of the 1981 Hunger Strike, claiming that the speaker accepts to live “dishonoured, in the shit” (“From the Death Cell: Iambes VIII”); in “Of Difference Does It Make” we are shown an image of “a mild and patient prisoner/ pecking through granite with a teaspoon”. The whole volume The Strange Museum as a matter of fact displays disregard for Calvinist predeterminism and rigid linear historical narratives, the part being considered “an autocracy”, “somewhere costive and unchanging”. In the poem “A Partial State”, the territory is “intractable and northern”, the pervading atmosphere being one of disappointment and disillusion (Murphy 195). Stillness, without history; until leviathan spouts, bursting through manhole covers. (in Murphy 195) “Leviathan” is symbolical for the forces that loom behind the Northern Irish society and is used again in the poem “In the Lost Province”, with a focus on cyclical violence. In the introduction to the 1996 collection of essays Writing to the Moment, Paulin shows his fascination with a type of writing which is “instant, excited, spontaneous, concentrated”, a writing “which seeks but never finds absolutely definitive judgements” (qtd. in Murphy 197). Therefore, his poetry becomes more immediate by focusing on orality and the vernacular. To serve the poet’s purpose, language has to go on “recreating itself, playing games, breaking down old structures and forming new ones” (Paulin qtd. in Murphy 197). In “The Wind Dog”, the title poem of his 1999 volume, Paulin has found the most appropriate form to express his thoughts: the cento, defined in an interview as follows: I began to write and got interested in the cento as a literary form through Hazlitt and Eliot. A cento means a patchwork, and I found myself writing a cento with different lines, or thoughts, coming in. It’s a poetic form where you take bits of other poems and put them together. The idea is that somehow, like taking bits from elsewhere to make a quilt, you make your own thing of it. (in Murphy 197) 122 The writer of centos is not a compiler but an artist of the highest value. And the model poet for Paulin in this respect is Robert Frost. His concept of writing was that it should come out of the vernacular rhythms and trust in the speech around you. Rather than looking to received pronunciation or to a language which exists in printed texts, writing should look to the primitive, original orality, which any child is given from the moment they try to talk. (qtd. in Murphy 198) Frost’s ideal poetry is accessible, democratic, non-elitist, an ars poetica favoured by Paulin when he quotes street ballads, texts by Joyce, John Clare and Thomas Hardy. Or, for example in “The Four” (The Invasion Handbook), based on the Versailles Treaty negotiations, the poet uses for the assemblage various sections: Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of Peace and insertions of policies dictated by Clemenceau, Wilson and Lloyd George. All in all, writing centos has become “an artistic principle for Paulin” (Murphy 198), meant to accommodate all his sources from a postmodern viewpoint. 123 124 CHAPTER VIII CIARAN CARSON: TROUBLES IN THE CITY Ciaran Carson was born in 1948 in Belfast in an Irish-speaking family and was educated at St. Mary’s Christian Brothers’ School and Queen’s University Belfast. Carson worked as a teacher and civil servant before being appointed Traditional Arts Officer with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Literature Officer, in 1991 (Croty 308). He won an Eric Gregory Award for poetry in 1978 and the Alice Hunt Bertlett Award of the Poetry Society in 1987. A musician and poet, Carson published The Pocket Guide to Irish Traditional Music (1986). Among the poetry collections, we mention The New State (1976), The Irish for No (1987), The New Estate and Other Poems (1988), Belfast Confetti (1989), First Language (1993), After Ovid (1994). The Troubles constitute the background of many of his poems. In The Irish for No, personal and collective memory are interwoven in the attempt to save Irish identity, the volume being based on traditional storytelling techniques. The same feeling is experienced throughout another volume, Belfast Confetti, a title which suggests the remains of the explosions spread around. The city in question is Belfast, seen in an endless process of destruction and renewal. The volume First Language suggests a mixing of the native tongue and the language of poetry, both regarded as connection to primal identities (Fairleigh 16). Carson’s first language is Irish, which he solely spoke until four years old and he retained an interest in traditional music and storytelling. The opening love poem of First Language, “La Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi” is written in Gaelic, in the attempt to better capture the mélange of feelings and perceptions. The volume The Irish for No acknowledges the poet’s indebtedness to the storyteller John Campbell of Mullaghbawn, through narrative techniques used in poems (Corcoran 216). The volume plays on tensions between references to high literature and Irish folktales. In the poem “The Irish for No”, Carson draws our attention to the frequent avoidance by Irish speakers of the terms ‘yes’ or ‘no’, preferring ‘it is’ or ‘it isn’t’ to respond as this is the manner in which agreement or disagreement is used in Irish (Pierce 38). It was time to turn into the dog’s-leg short cut from Chlorine Gardens 125 Into Cloreen Park, where you might see an Ulster Says No scrawled on the side Of the power-block – which immediately reminds me of the Eglantine Inn Just on the corner: on the missing h of Cloreen, you might say. We were debating, Bacchus and the pards and me, how to render The Ulster Bank - the Bank That Likes to Say Yes into Irish, and whether eglantine was alien to Ireland. I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, when yes is the verb repeated, Not exactly yes, but phatic nods and whispers. The Bank That Answers All Your Questions, maybe? That Greek portico of Mourne granite,dazzling With promises and feldspar, mirrors you in the Delphic black of its windows. (“The Irish for No” in Ormsby 205) Other poems in the volume The Irish for No, such as “Dresden”, look down on forms of high culture and the mythological constructions of the militarised state and of the paramilitary organisations. The poem also shows repression and decline in the city of Belfast and a general mental breakdown of the entire population. Horse Boyle was called Horse Boyle because of his brother Mule; Though why Mule was called Mule is anybody’s guess. I stayed there once, Or rather, I nearly stayed there once. But that’s another story. At any rate they lived in this decrepit caravan, not two miles out of Carrick, Encroached upon by baroque pyramids of empty baked bean tins, rusts And ochres, hints of autumn merging twilight. Horse believed. (“Dresden” in Croty 200) The narrator of the long poem tells the story of Horse and Mule Boyle living in a ruined caravan; Horse Boyle was on a mission as a rear-gunner during 126 WWII, in a bombing raid in Dresden and then he could hear Dresden china shattering. In a tin he kept war medals, which get mixed with a rosary and the remains of a Dresden milkmaid; there is an atmosphere of political realities and emotional emptiness. Horse Boyle tells the story of “Young Flynn”, an IRA volunteer who wants to smuggle gelignite over the border on a bus. A policeman gets into the bus because he has a bike accident and Flynn confesses. Then the story follows Flynn’s self-education in jail and the memories of Boyle’s teacher Master McGinty before the Troubles. At the end of the poem one realizes the meaning of the title and the fact that it has been about an Irish immigrant in Manchester during the war, when he joined the RAF and became a “rear gunner over Dresden” (Corcoran 281): As he remembered it, long afterwards, he could hear, or almost hear Between the rapid desultory thunderclaps, a thousand tinkling echoes All across the map of Dresden, store-rooms full of china shivered, teetered And collapsed, an avalanche of porcelain, slushing and cascading: cherubs, Shepherdesses, figurines of Hope and Peace and Victory, delicate bone fragments. He recalled in particular a figure from his childhood, a milkmaid Standing on a mantelpiece. Each night as they knelt down for the rosary, His eyes would wander up to where she seemed to beckon to him,smiling, Offering him, eternally, her pitcher of milk, her mouth of rose and cream. (“Dresden” in Croty 203-204) The bone fragments of the city, burning tyres, broken glass, pieces of china and of human bodies are meant to parallel the story of Dresden and that of Belfast. The story of Horse Boyle – the stories he tells and the story which tells him – is therefore an entirely, but not obviously connected story about some typical patterns of Irish experience: involuntary emigration; service in the British armed forces for want of anything else to do; involuntary recruitment to the IRA; a life of sexless, 127 vaguely alcoholic smallmindedness, meanness and seediness at home; and the kitsch of the eroticised intercessory feminine religious presence. (Corcoran 218) The central part of the volume The Irish for No maps the collapsing city of Belfast, with a “topography of violence, sectarian hatred and British Army occupation and surveillance; it contains poems about, inter alia, bombings, demolitions, August 1969, an IRA murder, an interrogation” (Corcoran 216). The texts look like reportages with references to numerous Belfast streets and building names depicted in a surreal atmosphere reminding one of de Chirico or Kafka. In the debris of Carson’s cityscapes, dismemberment is bodily, political and linguistic: They questioned him for hours. Who exactly was he? And when He told them, they questioned him again. When they accepted who he was, as Someone not involved, they pulled out his fingernail. Then They took him to a waste ground somewhere near the Horseshoe Bend, and told him What he was. They shot him nine times. A dark umbilicus of smoke was rising from a heap of burning tyres. The bad smell he smelt was the smell of himself. Broken glass and knotted Durex. The knuckles of a face in nylon stocking. I used to see him in the Gladstone Bar, Drawing pints for strangers, his almost-perfect fingers flecked with scum. (“Campaign” in Ormsby 198) Murder is carried out on a waste land and the nameless victim is abandoned among burning tyres and broken glass. Though the interrogators accepted that the man was not involved, he was killed without justification. The body’s dispersed parts are put together achieving coherence only in language (Brewster 23). The title of the poem included in the volume The Irish for No ironically refers to a military campaign since the murder is so unprincipled. The waste land is the field where the “zero-sum politics” is played with no gains for nationalists or unionists. 128 Carson’s Belfast, in “Belfast Confetti”, is fighting hard, its streets names “being named after the imperial ventures in the Crimea or Sevastopol, but as he says about the streets in the new Belfast in ‘Exile’ (2003), ‘it is/as much/ as I can do/to save/even one/from oblivion’” (Pierce 250). Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation marks, Nuts, bolts, nails, car keys. A fount of broken type. And the explosion Itself – an asterisk on the map. The hyphenated line, a burst of rapid fire ... I was trying to contemplate a sentence in my head, but it kept stuttering, All the alleyways and side streets blocked with stops and colons. I know this labyrinth so well – Balaclava, Raglan, Inkerman, Odessa Street – Why can’t I escape? Every move is punctuated. Crimea Street. Dead and again. A Saracen, Kremlin-2 mesh. Makrolon face-shields. Walkietalkies. What is My name? Where am I coming from? Where am I going? A fusillade of question marks. (“Belfast Confetti” in Ormsby 197) The poet renders the sights through the senses with such intensity as if he were photographing the site of a crime but, according to Kiberd, “the emotion is suffused with a conclusive tenderness that can come only from intimate knowledge” (600). The Belfast of “The Mouth” and “The Knee” and of other poems in the volume Belfast Confetti create a labyrinth of the streets, paralleled by one of the mind. There was this head had this mouth he kept shooting off. Unfortunately. It could have been worse for us than it was for him. Provisionally. But since nothing in this world is certain and you don’t know who hears what 129 We thought it was time he bit off more than he could chew. Literally. By the time he is found there’ll be nothing much left to tell who he was. But of course some clever dick from the ‘Forscenic Lab’ reconstructs Him, what he used to be – not from his actual teeth, not his fingerprints, But from the core – the toothmarks of the first and last bite he’d taken of This sour apple. But then we would have told then anyway. Publicity. (“The Mouth” in Ormsby 198) His first bullet is a present, a mark of intelligence that will End in the gutter behind The Clock Bar, since he keeps on doing what He’s not supposed to. The next one is for real, what we’ve just talked about. It seems he was a hood, whatever, or the lads were just being careful. Two and two were put together; what they added up to wasn’t five. Visiting time: he takes his thirteen-month-old son on his other knee. Learning to walk, he suddenly throws himself into the staggering, Distance between his father and his father’s father, hands held up high, His legs like the hands of a clock, one trying to catch up on the other. (“The Knee” in Ormsby 199) Carson’s best-known volumes, The Irish for No and Belfast Confetti, are full of references to defensive architecture, buildings, surveillance, weapons, interrogations, religious and political affiliations, appearances and truth, secrets, all creating a “disorienting complexity of life during the Troubles” (Murphy 203). In the poem “Last Orders”, the characters are first checked before passing through “the steel mesh gate” that circles the 130 entrance to the bar. The reader is told that the speaker is Catholic (“Taig’s written on his face”), and when the two are in the bar they order the beer Harp, not noticing “the Bushmills mirror”, which means that the place is Protestant. Or in the poem “Night Out”, there is the same scene of checking, the speaker being told to wait in front of the “galvanized wire mesh gate” and inside “we get the once-over once again” (Murphy 204). The characters described above could be inscribed in the “narrow ground” of Ulster, to use the phrase coined by A.T.Q. Stewart: The Ulsterman carries the map of this religious geography in his mind almost from birth. He knows which villages, which roads and streets, are Catholic, or Protestant, or ‘mixed’. It not only tells him where he can, or cannot, wave an Irish tricolor or wear his orange sash, but imposes on him a complex behavior pattern and a special way of looking at political problems. (qtd. in Murphy 204) The poem “The Brain of Edward Carson18” (First Language) depicts an Ulster map in such terms: “open up, hexagonal and intricate, tectonic:/ Its shifting plates were clunked welded into place by laws Masonic” (in Murphy 204). Throughout his volumes, Carson uses this metaphor of the map, with the purpose to compose “the fractuous epic of that is Belfast”, to write the city as a text, using “alphabet bricks”, registering how “the storeyed houses become emboldened by their hyphenated, skyward narrative” (Carson qtd. in Murphy 204). Cartography is thus employed in a complex manner by Carson: It marks out territory and records the location of peace-walls, security barriers and republican/loyalist enclaves; it is an aidemémoire, facilitating an ultimately doomed project of reclamation, retrieval and remembrance; it instigates a reflection both on the inexactitude of memory and on the intersection between story and history. (Murphy 204) With the realization that maps can be played upon, drawn and redrawn, lacking and definite contour or shape, Carson constructs intricate 18 Lord Carson (1854-1935) was a Unionist leader and a paradoxical figure: he represented the powerful bourgeois Unionism of Edwardian Ireland, yet, he had faith in the political role of the landed gentry as well; he was strongly legalistic, yet he challenged the British constitution, too (Connolly 75). 131 city maps in many of his texts. In the poem “Smithfield”, the speaker looks at a map of Belfast In the ruins: obliterated streets, the faint impression of a key. Something many-toothed, elaborated streets, stirred briefly in the labyrinth. (in Murphy 205) The poem “Punctuation” shows the speaker walking and the “frosty night is jittering with lines and angles, invisible trajectories: Crackly, chalky diagrams in geometry, rubbed out the instant they’re sketched”. The maps in the poem “Turn Again” are imaginary. There is the map of the bridge that was not built and the city map shows “the bridge that collapsed” and “the streets that never existed”. It is a world which throws away the boundary between real and imagined worlds. Today’s plan is already yesterday’s – the streets that were there are gone. And the shape of the jails cannot be shown for security reasons. (“Turn Again” in Corcoran 219) But it is not the accuracy of maps that interests the writer or the reader, it is rather their capacity to lend themselves to change and interpretation: the idea that a map has a secret, or that it is an essential part of a narrative, or that it is in itself a narrative, a sidelong version of reality. It’s interesting to me that a map is only useful be how far it deviates from reality. (Carson qtd. in Murphy 205) As an Arts Council officer, Carson wandered through Ireland looking for instance of traditional music, to see “how the 8-bat music unit of the reel – which can be further divided into smaller units, 2 or 4 or whatever – corresponds roughly to the length of, and stresses within, the poetry line” (Carson qtd. in Murphy 205). The style becomes conversational, mixing various bits of narratives, personal stories, anecdotes, ballads, other literary writings and information from historical documents. For instance, “Bagpipe Music” offers an insight into traditional Irish music from an ironical perspective: 132 He was blabbing with his Jew-or-jaw’s harp finger on his lower lip, when the breech Of the gun snapped out its breach of the space. The linen handkerchief had got A brack in it, somehow, the dots and dashes of some other’s red. I tried to pin it down. Just then, or pen it down, but the Lambegs wouldn’t let me, and anyway, my thumb And finger’s smeared up to the wrist with Lion ink. My hand is disLocated. The unmarked car came quietly, enquiringly, while in a no-go zone Three streets away, I heard two taxis crabbing, like Gemini in Gethemane, which Of them was black: honk parp a bullet billet reverup and harp a ballad Scrake nithery lou a Mackie nice wee niece ah libralassie ... Just before I put the thing to bed, I closed a pair of scorpion’s inverted commas round it. Tomorrow I would glance at the decapitated headlines, then flick forward to the stars. (“Bagpipe Music” in Croty 320) Irish music and tales are an alternative to violence in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. If the reader turns again in Belfast and comes across a map already drawn for them, the only escape is into a rejection of the shadow perceived and a replacement of it with the product of educated historical awareness. Ultimately, the fragmented narratives and the multitude of voices used by the poet allow him to question the idea of a unified story, identity or map. 133 134 CHAPTER IX EAVAN BOLAND: THE MYTHICAL SUBURBAN IRISH WOMAN Eavan Boland was born in Dublin in 1944 and brought up in London, where her father was Irish ambassador and in New York, where he represented Ireland at the United Nations. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, she returned there to teach for two years (1966-1968). She has worked as a freelance lecturer in Ireland and the US. A founder of Arlen House, a pioneering women’s press, she is regarded by the young generation of women writers as a model. Eavan Boland has been a prolific writer, literary journalist and poetry reviewer for the Irish Times and PN Review (Manchester). Among her volumes, we mention New Territory (1967), The War Horse (1975), In Her Own Image (1980), Night Feed (1982), The Journey and Other Poems (1987), Outside History: Selected Poems, 1980-1990 (1990), In a Time of Violence (1994), Anna Liffey (1997), The Lost Land (1998), Against Love Poetry (2001), Domestic Violence (2007). Other writings include: A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a National Tradition (1989) and Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and Poet in Our Time (1995). Her poetry has been alert to crosscurrents in international poetry and her interests have covered autobiography, history, and aspects of domesticity, criticism of bardic, stereotypical representation, the consolation and deceits of art (Croty 272). Irish writers have traditionally sought to define themselves imaginatively. “The writer creates his or her subject by probing the present, constructed as it is in Ireland out of the coalescing forces of social conservatism, cultural nationalism, political violence and religious hegemony. In this vortex, the artistic identity is made, not inherited” (Dawe 169). Stephen, James Joyce’s character, offers a model of the Irish artist, admired but also scorned by Joyce the man: “Joyce maintained always an ambiguous attitude to poetry; it seems perfect for secret loves and for song, but it has nothing to do with that reality which is Joyce’s main preoccupation” (Cixous qtd. in Dawe 170). Eavan Boland has written to turn poetry towards this reality mapped by Joyce, that of human domestic relations, love, sexuality and the feminine. 135 In the essay Object Lessons, Boland expresses her intention to write following a more challenging route: I could confront the fact that in order to write the Irish poem, I would have to alter, for myself, the powerful relations between subject and object which were established there. That in turn involved disrupting the other values encoded in those relations: the authority of the poet. Its place in the historic legend. And the allegory of nationhood which had customarily been shadowed and enmeshed in the image of the woman. But in reality I had no choice. I was that image come to life. I had walked out of the pages of The Nation, the cadences of protest, the regret of emigrant ballads. And yet I spoke with the ordinary and fractured speech of a woman living in a Dublin suburb, whose claims to the visionary experience would be sooner made on behalf of a child or a tree than a century of struggle. I was a long way from what [Thomas] Davies thought of a national poet. And yet my relation to the national poem – as its object, its past – was integral and forceful and ominous. (Boland qtd. in Batten 171-172) Only the approach of a subversive, private experience may now offer a true perspective and some form of authority, without having any false hopes of integrality. Boland questions her self and the relation between body and spirit but she cannot escape the references to the community. She will insist that the woman poet must become a subject who matters. Above all, women must avoid victimhood; the poet will show her anger at the silent or absent status of women in Ireland or at the Irish Catholic iconography of women. A strategy for decolonization is to revise history from a subaltern point of view. So, it is important that the poet establishes a network of women held together by a shared, gendered, multiple identity. In “Subject Matters” and in her volumes, Boland emphasizes her wish to replace the male hero with the uncelebrated Irish female. The obstinate and articulate privacy of their lives was now writing the poem, rather than simply being written by it. If this did not make a new political poem, it at least constituted a powerful revision of the old one. As more and more poems by Irishwomen were written, it was obvious that something was happening to the Irish poem. It was what happens to any tradition when previously mute images within it come to awkward and vivid life, when the icons return to haunt the icon makers. That these disruptions had been necessary at all, and 136 that they were awkward and painful when they happened, has something to do with the force of the national tradition. (Boland, Object Lessons qtd. in Batten 177) According to Birkle, paradise is for Boland a longing for the Imaginary (Lacan) or the Semiotic (Kristeva) as opposed to the Symbolic; it is a paradise that maintains survival and is future-oriented. It is a desire for an “Imaginary Homeland” (Rushdie) or a real-and-imagined place (Soja) (349). The “lost land” is for Boland an Ireland she left as a child to move to London then to New York and back to Ireland. Her poetry deals with a traumatic experience of exile in the attempt to create ties to make her belong to this national construct and, at the same time, it implies criticism targeting this very construct which has excluded women from active participation. The poet seems to preserve a sense of ambiguity in relation to home, such as in “After a Childhood Away from Ireland”: Love is also memory. I only stared. What I had lost was not land but the habit of land, whether of growing out of, or setting back on, on being destined by ... (in Dawe 179) Living far from her country, Boland becomes aware of the pain of exile (“fractions of place and memory” “A Fragment of Exile”) and the necessity of structure, shape (“The disoriented intelligence seeks out symmetry” “A Fragment of Exile”) (in Birkle 355). Memory plays an important part in embracing Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community”. Thus, on her return, confronted with an experience of otherness and unbelonging, Boland needs to locate herself as a poet and as a woman. This possibility is offered to her by her intention to disprove that “Irish history is not her [her grandmother’s] story” (“Lava Cameo” in Birkle 355). Boland’s collection The War Horse is concerned, especially in the opening (“The Other Woman”, “The War Horse”, “Child of Our Time”, “A Soldier’s Son” and “The Famine Road”) and closing poems (“Suburban Woman” and “Ode to Suburbia”), with reaching a compromise between the lover, mother and wife, trapped in these roles, and her struggle to find her 137 real self. A key image for Boland’s poetry and for the discovery of a woman’s “true” self is offered in the poem “From the Painting Back from Market by Chardin”; Chardin is an eighteenth century painter of domestic scenes and portraits; the poem focuses on the peasant woman and her treatment by the artist: I think of what great art removes: Hazard and death, the future and the past, This woman’s secret history and her loves – (in Dawe 173) Boland’s purpose is to make collapse the distinction between “what great art removes” and life, such as illustrated in another poem, “Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening” (The Journey and Other Poems): Can’t you feel it? Aren’t you chilled by it? The way the late afternoon is reduced to detail – the sky that odd shape of apron – opaque, scumbled – the lazulis of the horizon becoming optical greys before your eyes before your eyes ... in my ankle-length summer skirt crossing between the garden and the house, under the whitebeam trees, keeping an eye on the lengths of the grass, the height of the hedge, the distance of the children I am Chardin’s woman ... (in Dawe 173) 138 Thus, the woman has managed to enter the realm of art as herself, an idea continued through the collection In her Own Image, which becomes a cry of the woman’s need to be heard not only seen: You did protect yourself from horrors, From the lizarding of eyelids From the whiskering of nipples, From the slow betrayals of our bedroom mirrors – How you fled The kitchen screw and the rack of labour, The wash thumbed and the dish cracked, The scream of beaten women, The crime of babies battered, The hubbub and the shrieks of daily grief That seeks asylum behind suburb walls ... Make your face naked, Strip your mind naked, Drench your skin in a woman’s tears. I will wake you from your sluttish sleep. I will show you true reflections, terrors. You are the Muse of all our mirrors. Look in them and weep. (“Tirade for the Mimic Muse” in Dawe 175) Appropriately, the volume refers to shocking themes, such as drudgery, violence, hatred, anorexia, mastectomy, menstruation and women’s desires. “Solitary” deals with masturbation; “Exhibionist” tackles self-exposure; “Witching” becomes apocalyptic in tone, whereas “Making Up” draws attention to the long list of mythical images of females, from Cathleen Ni Houlihan to the whore, invented by men (Dawe 175). Unlike the previous volume, the collection Night Feed offers an image of mature self-awareness and womanhood no longer in crisis. Poems are now generally set at dawn or in the evening, with the quiet house, the beautiful garden, the children asleep and these ordinary scenes become archetypal (“Hymn”, “The Muse Mother”, “Light”). But the next volume The Journey and Other Poems, through the title poem, evoking an imaginary encounter between the poet and Sappho, claims the opposite, the need to find a world that transcends domestic life. Thus, the points of interest in the volume range from separateness, exile (“An Irish Childhood 139 in England: 1951), the need to escape (“The Bottled Garden”) to language and memory (“Lace”, “Miss Éire”, “The Oral Tradition”). “Does memory produce the language that becomes the poem, or is the poem the force that reproduces the memory”? (Dawe 180) Eavan Boland’s poetry has also been inspired by the American poet Adrienne Riche, who believes that myths and poems are written by and for men, with women commonly depicted as renewable creatures. In her collections In a Time of Violence and The Lost Land, Boland revisits the roles assigned to women, Mother Ireland motif and the myth of the cyclical renewal of the Greco-Roman earth goddess and mother Ceres or Demeter and of her daughter Persephone. The oldest literary document which narrates the myth of Demeter and Persephone is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which critics assign to the seventh century before our era. The youthful Persephone, so runs the tale, was gathering roses and lilies, crocuses and violets, hyacinths and narcissuses in a lush meadow, when the earth gaped and Pluto, lord of the Dead, issuing from the abyss carried her off on his golden car to be his bride and queen in the gloomy subterranean world. Her sorrowing mother Demeter, with her yellow tresses veiled in a dark mourning mantle, sought her over land and sea, and learning from the Sun her daughter’s fate she withdrew in high dudgeon from the gods and took up her abode at Eleusis, where she presented herself to the king’s daughters in the guise of an old woman, sitting sadly under the shadow of an olive tree beside the Maiden’s Well, to which the damsels had come to draw water in bronze pitchers for their father’s house. In her wrath at her bereavement the goddess suffered not the seed to grow in the earth but kept it hidden under ground, and she vowed that never would she set foot on Olympus and never would she let the corn sprout till her lost daughter should be restored to her. Vainly the oxen dragged the ploughs to and fro in the fields; vainly the sower dropped the barley seed in the brown furrows; nothing came up from the parched and crumbling soil. Even the Rarian plain near Eleusis, which was wont to wave with yellow harvests, lay bare and fallow. Mankind would have perished of hunger and the gods would have been robbed of the sacrifices which were their due, if Zeus in alarm had not commanded Pluto to disgorge his prey, to restore his bride Persephone to her mother Demeter. The grim lord of the Dead smiled and obeyed, but before he sent back his queen to the upper air on a golden car, he gave her the seed of a pomegranate to eat, which ensured that she would return to him. But Zeus 140 stipulated that henceforth Persephone should spend two thirds of every year with her mother and the gods in the upper world and one third of the year with her husband in the nether world, from which she was to return year by year when the earth was gay with spring flowers. Gladly the daughter then returned to the sunshine, gladly her mother received her and fell upon her neck; and in her joy at recovering the lost one Demeter made the corn to sprout from the clods of the ploughed fields and all the broad earth to be heavy with leaves and blossoms. And straightway she went and showed this happy sight to the princes of Eleusis, to Triptolemus, Eumolpus, Diocles, and to the king Celeus himself, and moreover she revealed to them her sacred rites and mysteries. Blessed, says the poet, is the mortal man who has seen these things, but he who has had no share of them in life will never be happy in death when he has descended into the darkness of the grave. So the two goddesses departed to dwell in bliss with the gods on Olympus; and the bard ends the hymn with a pious prayer to Demeter and Persephone that they would be pleased to grant him a livelihood in return for his song. (Frazer 393394) The Eleusian cult is meant to celebrate the life cycle of the grain and the earth’s fertility, in the attempt of humans to come to terms with life and death experiences. The 1970s, with their second wave of feminism, saw a resurgence in the interest of the myth of Demeter and Persephone. According to Christine Downing, we felt that the rediscovery of these ancient images of female power as sacred and transformative could be transformative in our own lives, both individually and socially. We hoped that the discovery of a prepatriarchal world might help us imagine forward to a postpatriarchal one. (in House 106) The myth was also popular in the 1990s, when several studies were published, while Boland was writing her Ceres poems: Some women have found in this myth resources for the imaginal recreation of a prepatriarchal matristic, that is woman centered, world. Many ... have seen it primarily in terms of how it valorizes the beauty and power of the mother-daughter bond. Others have focused on Hades’s abduction of Persephone and read the myth as primarily a story about paternal violation ... about the rise of 141 patriarchy and the suppression of the goddess. Yet this same myth has also been interpreted as one that might help move us beyond the fantasy of a conflict-free world ruled by an all-growing and allpowerful mother, beyond the illusion of female innocence and perfect love. It has been seen as representing the necessary initiation for women that frees them from being defined by the roles of mother or daughter and as teaching the necessity of coming to terms with loss and limitation and with experiences that provoke rage and grief. (Downing qtd. in House 106) The poet chose the myth to enable her to deal with the question of ageing women in literature and myth. Her concern has been to avoid the tradition that fixes women into unageing and undying images, as in “From the Painting Back from Market by Chardin” (New Territory), in which art removes the process of growing old, hazard, death, future and past. In the poem “Domestic Interior” (Night Feed), for example, the bride is immortalized happy and fertile. Boland wants to break the silence of these women because she claims traditional (Irish) poems only cover up wounds. With Boland, the tradition thus recreated stands between the silence of women and the real women omitted in art: Boland’s sequences constitute a determined effort not to solve historical problems or to resolve the tensions of the construct, but instead precisely to resist solutions and resolutions and to hold open and demand continued attention to the problems posed by public history, private life, and the problematic meditations of memory, myth and language. (Thurston qtd. in House 107) Boland intends to write the female ageing body into poetry. The poem “What Language Did to Us” is an apparently classical terza rima text, only that the topic is what traditional forms have done to women. The use of the metrical and formal regularity suggests subversion, alongside the subject, as if women were fighting the form as well. I stood there and felt the melancholy of growing old in such a season, when all I could be certain of was simply in this time of fragrance and refrain whatever else might flower before the fruit, and be renewed, I would not. Not again. 142 I went nearer. They were disappearing. Dusk had turned to night but in the air – did I imagine it? – a voice was saying – This is what language did to us. Here is the wound, the silence, the wretchedness of tides and hillsides and stars where we languish in a grammar of sighs, in the high-minded search for euphony, in the midnight rhetoric of poesie. We cannot sweat here. Our skin is icy. We cannot breed here. Our wombs are empty. Help us to escape youth and beauty. Write us out of the poem. Make us human in cadences of change and mortal pain and words we can grow old and die in. (“What Language Did to Us” in House 108-109) In this rewriting of the Ceres myth, we are confronted with an ageing Ceres, looking at maidens and mermaids swimming trapped in the myth that holds them forever young and beautiful. “I would have to reexamine and disrupt and dispossess [those images] in order to make up for the paucity of dynamic, multidimensional women in Irish poems”, says Boland (in House 109). The myth of Ceres has been, for Boland, an expression of her dilemma between maintenance and disruption of Irish poetry tradition. Nature – woman correspondence in poetry must be broken, proclaims Boland in “A Woman Painted on a Leaf”, which is an attack on stasis in traditional art; poetry should allow women grow old and die. This is not death. It is the terrible suspension of life. I want a poem I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in. I want to take this dried-out face, as you take a starling from behind iron, 143 so that Autumn ... will be, from now on, a crisp tinder underfoot. Cheekbones. Eyes. Will be a mouth crying out. Let me. Let me die. (in House 110) Though the Greek myth of mother-daughter appears as relevant to twentieth century women, Boland is troubled by the issue of inventing a new language and a new mythology of the ageing woman, as this has been absent from traditional myth, literature, history. “Anna Liffey” ponders on the difficulty of finding the right words for the description of an ageing woman: I am sure The body of an ageing woman Is a memory And to find a language for it Is as hard as weeping ................ An ageing woman Finds no shelter in language. Single words she once loved Such as “summer” and “yellow” And “sexual” and “ready” Have suddenly become dwellings For someone else. (in House 111) In order to achieve her goal, the poet is willing to try to relate the myth and history and literature to her personal experience in such as way as to turn it universal: I thought it vital that women such as myself should establish a discourse with the idea of the nation. I felt sure that the most effective way to do this by subverting the previous terms by that discourse. Rather than accept the nation as it appeared in Irish 144 poetry, with its queens and muses, I felt the time had come to rework those images by exploring the emblematic relation between my own feminine experience and a national past. (Boland qtd. in House 111) As an Irish Catholic, Boland rejoices resurrection and blessed afterlife (of Ceres’s daughter’s return as well) at a personal level though her own daughter’s loss of childhood and subsequent integration in the cycle of life, such as depicted in “The Pomegranate”: I was Ceres then and I knew Winter was in store for every leaf On every tree on that road. Was inescapable for each one we passed. And for me. It is winter. (in House 114) She may fear separation and death, disembodiment and abstraction, and all other psychological experiences connected to ‘descent’. She may see all of these as an end and a failure to consider that they might be part of a transformative process, one stage only in a larger process of growth and change. (Carlson qtd. in House 115) Thus, the poet achieves maturity as she understands the identification of the modern woman with the myth. Paradoxically, by choosing the myth, the poet places herself in a mortal world; her life is not cyclical, like that of Persephone, but finite. In “The Blossom” her daughter is an apple blossom who says: imagine if I stayed here. even for the sake of your love, what would have happened to the summer? To the fruit? Then holds out a dawn-soaked hand to me, whose fingers I counted at birth years ago, And touches mine for the last time. And falls to earth. (in House 116) 145 I wake slowly. Already my body is a twilight: Solid. Cold. At the edge of a larger darkness. But outside my window a summer day is beginning. Apple trees appear, one by one. Light is pouring into the promise of a fruit. Beautiful morning Look at me as a daughter would look: with that love and that curiosity: as to what she came from. And what she will become. (“Ceres Looking at the Morning” in House 116) If a wanted a child now I could not have one. Except through memory. Which is the ghost of the body. Or myth. Which is the ghost of meaning. (“Daughter” in House 117) The Ceres series focuses on the sadness of the ageing mother, who can only preserve motherhood through memory. The mother’s gift to the daughter is the fact that she allows her to be free from being eternally young and beautiful. “As a poet, Boland ca re-write the mother/daughter myth to include irreversible loss” (House 117). Her Ceres poems offer a model for how women can take this story about a mother and daughter from the patriarchal literary tradition and reclaim it as their own. She reworks the Ceres myth, demanding that her readers acknowledge human frailty and the necessity for loss, and in so doing she inscribes her ageing body into the literary canon. (House 118) In her Studies, Boland publishes an essay “The Woman Poet in a National Tradition”, in which she considers that political and cultural continuity with Irish nationalist idealism are seen as “the fusion of the 146 national and the feminine, the interpretation of one by the other”; so, the result is that women became “ornamental icons and figments of national expression” (Boland qtd. in Dawe 171). Her objective as a poet is to break the silence of women and produce discontinuity in the traditional flow: “A society, a nation, a literary tradition is always in danger of making up its communicable from its visible elements. Women, as it happens, are not especially visible in Ireland“ (Boland qtd. in Dawe 171). Sharing the isolation from and by national traditions, Boland makes use, nevertheless, of the advantages of it: Marginality within a tradition, however painful, confers certain advantages. It allows the writer clear eyes and a quick critical sense. That critical perspective, in turn, may allow him to re-locate himself within that tradition which alienated him in the first place. I wanted to re-locate myself within the Irish poetic tradition. (Boland qtd. in Dawe 172) In a dialogue with Irish themes and writers, Boland is rewriting literary and national tradition in her first volume New Territory in relation to images of the feminine (exile in “The Flight of the Earls”, literary tradition in “The Winning of Etain”, the Great Famine in “Anorexic” and “Quarantine”, Yeats in “Yeats in the Civil War” and Derek Mahon in “Belfast vs. Dublin”): “the majority of Irish male poets depended on women as motifs in their poetry” “Outside History”, but these are images of women in which [Boland] did not believe and of which [she] could not approve. The women in their poems were often passive, decorative, raised to emblematic status. This was especially true where the woman and the idea of the nation were mixed: where the nation became a woman and the woman took on a national posture.[....] What had happened? Haw had the women of our past – the women of a long struggle and a terrible survival – undergone such as transformation? How had they suffered Irish history and rooted themselves in the speech and memory of the Achill woman, only to reemerge in Irish poetry as fictive queens and national sibyls? (“Outside History” in Birkle 356) In 2004, Eavan Boland confirms that “[in the nineteenth century] you could go through Irish poetry and not find any real references to the Irish famine ... the poetry kept up its heroism, its resistance to ordinariness ... I felt some kind of disagreement with that [traditional] poem – or, at least, 147 with its history” (Boland qtd. in Pascual 267-268). Consequently, Eavan Boland wrote extensively on the silenced Famine. “Quarantine” (Against Love Poetry) is about a man and a woman leaving the workhouse at the time of the 1847 famine; in the same volume, “The Journey” “Cholera, typhus, croup, diphtheria/ in those days they racketed/ in every backstreet and alley of old Europe./ Behold the children of the plague.”; in “The Making of an Irish Goddess”, agony has spread everywhere: “the famished harvest,/ the fields rotting to the horizon/ the children devoured by their mother”. According to Pascual, imposed hunger and starvation symbolize in Boland’s poetry oppression that burdens women’s lives in general, extending the area of reference beyond the topic of the Famine. In “Contingencies”, “women spoke .../ with a private hunger in whispered kisses”; “A Woman Painted on a Leaf” has her “dried-out-face”; in “A False Spring”, female bodies have become emaciated, ghosts that haunt the Irish present; “The Photograph” shows “a woman hold[ing] her throat like a wound”; in “Anorexic”, the woman deprives herself of food to become pure and holy in imitation of the Famine victims” (270-271). The female body is reduced to skin and bones, it is descarnated and pure in the Catholic tradition of medieval ladies striving to achieve thus purity. In “The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish”, the poet describes an inversion of the fish-into-girl progress in Yeats’s “The Song of Wandering Aengus” and records the pain, the difficulty involved in the attempt to conform to an image. The woman in the text had moved from passivity to self-transformation, from being the object (of adoration) in the poem to being the subject of it. It’s done: I turn, I flab upward blub-lipped, hipless and I am sexless shed of ecstasy, a pale swimmer sequin-skinned, 148 peeling eggs screamlessly in seaweed. It’s what I set my heart on. Yet ruddening and muscling in the sunless tons of new freedoms still I feel a chill pull, a brightening, a light, a light and how in my loomy cold, my greens still she moons in me. (in Kiberd 605-606) As the merging of the feminine and the idea of the nation has simplified matters, Boland deplores “the power of nationhood to edit the reality of womanhood” since the women in traditional Irish poetry were depicted as “often passive, decorative raised to emblematic status”. “Rather than accept the nation as it appeared in Irish poetry, with its queens and muses I felt the time had come to re-work those images by exploring the emblematic relation between my own feminine experience and a national past” (Boland qtd. in Kiberd 607). Boland’s renegotiation of the mermaid image is thus an updating of the idea of the nation not a rejection of it, which made the poet the “logical laureate of Mary Robinson’s presidency” (Kiberd 607). 149 Boland claims that myths are better dismantled from within. So, in “Miss Éire”, Patrick Pearse’s refrain “I am Ireland” is revisited as “I am woman”: Land of the Gulf Stream, The small farm, the scalded memory, the songs that bandaged up the history, the words that make a rhythm of crime where time is time past. A palsy of regrets. No. I won’t go back. My roots are brutal: I am the woman – A sloven’s mix of silk at the wrists, a sort of dove-strut in the precincts of the garrison – who practices the quick frictions, the rictus of delight and gets cambric for it, rice-coloured silk. I am the woman In the gansy-coat On board the ‘Mary Belle’, In the hudding cold, Holding her half-dead baby to her As the wind shifts East And North over the dirty Waters of the wharf 150 Mingling the immigrant Guttural with the vowels Of homesickness who neither knows nor cares that A new language Is a kind of scar And heals after a while Into a passable imitation Of what went before. (in Constantinescu 73) Ireland is in pains; memory turns into a wounded body bandaged with songs; “the music of the words is a music of crime” (Constantinescu 69). The elements depicting the atmosphere point to darkness: half-dead baby, dirty waters, guttural immigrant, passable imitation. There is no refuge and new language is a scar. Mother Ireland as applied by Irish men has helped to confine Irish women in the straightjackets of purity and passivity; and as applied by English cultural imperialists it has imprisoned the whole Irish race in a debilitating stereotype. (Elizabeth Butler Cullingford in Birkle 358) What matters is that in the course of the poem, Mother Ireland becomes an ordinary woman, who cannot understand. This is the initial stage in a process of transformation. Only an object in the past, now she can learn her name, to listen, rise up and remember. Then, the woman acquires the tools for subversion as she remembers and is granted the right to speak and tell her story. The woman becomes confident to continue her journey, draw her maps and tell her own story. Since womanhood and nationhood have been interconnected, the desire for a libation of the women’s position in Irish history must be instrumental in ensuring the survival of an independent Irish national identity. The poet enriches the definition of nation by including the voiceless immigrants marginalized in previously imagined communities. Another poem, “In a Bad Light” (In a Time of Violence), shows an image of the lost lives of Irish seamstresses next to the beautiful objects created by them displayed in a museum in St. Louis, a place evoked by Eamonn Wall as well in connection to Irish immigration: 151 I stand in a room in the Museum. In one glass a plastic figure represents a woman in a dress with crêpe sleeves and a satin apron. And feet laced neatly into suede. She stands in a replica of a cabin on a steamboat bound for New Orleans. The year is 1860. Nearly war. A notice says no comforts were spared. The silk is French. The seamstresses are Irish. I see them in the oil-lit parlours. I am in the gas-lit backrooms. We make in the apron front and from the papery appearance and crushable look of crêpe a sign. We are bent over in a bad light. We are sewing a last sight of shore. We are sewing coffin ships, and the salt of exile. And our own death in it. For history’s abandonment we are doing this. (In a Time of Violence 8) When Mary Robinson was inaugurated as president she lighted a lamp in Áran an Uachtaráin as a reminder of the “greater Ireland oversea”, of those generations of silent emigrants that lived their lives with the pain of the loss of their country. On that occasion, the president quoted a poem by Boland as having inspired her gesture (Kiberd 608): Like oil lamps we put them out the back, of our houses, of our minds. We had lights better than, newer than and then a time came, this time and now we need them. Their dread, makeshift example. They would have thrived on our necessities. What they survived we could not even live. By their lights now it is time to imagine how they stood there, what they stood with, that their possession may become our power. 152 Cardboard. Iron. Their hardships parceled in them. Patience. Fortitude. Long-suffering in a bruise-coloured dusk of the New World. And all the old song. And nothing to lose. (“The Emigrant Irish” in Kiberd 608) Since nature and landscape have been traditionally personified as feminine in Irish literature (Cathleen Ni Houlihan, the Queen, the old woman, Old Woman of the Roads, Dark Rosaleen, Anna Livia Plurabella, Red Rose, Mother Machree, Eiriú, the Bog Queen), Boland had to come with a response to it and that has been a poetry of the (Irish) suburbs. In 1970, Boland was writing in the Irish Times an article entitled “The Future of Poetry” in which after she discusses Joyce’s city and Kavanagh’s countryside, the question that arises is related to what could be between these two instances: “What new realities are there in Ireland to match these two equally rich realities pushing each other aside?” (Boland qtd. in Frawley 149). The third space, a more fluid, flexible, open to new possibilities one, needed by women, is represented by the suburbia. Nature is usually seen as opposed to culture; in the Irish tradition, nature is woman; thus, exclusion and marginalization have been the typical experience of a woman, twice colonized in Ireland, by men and colonizing invaders. Seventeenth and eighteenth aisling literature pictured women as constantly raped, plundered and displaced. Boland’s volumes in the 1960s and 1970s come as attempts to come to terms with larger cycles of history that dictated the removal of women from literary traditions. Under the (Northern) Irish circumstances in the late 1970s and the 1980s, poems had to be perceived in a political context; only that politics is male territory. The answer to this dilemma has been offered by the creation of a new pastoral, that of the suburbia (Frawley 150): Town and country at each other’s throat – between a space of truce until one night walls began to multiply, to spawn like lewd whispers of the goings-on, the romperings, the rape on either side. The smiling killing. That you were better dead. 153 than let them get you. But they came, armed with blades and ladders, with slimed knives, day after day, week after week – a proxy violation. She woke one morning to the usual story. Withdrawing neither side had gained, but there dying, caught in cross-fire, her past lay. Like a pride of lions toiled for booty, tribal acres died and her world with them. She saw their power to sever with a scar. She is the sole survivor. (“Suburban Woman” in Frawley 150-151) The birth of the suburbs is compared, like in Seamus Heaney’s “Act of Union” to a rape and the outcome of this act is suburbia, a feminine space. Another text, “Ode to Suburbia”, deals with a sort of claustrophobia of this marginalized space of the marginals in Ireland, housewives and mothers. The suburbs are finally established in Irish poetry, after being previously part of “hidden Ireland”. This new space has triggered and has also been triggered by a new pastoral (“The New Pastoral”), which involves a retrieval of Irish women’s experiences as subversive. The interesting and different element is that this new form is constructed as realistic because it gives account of women’s real life problems and imaginary, at the same time, as it tends to express universal feelings. Far from being idealizing, its ultimate goal is to overturn stereotypes by mapping this third space: She maps out a territory ... This is of course a region of the imagination, as much as a fictional construct as [Austin] Clarke’s Celtic Romanesque or Kavanagh’s childhood country of Ballyrush and Gortin – though less haunted with history as the one, or without topography as the other, and quite without the savage nostalgias that alternately energize and disable their sense of experience. (Augustine Martine in Frawley 154) This nostalgic space of silent women, of Ireland left behind by immigrants, of the territory lost under colonization, of the loss of imaginary Mother Ireland, is pictured in poems such as “Colony“ and “The Lost Land”: 154 Beautiful land the patriot said and rinsed it with his blood. And the sun rose. And the river burned. The earth leaned towards him: Shadows grew long. Ran red. Beautiful land I whispered. But the roads stayed put. Stars froze over the suburb. Shadows iced up. Nothing moved. Except my hand across the page. And these words. (‘Whose’?) (“The Lost Land” in Frawley 155) Inspired by claims that statues had been seen moving in Ireland in 1988, in her poem “Moving Statues”, Boland states that the people of Ireland should not let themselves dupes by such visions, which she calls “dark forces at the crossroads” or “hysteria of collective superstition” (in Batten 179) and which she replaces with ordinary woman experience. In conclusion, Eavan Boland points out the difference between history and the past: In a country like Ireland it was possible to see the difference between the past and history – how one was official and articulate and the other was silent and fugitive. I suppose I was drawn to the past, rather than to history. (Boland qtd. in Pascual 268) Unofficial and unwritten, the past transfers “its available resources from memory to allegory” and becomes myth: “sometimes on a summer evening ... I could imagine ... that such lives as mine and my neighbours were mythic, not because of their strangeness but because of their powerful ordinariness” (Boland qtd. in Pascual 268). Boland’s desire has never been to erase history and myth but establish a dialogue with them through a mythologizing of the domestic, mother-daughter bond and of the suburbs. 155 156 CHAPTER X MEDBH MCGUCKIAN: BALLERINAS AND OTHER STORYLESS CHARACTERS Medbh McGuckian was born in 1950, in Belfast, enjoying a Dominican education at the Dominican College, Fortwilliam and being Seamus Heaney’s student at Queen’s University, Belfast, where she took her BA in English and MA in Anglo-Irish Literature. She taught at St. Patrick’s College in Knock before becoming a full time writer. McGuckian was writer in residence at Queen’s University, Belfast and literary editor of Fortnight magazine since 1989 and a Visiting Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Her debut volume is The Flower Master (1982). Then, she has published Venus and the Rain (1984), On Ballycastle Beach (1988), Marconi’s Cottage (1991) and The Lavender Hat (1994), Drawing Ballerinas (2001), for which she received numerous literary prizes, among which the British National Poetry Competition (1979), The Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize (1982), The Bass Ireland for Literature (1991). She has been represented in the anthologies Trio Poetry (1981) and Introduction 5 (1982) and she has edited The Big Striped Golfing Umbrella (1985), an anthology of children’s poetry from Northern Ireland (Ormsby 309). According to Croty, McGuckian’s poems recall the playful, enigmatic work of Rilke and Stevens, yet, critics are divided as to whether her verses’ challenge to “semantic authority issues from postmodernist relativism or feminist radicalism” (330). McGuckian reinforces representations of women in which “the body reshapes or even metamorphoses under conditions of threat, becoming itself at one form and content, structure and substance, history or story and resistant event” (Batten 174). The focus in her poetry is on gaps and silences of the absent woman who does not claim to represent the “whole” nation or history. For example, the poem “Dovecote” (Venus and the Rain) focuses on the issue of the personal and political realms in the context of the feminization of Ireland. As a matter of fact, the whole volume has been seen as an effort “to weave ... private life with ... public suffering in ... deeply complicated ways” (McGuckian qtd. in Summers-Bremner 42). Many poems also seem to comment on the idea of poetry writing itself as well; everything is movement, a process and a site of creativity. 157 “The Seed-Picture” and “The Sitting”, for instance, focus on picturemaking in terms of the power relations involved in any act of representation; the verse triggers a mood of liberation into indecisiveness. This is my portrait of Joanna – since the split The children come to me like a dumb-waiter, And I wonder where to put them, beautiful seeds With no immediate application ... the clairvoyance Of seed-work has opened up New spectrums of activity, beyond a second home. ................................................................................... The single pearl barley That sleeps around her dullness Till it catches light, makes women Fell their age, and sigh for liberation. (“The Seed-Picture” in Croty 331) As a woman’s touch makes curtains blossom Permanently in a house: she calls it Wishfulness, the failure of the tampering rain, To go right into the mountain, she prefers My sea-studies, and will not sit for me Again, something half-opened, rarer Than railroads, a soiled red-letter day. (“The Sitting” in Croty 333) The girl in “The Sitting” seems to contest the approach adopted for her representation as McGuckian tackles the capacity of the language to provide freedom; thus, the model will not sit. The plural and unstable nature of the self is a prominent feature in McGuckian’s poetry, demonstrating a desire to return to pre-natal and prelinguistic stages: the poet’s desire to eliminate the ‘I’ altogether, to escape from a rational, unified self in order to become ex-centric, heterogeneous, capable of spreading into every contradiction and (im)possibility ... a desire to undo the linguistic order which creates and constitutes a whole self, a total body, an identity, a desire to reverse or rupture the process of ego formation, and to attempt to re-enter what Lacan calls the ‘imaginary’ phase, before differentiation. (Elmer Andrews qtd. in Holmsten 165) 158 This plurality makes certain representations ungraspable, yet, experiences are pictured as equally meaningful through the image of the teraphim, which were household statues mediating gods’ messages; the encounter with alterity remains mysterious: Deathly nameless angel, bend to my earth: When you speak as fire should, We become sweet water: I wait for you like a road, Without quite knowing that you wait, My openness is like a name Whose you play on to say only Something about yourself. Two paths we cannot distinguish between Fold us into the lost Strangeness of our namelessness, The mist in which we are swallowed Allows a garden to be planted, To breathe with our breath. (in Holmsten 170-1) In connection to self-representation as mother-to-be, “Dovecote” tackles the painful story of ten Hunger Strikers at Long Kesh prison in 1981. Suffering after the loss of an unborn child is intertwined with that provoked by the death of the prisoners. Interestingly, motherhood in itself is described in terms of fundamental loss, with the child being chased out of the blessed womb. Irish nationalism and maternity – the golden land and the pregnant body – take on similar attributes. The doves which circle the dovecote represent an image of the pregnant body, both happy and unhappy, anxious and fulfilled. “Having ‘built [her] dovecote all from the same tree/ To supplement the winter’ and house the child, she is yet inside this cloud of doves, inseparable from the fate of nature’s other vulnerable creatures” (Summers-Bremner 43). The parallel that draws one’s attention is between the powerless Hunger Strikers, doves and speaker who is about to become a mother. “The doves do not know they are being fattened for slaughter any more than the Hunger Strikers know whether political will intervene to keep them from their fate” (Summers-Bremner 43). The mother equally suffers because the child will be born in a world full of violence. “Maternal and 159 familial relationship are associated with violence, loss and discontinuity” (Wills qtd. in Summers-Bremner 45); trauma and madness very often accompany maternity. Maternity, giving birth and being born are evoked in McGuckian’s poetry as metaphors for transformations of the self, in the dialogue with the other or reaching transcendence. “If becoming is pregnant with promise, humans might be seen as both midwives and offspring, or perhaps even strange that midwife itself” (Desmond qtd. in Holmsten 166). Dedicated to her daughter, Emer, “On her Second Birthday” is written adopting the voice of her daughter. The mother remembers a moment of beginning, possibly that of inception. A flame burnt up the paper On which my gold was written, The wind like a soul Seeking to be born Carried off half Of what I was able to say. ........................................... The more it changed The more it changed me into itself, Till I regard it as more real Than all else, more ardent Than love. Higher than the air Of a dream, A field in which I ripened From an unmoving, continually nascent Light into pure light. (in Batten 181) The model of her daughter’s birth is that of reincarnation or metamorphosis not of coming into being. In the poems “Venus” and “Venus and the Rain” pregnancy is seen as the “birth of a new ocean”, ending in the former in ‘a waterfall/ Unstitching itself down the front stairs’; life and desire of the ocean may be lost in the ‘waterfall’ of the miscarriage down the stairs or may be regained in renewed life. On one occasion, I rang like a bell For a whole month, promising their torn edges The birth of a new ocean (as all of us 160 Who have hollow bodies tend to do at times): What clues to distance could they have, So self-excited by my sagging sea, Widened ten times faster than it really did? (“Venus and the Rain” in Muldoon 391) The water in the womb may represent the primal home, but for the woman this is both home and an outside element. Home is where comfort should be found, but in McGuckian’s poems this is a strange place, one of estrangement and travelling, a Northern Irish home, perhaps. In the essay “Home”, the poet describes her family’s unfinished house in Ballycastle as “a grave unto the ground”; “the house grew; its brain began; its grey matter formed meaning. It took something and gave something back, added and subtracted” (in Summers-Bremner 46). The house had belonged to a Protestant and it had to be rebuilt but it still kept a trace of strangeness that was added on the other layers of construction. Metaphorically, this trace may be the residual element of maternity carried within each of us. In the context of Northern Ireland, the comforting element may be the female presence and the hostile one is the British presence. In the same volume, Venus and the Rain, there are also portraits of half-sisters and dream-sisters as doubles of the speaker, contributing to the birth of a new self or a rebirth of the self, such as in the poem “Sea or Sky” (in the volume On Ballycastle Beach): The athletic anatomy of waves, in their, Reflectiveness, rebirth, means my new, especially Dense breasts can be touched, can be Uplifted from the island of burned skin Where my heart used to be ... (in Holmsten 166) The other may be found in a death experiences, irrationality or dark drives: She seems a garden escape in her unconscious Solidarity with darkness, clove-scented As an orchid taking fifteen years to bloom, And turning clockwise as the honeysuckle. Who knows what importance She attaches to the hours? Her narrative secretes its own values, as mine might If I painted the half of me that welcomes death 161 In a faggotted dress, in a peacock chair, No falser biography than our usual talk Of losing a virginity, or taking a life, and No less poignant if dying Should consist in more than waiting. (in Muldoon 387) The poem “The After-Thinker” is another meditation on light and darkness surprised together, life and death and transience and immortality: The brightest dark in the world Is your shadow thinned to light Your eyes, before they are hearse horses Are two unused theatre tickets; eternal, lifeless, going under the gathered knowledge That they are nor real, they are merely filled time. (in Holmsten 169) Marconi’s Cottage, written after her father’s death to celebrate the birth of her daughter, also contains representations of the self, other, darkness, death and indecisiveness. The bed of your mind has weathered Books of love, you are all I have gathered To me of otherness; the worn glisten Of your flesh is relearned and reloved. Another unstructured, unmarried, unfinished Summer, slips its unclenched weather Into my winter poems, cheating time And blood of their timelessness. Let me have you for what we call Forever, the deeper opposite of a picture, Your leaves, the part of you That the sea first talked to. (“Marconi’s Cottage” in Croty 334) The volume Captain Lavender (1994) is homage to the poet’s father, in an attempt to assuage the grief over the man’s death. A second strong source of the book is the poet’s workshops in the Maze Prison, Northern 162 Ireland, with political prisoners. The parallel between prison life and feminine domesticity becomes more prominent than in Venus and the Rain. In an interview with Rand Brandes, McGuckian states that the “death or living death” of the prisoners offered her a context she “was able to use as a metaphor for mourning her dead father” (in Summers-Bremner 47). “Porcelain Bells”, an elegy written after her father’s death, is addressed to her mother. The poem shows a time of stasis and suspension. This death you have nourished is too orderly, its fragrance too convincing. You wear it like an unusually free veil, so light it flies by me; the mirror hardly believes it. Or as if you were living in another town, rejoining us with a completely different handwriting, timid and beautiful. Leaving the room, you break off a piece of the world, around which my life is standing, through which my blood spreads. Missing so much world, you still hold out your hands for more world, your footsteps softening like a creature before whom doors give way. (in Croty 334) The issue of the paternal function is resumed in the volume in another poem, “Story between Two Notes”: You are the story I can’t write. Every page of you has to be torn out of me. Even after your death when you are alone your mysteriously-suppressed name-sickness will weave itself into all I see. (in Summers-Bremner 49) The father is evoked in terms of the family name, whose function is to operate the bonding within the family. The reference in the text above could be explained in the context of her father’s “invisibility” as an Irish Catholic. This development of events was a historical accident. 163 generation of Catholics who were born .. when the country was severed ... just when the country was being cut in two. And they never really lived ... [M]y father ... could never be himself because – how could he? They weren’t supposed to be ... all those Catholics were just meant to go away ... don’t live. (McGuckian qtd. in Summers-Bremner 49) The “storyless” father is considered by critics more relevant to the meaning of McGuckian’s poetry, a better “carrier of historical trauma” than her determined maternal figures (Summers-Bremner 51). The volume published in 1998, Shelmalier, dwells upon the Irish rebellion of 1789 and on the issue of the integrity of the (Northern Irish) other, according to the writer herself: The theme is less the experienced despair of a noble struggle brutally quenched than the dawn of my own enlightenment after a medieval ignorance, my being suddenly able to welcome into consciousness figures of an integrity I had never learned to be proud of. (McGuckian qtd. in Holmsten 172) For instance, in the poem “Cleaning out the Workhouse” the references go to human suffering other than eighteenth century Ireland; one should bear in mind the context of nineteenth century England adopting this solution for its poor and then being embarrassed with it. According to Batten, the subject in this volume expresses herself in negative terms, especially through what she is not, rather than through what she is; the approach looks like a refusal to recall the suffering and repression of the past: These are poems very much concerned with what McGuckian has called her own, personal awakening to the history and ideologies of an Irish nationalism about which she heard little as a Catholic girl growing up in Northern Ireland. (Batten 182) The dead among the spices of words brush their eyes over me, as if all my limbs were separate. They are pearls that have got into my clothes, they stir about briskly with a form of tenderness like a bird on its nest. I may glide into them before they become set. (“The Sofa in the Window with the Trees Outside” in Batten 183) 164 The speaker identifies herself with the dead, who, in turn, will incarnate her in the form of a nest of a bird, which gives hope for the future. Human suffering and violence in an Irish context is also the focus of McGuckian’s famous 2001 volume, Drawing Ballerinas, both volumes featuring a mood of mourning and melancholia through the predominant genre, that of the elegy. The poem with the volume title, “Drawing Ballerinas”, was written to commemorate a friend, Anne Frances Owens, who died in an explosion in Abercorn Café in 1972 and it is also a tribute to the painter Matisse, who “when asked how he managed to survive the war artistically, replied that he spent the worst years ‘drawing ballerinas’” (McGuckian qtd. in Holmsten 176). And the lines’ desire is to warp to accommodate a body, a lost and emptied memory of a lost body, the virgin mind emptied from or of it, to discover the architecture of pressed-together thighs, or lips that half-belong to a face. The body turns in, restless, on itself, in a womb of sleep, an image of isolated sleep. It turns over, reveals opposing versions of itself, one arm broken abruptly at elbow and wrist, the other wrenched downwards by the force of the turning. .............................................................................................. The oval of the head is the wire folded in tension to spring back at right angles across the neck from which it has been lifted. And what are those unnerving sparks of matter, the astonishingly open, misaligned eyes? .................................................................. The contours become brittle and start to fracture, as if the body-burden with its stripped-down beauty, having rested, removed her necklace, had put her gown back on, tied back her hair, resettles her hat. So that underlaid whiteness is reunified by light into a breathing white, an undivided whiteness, a give or take space across or within that same whiteness, that simplest of solutions, the same whiteness everywhere. (in Blakeman 201-202) 165 In an interview, McGuckian stated about the poem: I just wrote the poem, and it had no meaning for me, I was not thinking about the girl that I say I was thinking of. I pinned that meaning onto it afterwards, to make it mean something to me, and it did then, when I saw through that meaning, that lens. (qtd. in Blakeman 280) Drawing ballerinas turns into a drawing of the woman killed by the explosion, her body suffering the consequences. The beauty of the body and movements are juxtaposed to the ones of violence and destruction; the broken and wrenched arms contradict the delicacy of the ballerina’s ordinary postures and gestures. The poem may also be considered an ars poetica with the paper as the whiteness trying to accommodate the wounded body, the lines on the page staging a performance. Another interest of McGuckian’s throughout her volumes has been to achieve “a positive marking of women’s bodies” (Grosz qtd. in Blakeman 198) through poems, such as “Tulips”: Except, like all governesses, easily, Carried away; in sunny Absences of mirrors they exalt themselves To ballets of revenge, a kind Of twinness, an olympic way of earning, And are sacrificed to plot, their faces Lifted many times to the artistry of light – Its lovelessness a deeper sort Of illness than the womanliness Of tulips with their bee-hearts. (in Muldoon 376) The lines promote a form of self-eroticism in order to make the woman defy the male gaze. In such a space as the one constructed by “Tulips” the woman’s attempt to deconstruct masculine authority becomes possible. Reversely, in “Stone with Potent Figure” (Shelmalier), the woman’s body remains vulnerable, prey to voyeuristic male gaze, adopting an approach similar to the ones used by Seamus Heaney in his “bog bodies” sequence, in poems like “Punishment” or “Strange Fruit”. Her head to the west, Her legs to the east, 166 Her black-stained left arm bent; The waist front of her skirt A very clumsy seam along The slightly constitutional fields. (“Stone with Potent Figure” in Blakeman 199) Here is the girl’s head like an exhumed gourd. Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth. ………………………………………… Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible Beheaded girl, outstaring axe And beatification, outstaring What had began to feel like reverence. (“Strange Fruit”, North 30) Heaney’s “Strange Fruit” (North) is a title that comes from a mournful song about blacks lynched by racist mobs and left to hang on trees, being referred to as “strange fruit”. The poem goes against itself in the sense that the decapitated head of the girl, unlike other silenced bog bodies, such as the Tollund Man or the tar-black faced girl in “Punishment” seems to stare back at the gaze of the voyeuristic poet in a refusal to keep quiet and to be made an exhibition of. Thus, Heaney undermines or, at least, questions the socalled aestheticism of the bog-bodies series, for which he has been blamed by some critics. Commenting, in “Feelings into Words”, upon P.V. Glob’s accounts of the ritual sacrifices and the pictures of the ancient bodies discovered in the peat bogs presented in The Bog People, Heaney asserts: It was chiefly concerned with preserved bodies of men and women found in the bogs of Jutland, naked, strangled or with their throats cut, disposed under the peat since early Iron Age times. The author, P.V. Glob, argues convincingly that a number of these, and in particular the Tollund Man, whose head is now preserved near Aarhus in the museum of Silkeburg, were ritual sacrifices to the Mother Goddess, the goddess of the ground who needed bridegrooms each winter to bed with her sacred place, in the bog, to ensure the renewal and fertility of the territory in the spring. Taken in relation to the tradition of Irish political martyrdom for that cause whose icon is Cathleen ni Houlihán, this is more than an archaic barbarous rite: it is an archetypal pattern. And the unforgettable photographs of these victims blended in my mind with photographs 167 of atrocities, past and present, in the long rites of Irish political and religious struggles. (Preoccupations 57) Another bog poem, “Punishment” (North) is envisaged as a zone where violence and culture overlap. The bog in Heaney’s mythos preserves not only bodies but consciousness as well, so each layer tells its own story, unlike in the case of McGuckian’s storyless characters. The adulteress in Heaney’s poem had her body and her story preserved in a layer which suffocated her. The story which the poet imagines when confronted with the picture of the woman’s body with visible signs of violent punishment is that of an Irish girl killed, stripped, feathered, tarred and thrown into the bog as a punishment for going out with British soldiers. The lines are shocking. Commenting on the volume North, Connor Cruise O’Brien claims “I have read many pessimistic analyses of ‘Northern Ireland’, but none that has the bleak conclusiveness of these poems” (in Allen 26). I can see her drowned body in the bog, The weighing stone, The floating rods and boughs. ………………………....... her noose a ring to store the memories of love. Little adulteress, before they punished you you were flaxen-haired undernourished, and your tar-black face was beautiful. My poor scapegoat, I almost love you But would have cast, I know, the stones of silence. I am the artful voyeur ………………………. I who have stood dumb when your betraying sisters, cauled in tar, wept by the railings, 168 who would connive in civilized outrage yet understand the exact and tribal, intimate revenge. (“Punishment”, North 71-72) Silenced, marginal, the speaker witnesses the young Catholic woman’s public humiliation in the “present”. There is empathy for the vulnerable victim, the point of identification shifting from “her” to “you”, and hesitation over the “tribal” revenge. Heaney’s bad dream is, according to Frazier, that he throws the stones of silence when Republican punishment occurs. The poet’s attitude in “Punishment” (N) is an entanglement of feelings, from empathy to voyeurism – in front of her exposed and subjected body – from liberal protest to primitive understanding and acceptance of violence, culminating in the guilt of the onlooker at not acting like Christ, who stopped the stoning of the adulterous woman. The lines remind us of T.S. Eliot’s critical attitude in The Waste Land, inspired by Baudelaire and directed against the reader and himself: “You! hypocrite lecteur! -mon semblable, - mon frère!” (Stanca, Duality of Vision in Seamus Heaney’s Writings 146-147). The depiction of the female body in McGuckian’s poems in terms of Mother Ireland, the land, also recalls not only Heaney’s text “Act of Union” but also, earlier in the Irish literature tradition Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan. In terms of the masculine and feminine modes, the poems “Act of Union” and “Ocean’s Love to Ireland” (North) represent two allegorical stories; there are violent scenes of rape seen as counterparts of the English invasion of Ireland. The violent act of impregnation can be thought as having produced the present situation in Northern Ireland. The poems envision no ultimate solutions to this conflict; the wound is left open. I am still imperially Male, leaving you with the pain, The rending process in the colony, The battering ram, the boom burst from within. ……………………………... No treaty I foresee will save completely your tracked And strechmarked body, the big pain That leaves you raw, like opened ground again. (“Act of Union”, North 43) 169 Cathleen Ni Houlihan is set in the revolutionary year 1798, when the United Irishmen’s rebellion led by Wolf Tone took place. It starts with the arrival in a peasant cottage in the West of a Poor Old Woman, one of the personifications of Ireland. Sustained by hopes of getting her beautiful green fields back and putting the strangers out of her house, she rejects the peasants’ offer of food or money. The old woman goes off to join her friends gathering to help her. Responding to her words, Michael, the elder son, rushes out after her voice, away from his family and the girl he was to marry the following day. When the younger son comes in, his father asks him if he saw an old woman going down the path and he replies that he did not, but he saw a young girl with the walk of a queen. The play is an embodiment of the myth of the Republican nationalist movement, which calls for total sacrifice, starting from the belief in the power of heroic sacrifice working a miracle for Ireland, such as the old woman becoming the girl with the walk of a queen. It is a historical fact that such emotions informed the deeds of the leaders of the Easter Rising, which took place fourteen years after the first performance of Yeats’s play. Yeats identified the failure of his country at a political and economic level with a spiritual lack of power, so he attempted to give Ireland back its dignity by resorting to the intransigence of the Republican tradition. Yeats presented Ireland as a tragic heroine in the attempt to replace the comic ape in the Punch magazine (Stanca, The Harp and the Pen: Tradition and Novelty in Modern Irish Writing 56-57). Although avoiding to reveal her sources or to use quotation marks or footnotes, McGuckian uses the same technique borrowed by Tom Paulin from Robert Frost, that of the cento. The poet explains her method of composition in the following terms: I have a certain number of gathered words (liked and chosen and interesting to me and maybe never used before) that I try to mould into a coherent, readable argument that might parallel what is going on deep in my subconscious or somewhere unreachable by words. (qtd. in Murphy 199) McGuckian seems to have resorted to Frost’s model as she is not completely satisfied with English as an appropriate language: “I am more and more aware of English as being a foreign medium”; “English is very sour upon the tongue ... I keep finding fault with English these days, like a mother with her child”; “I resist and I’m angry – we’re always angry, because every time we open our mouths we’re slaves” (qtd. in Murphy 200). So, she hopes to deterritorialise English through an attempt to disrupt its structures: “I feel 170 perhaps in poetry a meta-language where English and Irish could meet might be possible, and disturbing the grammar or messing about like Hopkins is one method of achieving this” (qtd. in Murphy 200). For example, the poet uses a quote from Picasso as an epigraph to her 1994 volume Captain Lavender: “I have not painted the war ... but I have no doubt that the war is in ... these paintings I have done”. Or in “Drawing Ballerinas” (Drawing Ballerinas, 2001), the poem commemorating Anne Frances Owens, she constructs the cento from extracts in John Elderfield’s The Drawings of Henri Matisse: but the page stays light, the paper with ease, at ease, possesses the entirety of the sheets they occupy. (“Drawing Ballerinas” in Murphy 201) They share an absolute sureness – a sense of having been drawn with ease, at ease ... The entirety of the sheets is addressed (p. 128) The design ‘bleeds over the whole page’ and ‘the page stays light’, Matisse said (p. 104). (Elderfield in Murphy 201) Other examples of the use of the same oblique technique, equally successfully employed by Tom Paulin, cover texts like “In Visiting Rainer Maria” (Marconi’s Cottage, 1991), in which McGuckian resorts to Nadhezde Mandelstam’s biography of her husband the great poet Osip Mandelstam in the attempt to draw a parallel between her own condition as a poet and his status in a country under repression. Or in “Manteo” (Drawing Ballerinas), she revisits Angela Bourke’s book The Burning of Bridget Cleary, about a woman killed because she had been allegedly kidnapped by fairies, to deconstruct nineteenth century anti-Irish stereotypes. In “The Truciler” McGuckian relies on Tim Pat Coogan’s biography of Michael Collins to comment on the compromise accepted by Ireland for its freedom, the partition, which triggered the civil war. The bullet cleared the briars off the top of the ditch, drove particles of his bone at a four miles per hour walk, to rejoin a road like a swine with a tusk which has grown round into the head. Within minutes of the noontide priceless manuscripts floated over 171 the city, releasing the scent of partition, and the stray light in the straightjacket of the Republic paid out the head money of his soul. (“The Truciler” in Murphy 202) Many of the ‘Trucilers’ as they were called were poorly disciplined. [...] And McPeake cleaning the briars off of the top of the ditch [...] The bullet apparently drives not only particles of bone but also an air pocket before it [...] [T]he pair went back to Dublin at a ‘four miles an hour walk’ [...] [P]riceless manuscripts .. floated over the city [...] Firstly, the election, which made Craig the Six Counties’ first Prime Minister ... had the more important long-term result of definitely and unmistakably releasing the scent of Partition into the Irish electoral air ... ‘That’, said he, in the straightjacket of the Republic. (Coogan qtd. in Murphy 202) The poem mentions Collins’s assassination, the trajectory of the bullet killing him linked to a journey he had made through Dublin with Liam Deasy, a leading IRA figure, the IRA being the organization that ultimately decided to have him executed for his pro-Treaty views. McGuckian mixes three other references in the complex web of the poem: 30 June 1922 when the anti-Treaty forces destroyed manuscripts at the Public Records Office in Dublin’s Four Courts; Sir James Craig was elected the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland and Ireland still remained in the Commonwealth despite its independence. Collins had brought the plan to the negotiations with the British in 1921, but it could not save him from the “straightjacket of the Republic”, designed by Eamon de Valera. Collins could be perceived as a tragic victim of manipulation or of a Faustian pact, that of creating the legacy of the partition in Ireland. McGuckian’s poetry privileges feminine and physical experiences in a manner connected with Northern Irish history and political struggle, yet trying to subvert typical approaches of Ireland as “a woman, a womb, a cave, a cow, a Rosaleen, a sow, a bride, a harlot, and of course, the gaunt Hag of Beare” (Edna O’Brian qtd. in Summers-Bremner 40). Interestingly, she seems to preserve silent women victims and storyless characters, but who intend to change the course of narrative and history. 172 CHAPTER XI RICHARD MURPHY AND MARY O’MALLEY: THE WEST IN IRISH ECOPOETRY Richard Murphy was born in Co. Galway, in 1927, but spent his first years in Ceylon, where his father was the last British mayor of Colombo. The father, Sir William Lindsay Murphy, who retired from the British Colonial service as governor of the Bahamas and started farming in Rhodesia, was celebrated by his son later in “The God Who Eats Corn” in his Collected Poems (2000). He was educated at home in Galway, at Wellington College, Magdalene College, Oxford and the Sorbonne. Between 1953 and 1954, he was a teacher in Crete. Between 1951 and 1956 he rented a cottage on Rosroe Quay, an ex-coast guard station, between the Big and Little Killary harbours; he settled in Cleggan, co. Galway, where he lived until the 1980s. From 1974 to 1975, he was a Visiting Professor of Poetry at Princeton University. Now he lives in Dublin (Croty 149, Wall, Writing the Irish West 56). Richard Murphy’s concern with building, boat restoration and sailing in volumes such as, High Island (1974) and the memoir The Kick (2002), symbolically imply dealing with poetry construction and nature. History is another topic highly scrutinized in his works in volumes such as The Battle of Aughrim (1968) and The Prince of Stone (1985), the sonnets of which build a personal, (Anglo-Irish) family and national history. Murphy’s poetry has been considered by Eamonn Wall, in his seminal study Writing the Irish West: Ecologies and Traditions, the beginning of contemporary Irish ecological literature (51). The poet’s ecological consciousness is turned towards the community and its communion with nature. His work challenges the view of the West of Ireland that has been handed down from Yeats and other English-language poets of the Celtic Twilight, who were all inclined to read it symbolically and to objectify people, places, and living things to suit their own anthropological, historical, racial visions. (Wall, Writing the Irish West 52) Ecopoetry may have been as a matter of fact a major concern of Irish poetry, if only we were to consider Seamus Heaney’s example, with the marriage of man and place he imagines. 173 Ecocriticism, however, as a new filter for reading literature has gained advent more recently, manifesting itself more prominently in the world of the academy in the US, as discussed in the introduction. Wall mentions Glen A. Love’s manifesto in the 1990s “Revaluing Nature: Toward an Ecological Criticism”: He advocates for an ‘eco-centric’ criticism that radically rejects the anthropocentric concerns that have characterized literary study. For Love, the project of replacing ‘anthro’-with ‘eco’-oriented criticism entails three specific shifts: (1) the elevation of western American and nature-writing texts over ostensibly more human-centered canons, (2) the restoration of realism over ‘poststructuralist nihilism’ as the dominant mode for the revaluation of nature, and (3) the supplanting of nationalist with global, ecological perspectives. (qtd. in Wall, Writing the Irish West 53) Another ecocritic, Bryson, gives certain features of ecopoetry in his study with the same title (Ecopoetry): Ecopoetry is a subset of nature poetry that, while adhering to certain conventions of romanticism, also advances beyond that tradition... [There is] an emphasis on maintaining an ecocentric perspective that recognizes the interdependent nature of the world: such a perspective leads to a devotion to specific places and to the land itself, along with those creatures who share it with humankind ... [This interconnectedness] leads to the second attribute of ecopoetry: an imperative toward humility in relationships with both human and non-human nature. (qtd. in Wall, Writing the Irish West 66) These characteristics are especially relevant for Richard Murphy’s volume of poetry High Island and for the memoir The Kick. To demonstrate the differences but also a kind of filiation between traditional poetry of the West of Ireland and Murphy’s innovation, Wall compares Yeats and Murphy. The motif of the house is widely used by Murphy: the family houses at Milford, Co. Galway, the coast guard cottage on Rosroe Quay, New Forge in Cleggan, a miner’s hut on High Island and Knockbrack in Co. Dublin (Writing the Irish West 56). The “Yeats country” in popular imagination covers the Sligo home of his grandparents, local landmarks like Ben Bulben and Knocknarea, Coole Park, Lady Gregory’s estate, and Thoor Ballylee, the tower the poet bought as a place for withdrawal, all having provided inspiration. Yeats also visited other parts of 174 Europe and America; throughout his life he was inspired by images of the far-away and long-ago places ranging from India and ancient Greece and Rome to Japan and Byzantium. Murphy equally shared this Eastern and Buddhist understanding of the world together with the Anglo-Irish inheritance. In Nature poetry the Gaelic muse may vie with that of any other nation. Indeed, these poems occupy a unique position in the literature of the world. To seek out and watch and love Nature, in its tiniest phenomenon as in its grandest, was given to no people so early and so fully as to the Celt ... It is a characteristic of these poems that in none of them do we get an elaborate or sustained description of any scene or scenery, but rather a succession of pictures and images which the poet, like an impressionist, calls up before us by light and skillful touches. Like the Japanese, the Celts were quick to take an artistic hint; they avoid the obvious and the commonplace; the halfsaid to them is dearest. (Kuno Meyer qtd. in Wall, Writing the Irish West 60) In 1969, Murphy bought Ardilaum Island, the High Island of his poems. His reflections on this purchase caused him to reflect on man’s approach to nature in a manner which shows the distinction between his ecological approach and a Robinson Crusoe one: Buying an island, even with the intention of creating a wild life sanctuary, is a predatory act among predators, much easier than writing a book. Once you become the owner, your view of the island alters: you turn possessive and protective ... But I know that High Island can never be possessed because it will always remain in the possession of the sea. Its virtue will grow from its contemplation, not its use, from feelings and ideas evoked by its wild life and its and of the world terrain. (qtd. in Wall, Writing the Irish West 56) This island inspired Murphy’s volume High Island, with its celebration of the plants, the birds, the animals and the weather on the Irish desert island. The speaker through whose ecological consciousness the vision is rendered adopts the attitude of a meditative Christian or Buddhist monk, who must train himself in the art of paying attention to nature not humans. Ocean blue light Breaking through 175 Four days of mist And calculated solitude Is lifting up White and mauve parasols of angelica Briefly to celebrate. (“Ardilaum” in Wall, Writing the Irish West 58) The calamity of seals begins with jaws. Born in caverns that reverberate With endless malice of the sea’s tongue Clacking on shingle, they learn to bark back In fear and sadness and celebration. The ocean’s mouth opens forty feet wide And closes on a morsel of their rock. ................................................................ At nightfall they haul out, and mourn the drowned, Playing to the sea sadly their last quartet, An improvised requiem that ravishes Reason, while ripping scale up like a net: Brings pity trembling down the rocky spine Of headlands, till the bitter ocean’s tongue Swells in their cove, and smothers their sweet song. (“Seals at High Island” in Croty 154-5) As stated in his memoir, The Kick, Murphy operated a ferry service between the Galway coast and the island of Inishbofin. Therefore, his poems are full of his boats: “The Last Galway Hooker” or “The Cleggan Disaster”, with an evocation of a close relationship between the man and the boat, a metaphor which will be taken over by Murphy’s poet follower, Mary O’Malley: With her brown sails, and her sleek skin of tar, Her forest of oak ribs and larchwood planks, Cut limestone ballast, costly fishing gear. (“The Last Galway Hooker”, in Wall, Writing the Irish West 76) In an ecopoetic vein, natural elements are evoked for what they are in themselves not as symbols as was the tradition of Irish poetry of the West established by the Celtic Twilight. Yet, people are integrated in nature, but the approach is not anthropocentric. 176 Gypsy of the sea In winter wambling over scurvy whaleroads, Jooking in the wake of ships, A sailor hooks you And carves his girl’s name on your beak. Guest of the storm Who sweeps you off to party after party, You flit in a sooty gray coat Smelling of must Barefoot walking across broken glass. Waif of the afterglow On summer nights to meet your mate you jink Over sea-cliff and graveyard, Creeping underground To hatch an egg in a hermit’s skull. Pulse of the rock You throb till daybreak on your cryptic nest A song older than fossils, Ephemeral as thrift, It ends with a gasp. (“Stormpetrel” in Croty 155) With Richard Murphy, there is a shift in focus in the description of the Western island from the anthropocentric perspective to an ecocentric one. The ballet of birds continues in the sky ... though it really is dark and this church is a ruin, I feel inexpressibly happy ... the wind in the doorway is playful ... all things as well as creatures seem to be rejoicing in summer, the high point of life ... nothing will stop the music of the masonry until those birds come to the end of their dance and vanish before daybreak .. I shall lie down and sleep for a while on cushions of thrift between the abbot’s clochán and the lake, while the stormpetrels go on feeding their young, instructing them in flight and in song. (Murphy, The Kick in Wall, Writing the Irish West 61) 177 The ruins of the church remain against the natural background as a reminder of the fate of the speaker-hermit as a mortal but also of a connection between the ancient druid and the modern poet. Murphy has again followed in Seamus Heaney’s steps at remaking the link between monasticism and nature poetry. In his volume Station Island, Heaney makes a reference to the Sweeney, a character considered together with Dante one of the two major spirits of Heaney’s book. Dante is the symbolical Christian poet, a master of perfection in verse. His Divine Comedy has been compared by critics to a Greek cathedral, a sphere or a tangle – a perfect geometric shape. The other character, Sweeney, although filtered through medieval Christian lenses in the stories transcribed by the monks, is a druid and a pagan poet of nature. Both become wanderers, whose visions will be integrated in Heaney’s poetic design. Heaney refers to this dual vision in terms of the tension between pre-Christian pagus and Christian disciplina: On the one hand, there is pagus, the pagan wilderness, green, fullthroated, unrestrained; on the other hand there is the lined book, the Christian disciplina, the sense of a spiritual principle and a religious calling that transcends the most carnal lushness of nature itself. The writer is as much hermit as scribe. (Preoccupations 183) Pagus and disciplina, illustrative of the relationship between poet and priest, occurs in many of Heaney’s poems (“The Forge”, “The Tollund Man”, “The Strand at Lough Beg”). The poet digging for bodies in the bog may also be seen as a priest, a mediator between this world and the transcendent one. The bog corpses are victims of pagan rituals, but when discovered in our age they have the religious significance of buried things recovered from the past, as if to intercede for us by establishing a continuum with bygone times (Stanca, Duality of Vision in Seamus Heaney’s Writings, 181). On his High Island, Murphy’s speaker also mediates between pagus and disciplina, between modern language and poetry, a Western worldview, asceticism, Buddhism, the primal life on an island and an ecocritical approach. Ultimately, Murphy’s poetry has created what Voros calls “a web and a text, or, perhaps more accurately, ... a text that represents a web. A science whose subject is no animal, vegetable, or mineral but rather the complex interrelationship among these things” (qtd. in Wall, Writing the Irish West 65). This web includes his Anglo-Irish community, all kinds of local people in the places the poet lived – builders, stone workers, fishermen, boat builders, farmers, and, above all, these people being integrated within the landscape of western Ireland. 178 * Mary O’Malley’s works comprise the volumes: A Consideration of Silk (1990), Where the Rocks Float (1993), The Knife in the Wave (1997), Asylum Road (2001), The Boning Hall: New and Selected Poems (2002) and A Perfect V (2006), published after her return to Ireland, to the Moycullen Gaeltacht in her native Co. Galway (Wall, Writing the Irish West 71). Thus, her poetry is mainly concerned with topics related to the west of Ireland. Her father was a fisherman and her childhood was surrounded by boats, the sea and fishermen. She has been influenced by Richard Murphy’s poetry of the West of Ireland, only that her perspective is ironical regarding male voices and serious about representations of wives and mothers left on the shore (Wall, Writing the Irish West 77). I was allowed out on the currach, and later the bigger boats, with my father. Those boats were lovely but far from romantic. I learned that early, my stomach having as the boat slapped around in the swell while lobster pots were hauled or set. (O’Malley qtd. in Wall, Writing the Irish West 73) Twelve guardians watched over my child dreams sometimes soft as peaked cream sometimes gods of stone. Always minding, always men. (“Na Beanna Beola/The Twelve Pins, Connemara”, in Wall, Writing the Irish West 72) The mountains in Connemara are granted male attributes, particularly that of minding the women in the area. O’Malley was born in the generation of the 1950s, a woman in the West of Ireland, carrying the burden of historical difficulties, on the one hand, and having the opportunity of pursuing free secondary education, which had been introduced in Ireland in the 1960s. Gender issues in terms of landscape characteristics, introduced in the poem “Na Beanna Beola/The Twelve Pins, Connemara” are often resumed in O’Malley’s subsequent volumes. In each succeeding volume, she will explore the Galway landscape; she will return to it the erased lives and bodies of women; and she will celebrate the lives of men, not always ironically, who have appointed themselves the guardians of its physical, economic, sexual, and artistic aspects. (Wall, Writing the Irish West 72) 179 The role of women, in O’Malley’s texts, is to tame the roughness of the Western landscape: The West is hard with a treacherous yielding, so sometimes in summer there is softness ... They used to make me wonder until I learned the cost, before they taught me to trust the surer comforts of stone. (“The Countrywoman Remembers” in Wall, Writing the Irish West 73) Women also compete with the sea for the affection of the men. Once past their childhood, girls are not even admitted on their father’s boats as there was this superstition about women bringing ill luck on a boat. Look at her, the black bitch, I see nothing beautiful. He spends his day with her, his nights thinking about her. I only have peace in October when he becomes dutiful, a full-time husband for a stretch. (“Jealousy” in McCarthy 71) However, the poem “Untitled” offers a female counterpart to the fisherman, Granuaile, a pirate queen: I am Gráinne, Queen of men, mistress of a thousand ships, Bunowen’s chatelaine. A working mother, I keep my maiden name. (“Untitled”, in Wall, Writing the Irish West 77) Boats become mothers, wives and lovers when the fishermen are at sea, like in “The Maighdean Mhara”, in which they speak to the men like lovers. 180 But I can make them sing out a shower of curses and commands. I challenge them to win against the sea and other men. They listen for the slightest whisper between me and the wind. They understand my lightest sigh and respond. Here in my belly where men feel safe I draw out their soft talk, rising, falling, low as breath. At ease and sure of their control they are, in Irish, eloquent. I never let on anything but fall and rise and humour them. (“The Maighdean Mhara” in Wall, Writing the Irish West 74) Mary O’Malley writes poetry of the sea and the promontory. “Everything in Where the Rocks Float, including love and grief, is windswept, sun-drenched and sea-endangered” (McCarthy reviews 70), whether it is about the husband’s boat or a storm and a people trying to cope with the rough weather at sea. A humming deep in the ocean vibrates me like a high-tuned violin. (“Storm” in McCarthy 71) The poet’s fighting tool is language and at times she feels that this is not adequate: I have only passion and despair, nebulous things to work with, not many tools. (“The Rocks” in McCarthy 71) Always we are doomed. I cannot put English on this, the song of unattainable things, so I hum. (“Liadan With a Mortgage Tastes the Stars” in McCarthy 71) 181 O’Malley uses English and Irish alternatively in the attempt to express her thoughts, ideas and feelings in a most appropriate manner. Like many other Irish poets, as a matter of fact, she was “raised between languages ... We spoke English, but almost the entire specialized vocabulary of the sea, the names of fish, rocks, birds, and plants was in Irish” (O’Malley qtd. in Wall, Writing the Irish West 78). The poem “Tracing” is dedicated to the poet’s father and to a literary father, Richard Murphy. Mary O’Malley would have always liked to be in the boat with the men and not on the shore, but at least she could trace the steps left by the male poet interested in ecopoetry. O’Malley chose to write about catching fish instead of doing it but, according to her, poetry is not deprived of physical strength. I feel the heft of a satin handled fish-knife. The poet forms, a lobster pot turning on a wooden wheel. (“Tracing” in Wall, Writing the Irish West 75) Similarly, Heaney’s first poem, “Digging” (Death of a Naturalist) marks the birth of the poet-digger tracing the steps of his biological father: Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it. (“Digging”, Death of a Naturalist 1) The analogy, taking into account Heaney’s childhood background, between digging potatoes and writing poetry, shapes the poet’s first artistic manifesto: “the first poem I wrote where I thought my feelings had got into words” (Preoccupations 41). The father’s digging conjures up the image of the grandfather cutting turf and setting the rhythm of the poem. The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge. Through living roots awaken in my head. (“Digging”, Death of a Naturalist 2) The poem is illustrative of the way in which a poet’s mind works (“my head”) and also shows how language can be worked into poetry. While Heaney’s ancestors forced the land into crops, the poet, as their follower, 182 has a duty to work words into artistic creation. The son upstairs with the pen in his hand aspires to a sense of continuity. Conversely, the neighbourly advice which Heaney confesses that has become the poem’s inspiration (“The pen is lighter than the spade”) points to discontinuity, in the sense that by taking up the pen, the poet distances himself from the community. The realization brings about feelings of guilt but also initiates the exploration of origins and a quest for the self. His imaginative power may be born out of this breach which needs healing, since the son also feels part of the community. Both the spade with Heaney and the knife with O’Malley become metaphors for the art of writing Golden nets and silver fish Floating in the sky, Lift me on your shoulders Daddy, Daddy swing me high. And if the fishes are all tears And if the nets are dry, We’ll chase the moon with blazing spears Across the ice-cold sky. Carry me on your shoulders Daddy, Daddy swing me high. (“Lullaby”, O’Malley in Wall, Writing the Irish West 76) And the fathers remain inspiring figures passing down gifts to their children. The West of Ireland has for O’Malley a present and a future as well, besides the historically burdened past. O’Malley is very much engaged with battles for survival and with efforts to define the shape of the West of the future. She is willing to remember the past, record the present, and imagine the future: all are equally vivid in her poetry. She is concerned with the negative efforts of overdevelopment on Galway City and with the crass exploitation of the environmentally sensitive coastal areas. One aspect of her battle is the coming of second-home owners from the East of Ireland, for whom the West is not a real place but rather a kind of Bainín Disneyland, fashioned by the Celtic Revival. (Wall, Writing the Irish West 80) 183 “We love Connemara. Bought a little place there. It’s paradise,” the woman brays, adjusting her children like accessories. Even Cromwell knew better. Failed the first time. Scraggy blackthorn not covering the rock’s shame, the soil taken to Aran as a joke. To hell was the alternative, a hell without golf, decent restaurants or friends from Blackrock. Now they come to play, copper-fingered as that old snob Yeats predicted. (“The Second Plantation of Connaught” in Wall, Writing the Irish West 80-81) Even those of us that never liked it, whose capitals were Lisbon and New York, didn’t want it to come to this, the sidewalks littered with discarded people and a spike driven through its pot-holed heart. (“Dublinia”, Wall, Writing the Irish West 81) “The Second Plantation of Connaught” creates the image of a fake Celtic paradise, a hyperreal or heterotopic place, which is far from what ecocritical poets intend to express in their writings, whereas “Dublinia” mocks both the middle class holidaymakers in the West and the claims of superiority of Dublin city, which is again a different perspective of the city, if we compare it to the cityscapes envisaged by Montague, Longley or Mahon. 184 CHAPTER XII EAMONN WALL: JOURNEYS OF THE NEW IRISH ACROSS THE US Eamonn Wall was born in 1955 in Co. Wexford, in Enniscorthy, and has lived in the US since 1982. At present he is Smurfit-Stone Professor of Irish Studies and Professor of English and International Studies at the University of Missouri – St. Louis. Among the poetry collections, we mention Dyckman – 200th Street (1994), Iron Mountain Road (1997), The Crosses (2000), Refuge at DeSoto Bend (2004), Sailing Lake Mareotis (2011), A Tour of Your Country (2008). The volume From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills (2000) is a collection of essays on the Irish diaspora for which he received the Michael J. Durkan Prize from the American Conference for Irish Studies for excellence in scholarship. A longtime member of the American Conference for Irish Studies, Eamonn Wall served as president of the organization from 2005-2007 (http://www.eamonnwall.net/). In 2011, Wall published Writing the Irish West: Ecologies and Traditions, in which he parallels the Irish and the American West by looking of the writings of “Western writers”, such as John McGahern, Richard Murphy, Mary O’Malley, Moya Cannon; the study was very well received by critics: This book makes an important contribution to transatlantic Irish studies. Wall’s critical focus on ecocriticism is timely, providing new readings of Irish writing across genres. He employs a methodology that attends to literary cartography, potcolonial contexts, and persuasive close readings of his authors. What results is a book that is fresh, illuminating, and substantive, one that elucidates a new understanding of the literary and cinematic representations of the American West. (Susan N. Maher, University of Minnesota Duluth, back cover of Writing the Irish West) In 2013, Wall edited an equally praised volume by James Liddy, On American Literature and Diasporas, the first of two volumes of Liddy’s criticism; the study provides insights into the work of American and Irish writers overseas and lets the reader know what it felt like to live in America between 1967 and 2008. James Liddy came to the US in 1967 and taught Irish and Irish-American literature, Creative Writing and Beat Literature at 185 various universities until his death in 2008. Throughout his career, Liddy often went back to Ireland, was a member of the Aosdána and contributed to Irish journals and newspapers, including The Irish Times. According to studies dealing with Irish immigration in the US, there are four generations in the Irish American community today: the assimilated Irish ethnics – the descendants of those who reached America since midnineteenth century pushed by the Great Famine, the Irish “white flighters” – the immigrants that came to the US in the 50s and 1960s and made the flight to the suburbs pushed by the tense relations with Asian, Black and Latino migrants and pulled by the suburban facilities, the Irish “newcomers” or the New Irish – the generation of the 1980s, Eamonn Wall belonging to it, and the “newer Irish” – the generation of the 1990s and after, the last two occurring in a broader context which gives Irish identity a global dimension. In the volume From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills, Eamonn Wall, one of the most accomplished New Irish generation poets, meditates on the significance for an Irish poet belonging to his generation of this complex identity of the Irish immigrant, who may have departed long ago and been assimilated in America or they may have been pushed more recently by economic conditions to leave home: “Perhaps an appropriate binary for the future will be the parochial and the international” (Wall qtd. in Tobin 160). There is no more perceptive interpreter of the experience of migration in our time than Eamonn Wall. His fiction, poetry, and essays set before us with intelligence and grace the complexity of Irish/American doubleness. (Charles Fanning, author of The Irish Voice in America http://www.eamonnwall.net/) Wall studies poetry with James Liddy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and was involved in the Gorey Arts Centre, founded by Paul Funge, another New Irish from Wexford. The Irish have traditionally made this journey to America so the artists arriving there at one point or another did not open new paths but had to find their place to fit in the tradition and contribute their definition of Irish American identity: “to the Irish man or woman, this progress from Ireland to the United States is a natural right-of-way which has long been forged by history and practice” (Wall qtd. in Tobin 161). Moreover, for artists it is essential that they also prove their artistic value among American poets: to be able to write convincingly about America, the contemporary Irish poet must be able to unlearn what he or she has picked up in 186 Ireland and produce newer hybrid forms which are part-Irish and part-American. (Wall qtd. in Tobin 161) One of the keys of the Irish success in America has been the passion for education, denied to Catholics at home especially through Penal Laws up to the nineteenth century, so when they came to America they founded universities (Fordham, Manhattan College in New York); they acquired management positions, such as Cathleen Black of Hearts Magazines and once wealthy, they have showed their generosity (Manhattan College Library was provided for by the O’Malleys; NY City schools were supported by the fund-raiser Caroline Kennedy; Henry Ford settled the Ford Foundation). “It’s chic to be Irish”, said S. Heaney, and not only in America, but we may consider that the transnational dimension of the community has been enhanced by Irish America (in 1996 there were 26 American universities with Irish Studies; in 1998-5.5 million Americans went to Ireland to trace roots; in the 1990s the US Census reveled 18% Irish in the US). The Irish have been surviving the transition from Ireland into the big New York through the aspiration to serve; from priests, police chiefs, teachers, firefighters, at present they are involved in finance, law, medicine, communications and fund-raising (e.g. the American Ireland Fund; in 2004 the police commissioner of New York City was Raymond Kelly; the roll call of the 9/11 dead included dozens of Irish American firefighters; the leading voice on behalf of the poor is senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan; the McManus Midtown Democratic Association Club in Hell’s Kitchen has been now serving generations of immigrants). Culture and entertainment have offered new ways of achieving the hybrid forms Wall has been writing about. Irish fiddle players, Irish American musicians using Irish strains in rock, jazz, swing and country, Irish directors and actors, dancers, writers, they have all looked for the best union of the two faces of their experience (e.g. Larry Kirwan, the main writer and performer of the Black 47, a famous New York rock band evokes the dynamic quality of the cultural product blending the Irish and American sensibilities, Tobin 162). In Eamonn Wall’s case the influences of Liddy, Boland, Montague, Kinsella and Heaney, who had already engaged American experience and poetry before him, offer the poet lines to engage with and respond to. They have opened the path for this new hybrid form which unites “the old themes of exile and loss” with open forms, thus representing “an important development in Irish writing” (Wall qtd. in Tobin 162). In the same volume, From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills, Wall discusses the informal centre for the expatriate emigration in American, Sin187 é Café, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. According to Wall, the café had more in common with “the Nuyorican Café than it did with the up-town American Irish Historical Society”, the former still existing today close to the place where Sin-é Café used to receive its guests. The Inwood neighbourhood in Manhattan, where Wall’s family lived while the poet did his doctorate at the City University of New York, has traditionally been inhabited by the Irish American community. Wall’s volume Dyckman – 200th Street depicts this richly ethnic part of the world which is New York with its colourful multicultural neighborhoods hosting Irish, Jews, Asians, Latino and Blacks. In Washington Heights and Inwood, New York City, there were tensions between the Irish and blacks, Porto Ricans and Dominicans, in the classical American story of “natives” and immigrants, the Irish having settled there first and feeling pushed by the new immigrants. Today, many “newcomers” and “newer” Irish share with Blacks, Asians and Latinos the same jobs (men working in constructions and women in chidlcare and nursing) and social relationships or marriages. If anyone walks through here from out of town he/ she/ it will hardly be pleased by grinding boomboxes, the leaves of twenty autumns and every brand of beer can, bottle, and cigarette known to the bodega owners of this great city. And I agree that Inwood Park is an unholy mess and would be hard pressed indeed to write the Fall/ Spring/ Summer/ Winter poem the New Yorker demands for each pristine season because I don’t think that he/ she/ it in the dentist’s waiting room in Cincinnati would like to read a nature poem with a beer can in it. No way ... (“The Grassy Garbage of Inwood” in Tobin 163) Wall’s poem, written in the accumulative and accelerated style of American poets, proposes a new pastoral, one of the big multiethnic, crowded city in America, to be added on the map of Ireland, which had included the rural landscape, the Irish town and the feminine Irish suburb, as shown in the other chapters of this study. According to Tobin, we find examples of the American influenced accelerated style in all Wall’s volumes: Dyckman – 200th Street, Iron Mountain Road, The Crosses, Refuge at DeSoto Bend and A Tour of Your Country; thematically the titles of the volumes are references to passages or journeys of the Irish into America. 188 The same theme is tackled in poems such as “A Christmas Card from Ireland”, a reflection on the sea near Wexford, Homer and the poet’s own American odyssey, “A Radio Foretold: Green Card”, “Outside the Tall Building: Federal Plaza”, “Two Stops on the River”, on the bureaucratic difficulties of the immigration laws in America, in the volume Dyckman – 200th Street. The latter includes another poem, “Hart Crane’s Bridge”, depicting rows if immigrants turned towards the west, at the gates of a continent: “Where in the forest of grows/ the green card? Is it what surrounds the primrose/ on the Wexford Road?” (in Tobin 167). The landscape of the west with its prairies and the immigrants facing this mythical westwardness gives an impression of dream and fairytale, which is what America is for many individuals. The poem “Song at Lake Michigan” has been considered by critics as defining in relation to the dual nature of the Irish American experience, picturing the self and inviting the reader to empathize with the writer’s journey into this in-between-land, the solitude, homesickness and longing for Ireland and the liberation from pressures of self definition and history to be gained in America: I walked to Lake Michigan with thoughts of a sea nearer home where we swam under clouds of departure Maria, my father, and me. I walked towards Wisconsin’s waters to take wind of some boats and rocks a child of the green on the waterfront faces of the past in my eyes. The country is drinking itself working by day for the right not to sleep galloping along without comment or thought content that some time is at hand. But here I can sing to myself unbound by traditions of death I’m not working for brothers or nuns I’m drinking slowly at the wild neon bar. (“Song at Lake Michigan” in Tobin 168) 189 The poem seems to offer an answer to the poet’s question in other texts: how is he to explain his American passage? It might be a transition towards an open end existence: “one factor that excites me about leaving Ireland for America was that my new home offered the possibility of escape from history” (Wall qtd. in Tobin 168). The volume Iron Mountain Road includes other poems on the migrant’s voyage, such as “Four Stern Faces/South Dakota”: I was living in a bedsit in Donnybrook when John Lennon was shot outside the Dakota apartment building in New York City and that’s what I’m thinking this morning piloting my family through the hollow darkness on Iron Mountain Road, trespassing on the holy ground of the Lakota nation. (“Four Stern Faces/South Dakota” in Tobin 165) The journey goes from Donnybrook, Ireland, where the poet was then Lennon was shot, to New York City, where the tragic event happened, and from there into the west of the US, in the Black Hill, in the traditional home of the Lakota nation whose history had been erased by the “four stern faces” of Mount Rushmore and where the poet was driving with his family. Being woken one ordinary workday to Lennon being dead, ‘Imagine’ on the radio, remembering the grown-ups weeping in late November ‘63 one morning in Dublin when it finally struck that heroes are flowers constantly dying on these black and holy hills we spend the years wandering towards till light reveals a universe beyond strong victorious faces bolted to a rock. (“Four Stern Faces/South Dakota” in Tobin 166) The histories of the Irish and native Americans are thus paralleled through the migrant pattern. “Being ... wandering ... beyond” is a fundamental theme in Wall’s work as an all encompassing experience of the Irish Americans (Tobin 166). The examination of American history, in order to find liberation, gives the opportunity for examining Irish and native American histories, the poet’s wife including native American ancestors, to throw light on similar experiences. 190 Wall starts from his own experience of migration, that of the New Irish in America, but by looking at Irish immigration to the US historically and by considering the connections with other ethnic communities in New York and in the US in general, he extends the analysis of the migrant’s trope. Thus, the journey is no longer a solitary act, it acquires a communal dimension, embracing the poet’s family and the large family of immigrants in America, so that the poet is no longer afraid of solitude and feels like at home, in his Irish family: “What solitude?” “What I fear most, I reckon.” (“Winter Thoughts from Nebraska”, The Crosses, in Tobin 169). Wall caries his roots everywhere in his routes; the domestic and family references offer the security shaken otherwise by the travelling. Wall’s story of the immigration goes deeply geographically into America with the example of Don Martinez, a friend who died, after moving from job to job into the American southwest. You underline for me the desolation of these highways: the mockery of place names among great continuities: rising to dryland, descending into grass. (“The Crosses”, The Crosses in Tobin 171) Place names no longer carry the legendary content that the Irish are so proud of in their poetry, but they become relevant in a more humane context, like Las Cruces being associated with the death of a dear friend, Martinez: We were driving back to Denver Don Martinez’s funeral on an April day under the clearest of skies, the brightest of light. Under the crosses he has joined the dry ground. (“The Crosses”, The Crosses in Tobin 171) Seamus Heaney’s focus on tensions between a different ways of knowing a place offers a clarifying in this context. In his essay “The Sense of Place” (Preoccupations 131), he discusses a lived, illiterate, unconscious way, through the ancient Irish poetic tradition of dinnseanchas (place-name poems), forming a kind of “mythological etymology”. This approach is illustrated by Heaney’s place-name poems in the volumes Wintering Out and North. Secondly, there are the legends associated with the place names. “The whole of the Irish landscape is a manuscript which we have lost the skill to read”, according to John Montague (Preoccupations 132). Thirdly, 191 the poet mentions a learned, literate, conscious way, through literary filter: certain places have become famous thanks to writers that have rendered them familiar to readers, e.g. Yeats and Innishfree or Heaney and the bogland. Heaney undertakes a dual vision, a negotiating approach between two senses of place: the marriage of the mind with nature and the release of the powers of previous generations of ancestors and writers. Yet, the dangers must be taken into account - the space may be creative, a real source for the poet (such as in the case of the bottomless bog inviting imagination, in the poem “Bogland”), but it can equally act as the earth goddess, who demands sacrifices (such as with the earth goddess requiring the sacrifice of the Tollund man, in the poem “The Tollund Man”) (Stanca, Duality of Vision in Seamus Heaney’s Writings 78). The Irish place name sense is reconsidered in the New Mexico context by Wall in the traditional manner in a poem like, “Puye, New Mexico”: Mesas, arroyos, evergreens call you back to the cool centre of the backed lands, mother Of roots, mother of the dew. All share one way home. (“Puye, New Mexico” in Tobin 171) The sense of place is triggered by the visit to a Native archeological site. If one goes to Taos Pueblo to see the native village, one becomes aware of that fact that the architecture of the adobe buildings, the Native language, Tiwa, the river, the Red Willow Creek, dividing the village into the North Side and the South Side, are expressions of the union of the people with the place: The story of my people and the story of this place are one single story. No man can think of us without thinking of this place. We are always joined together. (“Tribal Manifesto”, Taos Pueblo, The Place of the Red Willow, World Heritage”) The journey west into the US is continued through voyages beyond the go-between New Mexico and the west of Ireland, into Europe, in the desire to place immigration in a global context, such as in “A Rose in Coyoacan” in Dyckman 200th and “Helsinki Sequence” in A Tour of Your Country. And if the immigrant is to find home, then home can be anywhere, as it is more a condition of being than a place, given a global context: “Do you know your place?” “my home is where I am” (“Finding a Way Home” in Tobin 171). Travelling is knowing and finding home: 192 You were looking across the playground. Above: the shed, sports field, folly water, car on John St. ........................ You might have imagined, might still imagine, that a man had taken a turn, that you were needed. A blacksmith’s needed. A doctor’s needed. A free-taker’s needed most of all. Even then you knew you wouldn’t hear that call. Quietly later, you stepped from shadow into sunlight. And everything you silently had seen remembered you. (“Know Your Place”, Refuge at DeSoto Bend 70-71) Writing about travelling can be conceived as a way of remembering. The poem “How You Leave” emphasizes the feelings associated with the poet and his family leaving Omaha, Nebraska for St. Louis: If you walk an hour beyond out town, the old people say, you will meet 193 fine weather & ceilí at the crossroads. A lake is central to your continent. Now, add tall buildings, underground stations, a woman at a coffee counter holding forth on the history of cattle and native grasses, that form of talk you heard on the dry prairie. Here, you came to know the lore doorbells & children who counted cats as paidup members of households. Each lodging place provided one lesson. (“How You Leave”, Refuge at DeSoto Bend 15) Wall’s life is portrayed in his texts as a series of departures: “from Wexford to Milwaukee, Milwaukee to New York, New York Omaha, Omaha to St. Louis, as well as many briefly visited locales across the American West and in Ireland, in Mexico, and in Continental Europe” (Tobin 172). Wall’s fourth volume, Refuge at DeSoto Bend, resumes the origins, the Irish roots of his poetic work, stressing the idea of hidden connections along the way, throughout the journey of the emigrant, beyond borders: We are bedded down in ring Layers of time, split by rivers, united by Bridges. We recall old spirits struggling Still to climb our great hills, their songs Frozen in December’s air, these names Unwritten in the big book of history. ............................................................ Let us dance and sing a new Millennium home to Enniscorthy at the Model County’s centre. Let us cheer the Dove of Good Friday peace as it circles the Strong turrets of our floodlit castle. Let us Let us turn right and left to see, in each set Of shining eyes, hope’s deep measure. And let us cheer always in warm houses Words of how we made it home Over the bridges of our old, majestic town, Our streets garland in purple and gold: Narratives of the past, New Year’s resolutions. (“Revelation”, Refuge at DeSoto Bend 76-77) 194 As the poet travels in between Ireland and America, he becomes aware of the importance of details, incidents, people, places along the way and of the necessity to order them to give experience meaning. The “Wexford Container Tragedy” section in the volume Refuge at DeSoto Bend includes stories of immigrants and locals trying to find a shelter in unfamiliar places and to come to terms with a world born out of tragedy: The vessel we may travel in may be our coffin: the sailors have nailed the hold. It was two days past Christmas We lingered long to have no need nor energy enough to cross the park to see the memorial to victims of the potato famine. We had gotten the message. To get out is essential. (“At the New York Holocaust Museum”, Refuge at DeSoto Bend 20) I wait to board a ferry for Ellis Island. Once a tower of hope and humiliation. Now a museum and shrine to immigration. (“Cormorants”, Refuge at DeSoto Bend 23) Of German, French, Swiss, Nigerian, and Irish ancestry, these performers in hard shoes gathered in our bright French city to dance a steady narrative of removal and survival. (“From St. Louis, Missouri”, Refuge at DeSoto Bend 25) America offering, in equal measures, forgetfulness and food. On panel 573, I note these names: Michael & Anna Wall. Early hopefuls rushed to the push cart streets Of downtown New York, Coming under the ambivalent gaze of Henry James. 195 America, we braved your disaffection with such raging genius That soon you hardly knew our faces from your own. Worldwide, children cower under growth. Jeeps roar through. Villages. Crops fail & coyotes pocket coin. Monday morning, I’m Home on holidays. Two Nigerian women purchase drafts For remittances back from Enniscorthy Disgraced Okonkwo, When sent from home, tended to his mother’s soil, drank the palm Wine of her trees. Though they merrily cross the Abbey Square, How strange this drab November day must seem To brave Nigerians. How quickly for each immigrant all can fall apart in fits of panic and dismay. (“Ellis Island”, Refuge at DeSoto Bend 27-28) A visit to the Holocaust Museum in New York reminds the poet of the “coffin ships” carrying the victims of the potato famine to the US; historically and symbolically, the museum dedicated to the suffering of the Jews is connected to the Irish Hunger Memorial in New York City, built in 2002. Another museum, Ellis Island, evoked in the poems “Ellis Island” and “Cormorants”, has witnessed the tragedies and happiness of generations of immigrants arriving in New York for decades, each generation telling its “narrative of removal and survival” though the displays in the museum. Wall’s work is meant to show the migrant nature of human existence in general as “ontological as well as historical errancy”: 196 At the same time, Wall’s ambition to create a technically hybrid poetry that draws from the esthetic resources of both the Irish and the American traditions of verse making likewise finds greater and greater impress in the work, as well as greater and greater variety. (Tobin 173) The volume A Tour of Your Country begins and ends on the road, symbolically for Wall’s work in general. “Leaving Boise” invites the reader to join the poet on this journey as well: For you, now, these twenty years, America indivisible from children’s names called out across a backyard at dinner time, indivisible from a night in deep December above a throbbing street when, finally, transfigured home, you wept in joy the final hour of your wedding day, finally poised, you knew, for fondness, responsibility, and due regard from this America on whose sheets you stretched, the plough a steady sentinel atop the city lights. (“Leaving Boise” in Tobin176) The backward look continues and it is completed by memories of the Irish immigrant miners who made their contribution to the building of Boise. Wall’s unique achievement is to understand that landscape is culture. The book’s final poem, “Leaving Boise”, though ostensibly describing a road-trip away from the city, stitches personal experience into the wider history of Irish emigration. Not only the US but Ireland is full of wonders and pleasures for this generous writer. The Irish Times (http://www.eamonnwall.net/) In conclusion, Eamonn Wall “listens and records for us some of the resonant truths this bright life reveals about nature, family, memory, hunger and public and private life in contemporary Ireland and America” (back cover of volume Refuge at DeSoto Bend). As a New Irish immigrant poet in America, his achievement is: 197 to have extended the sources and vision of his work on the open road of America while remaining vividly in step whatever he encounters anywhere, and to have done so without losing sight of the horizon of the past likewise expanding intricately behind. (Tobin 177) 198 CONCLUSION In a dialogue between F.R. Higgins and Louis MacNeice, in Tendencies in Modern Poetry, the former makes the following statement: Present-day Irish poets are believers – heretical believers, maybe – but they have the spiritual buoyancy of a belief in something. The sort of belief I see in Ireland is a belief emanating from life, from nature, from revealed religion, and from the nation. A sort of dream that produces a sense of magic. (in Muldoon The Faber Book 17) Out of the all the Irish beliefs, the volume Mapping Ireland (Essays on Space and Place in Contemporary Irish Poetry) has chosen as a point of focus the sense of place, a characteristic of poems by John Hewitt, John Montague, Thomas Kinsella, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin, Eavan Boland, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, Richard Murphy, Mary O’Malley, Eamonn Wall whether they live in Ireland or America and in a dialogue with Seamus Heaney. In the context of the transatlantic connection, it is worth mentioning Bill Clinton’s 1996 campaign manifesto entitled Between Hope and History, which is inspired by Seamus Heaney’s 1990 translation of Sophocles’s Philoctetes, The Cure at Troy, focusing on the desire that “hope and history might rhyme” (Campbell 1). Heaney, Kinsella, Montague, Mahon and Boland held important positions in American universities. Kinsella taught at the University of Southern Illinois and Temple University. Boland is a Professor at Stanford University. Paul Muldoon is Professor at Princeton and his volume The Annals of Chile was written in the US. Derek Mahon has been in residence at New York University and Yaddo (Faggen 230). The chapter on Montague has highlighted the important Irish American component of the Brooklyn-born poet. The fascination of Americans with Ireland comes precisely from the manner in which they have identified the country as an ideal, rustic, romantic, mystical, vatic place of battles, the Country of the Young, the far end of legendary journeys. And the Irish struggle for self-definition still resonates with the American struggle for self-definition (Faggen 229). There is an important presence of Irish American poetry in both the American and the Irish traditions: “Continuously, the Irish and American literary communities, forming vibrant, original, hyper, noisy and creative spaces at the margins of traditional English literature, have sought each 199 other” (Wall in Liddy 8), as stated by one of the leading voices of the “New Irish” dispora in America in the 1980s, Eamonn Wall, to which a chapter has been dedicated in this revised and updated edition of the book. Eamonn Wall has become one of the most prominent and exciting contemporary voices of the Irish-American experience. He has an intimate understanding of what it means to be neither here nor there, and his words pull us toward new places. A Tour of Your Country reminds us that we are all linked to foggy roads elsewhere, and it celebrates displacement with the exuberant joy of a homecoming. An Sionnach (http://www.eamonnwall.net/) These contemporary Irish poets’ creation is based on “the energy contained in the native place, the luminosity of childhood memories and the mythical interpretation of apparently meaningless domestic events” (Giráldez 27). Irish places are charged with myth and religious beliefs, becoming “emotional entities, space-time capsules in which common lore created a new cultural imaginary” (Giráldez 29). In Yeats’s tradition, the Irish land-epic is connected to the heroic background. Kavanagh’s sense of place has been interpreted as universal parochialism, in the same tradition of poetry engendering a communion with home and the earth in general. Just as religion means to fasten, to bind, poetry, being seen in religious terms, shows the poets fastened to the native place and to nature. The earth and nature, the Irish place displays its healing powers towards the poet and the people, which is ultimately the process revealed in contemporary Irish poets’ texts: “The poet is able to bring the past to present, to heal the wounds of history, to redress and renovate the older injuries by means of language” (Giráldez 29). It would be inconceivable not to use the gifts of the place: “... you [may] have seen these gifts abused so often that you have become self-conscious about using them. There is nothing worse than the writer who doesn’t use the gifts of the region, but wallows in them” (Flannery O’Connor qtd. in Dawe 32). It has been suggested that the sense of place may have been defeated by an overwhelming sense of exile in contemporary world and a poetry written in English by Irish poets. Exile and change may be interpreted in terms of loss (of traditions, of language, of tranquil rural identity). On the other hand, for Irish poets, distance has always been a source of enchantment: “exile and emigrants are as though enveloped, bewitched by the aura, often superficial, which emanates from a past which is unchanged because it was lived in another place” (Liddy 96). 200 There is also a tendency to read texts such as Longley’s “The Civil Servant” and “The Greengrocer” politically, not through the voice of the poet. Yet, the Irish landscape (especially that of the Western islands), references to Celtic motifs, Irish language vocabulary, the role of the poet/ bard and his/ her connection with the public, the references to rural Ireland and the past (farming, fishing, seasons, nature, monasticism), past and present and village, city and suburbia overlapping in an atemporal Ireland have imprinted on this literary map of Ireland the features of spirituality and creativity. As it has been shown in the volume, the period 1960-1990 was characterized as being under various pressures in Ireland, but the end of it was seen as a second cultural Renaissance as a result of the effects of the Educational Act of 1947, the group around Philip Hobsbaum, various periodicals (The Honest Ulsterman) and reading tours (Room to Rhyme in 1968 with Heaney, Longley and folk singer David Hammons, The Planter and the Gael in 1970-1971 with Hewitt and Montague, Out of the Blue in 1971 with Simmons and Muldoon and In Their Element in 1971 with Heaney and Mahon). The anxiety of Yeats’s influence gave birth to poetry written less of the quarrel with the poets with themselves but more of the poets with the Literary Revival following Kavanagh’s tradition: Irish poets after Kavanagh are at last psychologically and technically sure of the resources of their English medium: his example can be said to have made possible the freedom of address of such colloquially rooted contemporary poetries as Heaney’s, Durcan’s and Muldoon’s. (Croty 3) Under these pressures, a mood of dissent has been triggered in the writings of John Montague in poems, such as “The Siege of Mullingar 1963” (“Puritan Ireland’s dead and gone,/ A myth of O’Connor and O’Faolain”); the poem’s refrain parodies Yeats’s verse to suggest that changes were due in Ireland in a wider context of the struggle for Civil Rights in America and the student risings of 1968 in the US and France. Public attention overwhelmed the writers of this period, but they were stifled rather than pleased: Each poet was granted a ritual, often drunken appearance on television; summer schools resounded to their voices, and some government ministers even appeared in newspaper photographs with artists whose work they once helped to support. (Kiberd 583) 201 The Republic, for Montague, was still dominated in the 1940s and 1950s, by censorship and literary isolationism. The remedy found by Montague and Mahon comprised exile, scepticism and the mask of the estranged artist. For the latter, the country in the 1950s was a “cultural desert” (qtd. in Brearton 98). The former describes the condition of the country in the following terms: “a limbo land” and its literature as “a procession of sad and broken poets and complaining novelists” and his own condition as “stunned isolation” (qtd. in Brearton 96). John Montague’s volume The Rough Field (1972) and Thomas Kinsella’s Nightwalker (1967), published at the end of the 1960s, are, according to Croty, a proof of the idea that “history is a nightmare from which the poetic consciousness has awaken into modernity” (4). For instance, the “Rough Field”, Montague’s home town Garvaghey (in Irish, garbh achaidh means “rough field”), has been conquered by the violent sweep of history that destroyed the pastoral idyll: “Our finally lost dream of man at home/ in a rural setting!” (in Brearton 97). Montague was born in New York of Irish immigrant parents, but raised by aunts on a farm in Co. Tyrone. In The Rough Field, he states that he felt as if “taking over where the last bard of the O’Neills left off” (qtd. in Ormsby 7), being conscious of himself as an inheritors of a lost tradition that made him speak in “a grafted tongue”. This is also the time when the Aosdána was established under Taoiseach Charles Haughey. It was an institution for artists, who enjoyed the prestige of the membership of such an elite organization and the basic income was guaranteed by the state in spite of the troubled years, with hunger strikes and abusive imprisonment in the north, unemployment, the divorce and abortion referenda in the south. The positive view of the situation was that Kinsella and Montague belonged to a generation born in the first decade of Irish independence and their careers grew in the context of the “institutionalization of poetry on both sides of the Atlantic” (Croty 34). Montague responds to the intricacies of the period by assuming a complex identity – American, Irish and French – and the possession of a “world consciousness” together with “local allegiances” (qtd. in Brearton 97). Thus, in “Like Dolmens Round my Childhood” (The Rough Field) he both mocks being stuck with the stereotype of “ancient Ireland” and praises the “dark permanence of ancient forms” (in Brearton 97). Internationalism and experimentation are significant in terms of poetic validation of the home place in a European and American context. John Hewitt, in the Foreword to his Collected Poems 1932-1967 (1968), speaks about the same sense of wider identity and internationalization, by making reference to a sense of place: “by birth an Irishman of Planter stock, by profession an art gallery man, politically a 202 man of the Left” (in Ormsby 4). He was an Ulster Protestant of Scottish descent and emphasized “regional identities in the United Kingdom” (Campbell 6). In an Irish Times symposium on “The Clash of Identities” (4 July 1974), he stated: I’m an Ulsterman of Planter stock. I was born in the island of Ireland, so secondly I’m an Irishman. I was born in the British archipelago and English is my native tongue, so I am British. The British archipelago are offshore islands to the continent of Europe, so I’m European. (in Ormsby 4) It is no wonder his poetry has been seen as a continuous quest for selfdefinition in relation to places as he was a native in a colonized province, at home a stranger and a city man who relocated to the country. In 1957, he had to leave a job as a museum curator for Coventry, England, where he helped in the cultural rebuilding of a city destroyed by war. The writer in Ulster is the inheritor of a “gapped, discontinuous, polyglot tradition” (qtd. in Dawe 38). Belfast taught him “The Importance of Elsewhere” (Campbell 6). In the poem “The King’s Horses”, Hewitt describes a pageantry and military display of “Rule Britannia” and somewhere in the background, there is a Humpty Dumpty figure, a man divided against himself, like the poet with affiliation to the British tradition but with a desire for regional separateness: All the King’s horses and all the King’s men Couldn’t put Humpty dumpty together again. I saw by the men astride these were the King’s horses going about the King’s business, never mine. (in Heaney, Finders Keepers 374-375) Thomas Kinsella was one of the few Irish writers who declined the invitation to Aosdána membership. His poems remain concerned with the consumerist present and a feeling of provincialism of which he aimed to free his country. What Kinsella considered essential was literature and translation (from Irish to English) as a means of bridging gaps. He creates narratives on the dislocation of psychic, family and natural history and universal perspectives on incoherence and loss. For instance, in the 1972 Butchers Dozen, the poet’s anger was provoked by the findings of an official inquiry in which the British Lord Chief Justice exonerated those responsible for the killing, and his feelings could be sensed in the context of his visit to the city: 203 I went with Anger at my heel Through Bogside of the bitter zeal -Jesus pity! – on a day Of cold and drizzle and decay. (in Campbell 13) Kinsella is the first of the twentieth century poets in the north to represent the rural community, influenced by Kavanagh. His verse is both a celebration and a lament of Irish culture and place. In Nightwalker, he described “an Ireland suffering from an odd mix of residual Republicanism, Catholic conservatism and a freed entrepreneurial business class, sponsored by a new class of politician, often less then scrupulous in its dealings” (Campbell 9). But in “Wyncote, Pennsylvania: A Gloss”, the felling is that the poet could find himself anywhere in the world producing the joy of art: Another storm coming. Under that copper light my papers seem luminous. And over them I will take ever more painstaking care. (in Faggen 231) Confronted with the pressure of the violence in the north, many northern voices took the situation as a fertile ground for poetic creation. Derek Mahon is engaged like an anthropologist in research into the roots of these disputes disturbing Catholics and Protestants. His poem “A Disused Shed in County Wexford” could be seen as emblematic of his generation. The victims of violence during the Troubles and the dead generations of earlier tragedies in the world are represented like mushrooms hidden in a dark room whose door is opened by the poet, who is begged by the traumatized creatures not to let them be forgotten again. Longley and Mahon’s poetry has been created to be adequate “to the fraught realities of their new socio-political context” (Croty 5), which meant an intersection between Irish nationalist politics and international (post)modernism. The concern with the Troubles in the early volumes has encouraged a parallel in conceiving revivals – that of the earlier part of the century and the Ulster Revival of the 1960s and 1970s. Michael Longley’s idea was that for him the 1960s “began quietly in Dublin and ended tumultuously in Belfast” (qtd. in Brearton 99). So, the map of Irish poetry was redrawn to include Belfast after the 1960s. Longley’s poetry contains many references to various characters – Circe, Nausicaa, Persephone, 204 Narcissus, Emily Dickenson, Dr. Johnson and Rip Van Winkle (in No Continuing City, 1969), who represent the universe of human beings at large. In other volumes, experience is approached indirectly, through myth, or, directly, through elegies. Longley is aware of cultural divisions in Ireland and within himself (An Exploded View, 1973); WWI memories are relevant in terms of his soldier father’s experience. Ultimately, Longley is a city dweller loving birds, flowers, animals, landscapes in poems about the west of Ireland (Ormsby 10-11). Derek Mahon has been a city dweller as well, haunted by history; poetry and the Troubles have a common source, the same energy of the explosive moment. Aware of the shallowness of contemporary world, the poet identifies with alienated figures, such as De Quincey, Van Gogh, Malcolm Lowry, François Villon, Ovid and Camus. Seamus Deane makes the following remark about Mahon: Mahon does not seek to have a sense of community with the kind of Ireland which so dominant in Irish poetry. All his versions of community depend on the notion of a disengagement from history achieved by those whose maverick individuality resisted absorption into the official discourses and decencies. (qtd. in Faggen 240) His volume Night-Crossing suggests a transitional split identity. Mahon’s “urbanity becomes a defence against commitment to place”, in poems such as “The Spring Vacation” and “Glengormley” (Brearton 106). For Mahon, Ireland could be pictured in terms of belonging and not belonging, as a point of arrival and departure: “a place from which he wishes to escape but which refuses to be exorcised, another ground on which he is drawn into the quest for equilibrium which informs his work” (in Ormsby 12). In a context of local and international fragmentation, Mahon praises the role of poetry: Battles have been lost, but a war remains to be won. The war I mean is not, of course, between Protestant and Catholic but between the fluidity of a possible life (poetry is a great lubricant) and the rigor mortis of archaic postures, political and cultural. The poets themselves have taken no part in political events, but they have contributed to that possible life, or to the possibility of that possible life; for the act of writing is itself political in the fullest sense. A good poem is a paradigm of good politics – of people talking to each other, with honest subtlety, at a profound level. It is a light to lighten the darkness; and we have had darkness enough, God knows, for a long time. (qtd. in Campbell 12) 205 Ciaran Carson, Tom Paulin and Paul Muldoon’s poetry has been undermining assumptions of the previous generations about cultural loyalties. In Belfast Confetti and The Irish for No, Carson mapped the city under siege, evoking the sights, smells and images of sites of crime with great intensity. Belfast is mapped as a labyrinth, with the solidity of brick and concrete but also a place remembered and imagined. It is a dangerous place “of codenamed undercover operations and the confidential telephone, of advanced surveillance technology, of bombings, murders and interrogations, a place where appearances cannot be trusted” (in Ormsby 14). Carson’s poems combine urban history with folklore and mythology. Part of his version of his Irish tradition is the poet’s imagining lands beyond the unknown: This is the land of the green rose and the lion lily, Ruled by Zeno’s eternal tortoises and hares, Where everything is metaphor and simile: Somnambulists, we stumble through this paradise From time to time, like words repeated in our prayers, Or storytellers who convince themselves that truths are lies. (in Campbell 18) Carson imagines a place which exists as metaphor and in which there is no distinction between the real and the imaginary. This is a characteristic of certain Irish contemporary poets, which is often oblique, metaphoric, allegorical and opaque. Tom Paulin’s characters are survivors of austere relationships. Like Carson, he recreates the concrete and steel grimness of urban life, full of masculine places and murderous culture still haunted by British colonialism (Ormsby 15). Paulin’s volume The Wind Dog revisits the ideas of Robert Frost’s wilderness, aboriginal in language and the pastoral belief in ordinary speech: -Farmer Frost that is used to call sentence sound because a sentence he said was a sound in itself on which other sounds called words may be strung. (Paulin, “The Wind Dog” in Faggen 237) 206 Paul Muldoon prefers etymology, jokes, songs, stories, allusions in long poems even if the focus in on place, like in “7 Middagh Street”, an address in New York, where artists lived; the poem proves to be a meditation on politics, sex and their interconnectedness. The poet’s fascination with places is more about the journey and the destination usually remains elusive. Even when he tackles the violence of the place, the adopted approach is an oblique one; in “The Year of the Sloes, for Ishi”, Muldoon speaks about Ireland using a story about the last member of a tribe of Californian Indians: I realized that if his brothers Could be persuaded to lie still, One beside the other Right across the Great Plains, Then perhaps something of this original Beauty would be retained. (in Campbell 14) Muldoon grieves the loss of the tribe, the loss of nature in verse evoking a story of colonialism and destruction of natural and cultural order. Contemporary northern poets have always been aware of the duality of their place in the world, of their lives, to use Heaney’s words, in an Ulster of the actual present and then an Ulster of the mind. Paul Muldoon shows in a pamphlet Knowing My Place (1971) his awareness of the community’s expectations from the minority to which he belonged and that everything has its place. He imagines this gift of duality inherited by the Northern Irish poets in a playful manner in the poem “Blemish”: Were it indeed an accident of birth That she looks on the gentle earth And the seemingly gentle sky Through one brown, and one blue eye. (in Heaney Finders Keepers 120) Muldoon’s “Symposium” mocks the seminars on the past, present and future of Northern Ireland’s troubles and echoes the Greek symposium, where men gathered to drink and talk so to show that old stories are repeated with little connection to truth. Contemporary Irish poets have written on their awareness regarding the fact that obeying solely the imperatives of time and place in Northern Ireland would be missing the larger context of its place, the island’s poetic traditions against a wider frame of British, American and Irish cultural exchanges. 207 Given the intricacies of the present Irish context, there is a large number of poems showing visions from wider spatial and temporal distance, from regions beyond the grave, from the viewpoint of mythological or historical characters (Heaney Finders Keepers 118). For example, Mahon imagines in “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” a whole Lethe full of doomed generations “pleading for a hearing in the great self gestures of mushroom-growths that strain from the dark towards a guiding star of light in the keyhole” (Heaney Finders Keepers 119). Mahon’s “Ovid in Tomis” shows the same mood of being on the outside: Imagine Byron banished To Botany Bay Or Wilde to Dawson City And you have same idea How it is for me On the shores of the Black Sea Woven of wood-nymphs, It speaks volumes No one will ever write I incline my head To its candour And weep for our exile. (in Heaney Finders Keepers 119) Mahon’s “Penhurst Place” tackles the issue of the Sidney family also associated with Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone and the battle of Kinsale, where he was defeated. There is a sense of bilocation transpiring from the poet’s love for Surrey, the countryside where he was writing the poem and for the Ulster of hill-forts, cattle-raids and rain-sodden gallow glasses. Heaney concludes an article in his volume Finders Keepers with a description of the triple, complex identity of the Northern Irish: Irish, Scottish and English, which is the legacy of contemporary Irish poets: There is a through-otherness about Armagh Of tower and steeple, Up on the hill are the arguing graves of kings And below are the people. (W.R. Rodgers in Heaney Finders Keepers 364) 208 “Through-other” is a term described by Heaney as a compound used in Ulster with the meaning physically and mentally confused, echoing the Irish trína cheile, meaning things mixed up like in Ulster (Heaney Finders Keepers 366). Though connected to Irish places, especially in Northern Ireland, Irish contemporary poets have always looked abroad and their creation is a give-and-take between Ireland and America, as shown for the creation of Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Derek Mahon, Eavan Boland, Paul Muldoon and especially Eamonn Wall, who claims that “Patrick Kavanagh spoke of the parochial and provincial: perhaps an appropriate binary notion for the future will be the parochial and transnational” (in Tobin 134). All these poets aimed at poetry at once regional and global to cope with the reality of family disillusionment, exile, alienation, racial, ethnic and sectarian divisions. Heaney’s dual vision alternates representations of margins with those of centres. The reality of borders and margins has triggered the fictional frontiers of writing and centres. The centres of childhood places, discussed in earlier sections of this book, and the ones searched for later as a poet (and expressed through poetry) are intertwined with visions of all types of frontiers, i.e. historical, religious, political, geographical, cultural and linguistic. The poet resorts to a complex imaginary diagram in order to clarify his vision and show his incorporation of the tradition of Irish writing: I sketched that tradition in terms of five towers, with first, at the centre, the tower of prior Irelandness, the round tower or original insular dwelling, located perhaps upon what Louis MacNeice called ‘the pre-natal mountain’. With this at the centre, I then placed at the southern point of a diamond shape Kilcolman Castle, Edmund Spenser’s tower, as it were, the tower of English conquest and the Anglicization of Ireland, linguistically, culturally, institutionally. Then, on the left of the diamond’s shoulder, in the west of the country, at Ballylee, there is the Norman tower occupied by W. B. Yeats as a deliberate symbol of his poetic effort, which was to restore the spiritual values and magical world-view that Spenser’s armies and language had destroyed. The fourth tower, on the eastern edge, is Joyce’s Martello tower, on Dublin Bay, the setting of the opening chapter of Ulysses and the symbol of Joyce’s attempt to ‘Hellenize the island’, his attempt to marginalize the imperium which has marginalized him by replacing the Anglocentric Protestant tradition with a newly forged apparatus of Homeric correspondences, Dantesque scholasticism and a more Mediterranean, European, classically endorsed world-view. So: we 209 can say that Spenser’s tower faces in to the round tower of the mythic first Irish place and sees popery, barbarism and the Dark Ages; Yeats’s tower faces it and sees a possible unity of being, an Irish nation retrieved and enabled by repossession of its Gaelic heritage; Joyce’s tower faces it and sees an archetypal symbol, the omphalos, the navel of a reinvented order, or maybe the ivory tower from which the chaste maid of Irish Catholic provincialism must be liberated into the secular freedoms of Europe. Enter then, form the north Carrickfergus Castle – MacNeice’s keep, shall we say. And this tower, where William of Orange once landed on his way to secure the Protestant Settlement, this tower, once it is sponsored by MacNeice’s vision, no longer only looks with averted eyes back towards the Glorious Revolution and the Mother of Parliaments, but is capable of looking also towards that visionary Ireland whose name, to quote MacNeice, ‘keeps ringing like a bell/ In an underwater belfry.’ MacNeice, I suggested, by his English domicile and his civil learning is an aspect of Spenser, by his ancestral and affectionate links with Connemara an aspect of Yeats and by his mythic and European consciousness an aspect of Joyce. And by writing his castle into the poetic annals, he has completed the writing figure. He can be regarded as an Irish Protestant writer with Anglocentric attitudes who managed to be faithful his Ulster inheritance, his Irish affections and his English predilections. As such, he offers a way in and a way out not only for the northern Unionist imagination in relation to some sort of integral Ireland but also for the southern Irish imagination in relation to the partitioned north […]. (Redress of Poetry 199-200) This quincunx with five imaginative centres, presented by Heaney in his prose writings as a double metaphor – of military architecture yet, of an integrated literary tradition - is meant to act as a model for social and political inclusiveness. This figure of five towers connects spaces, poets, traditions, making meaning derive out of the pattern and it may be engendered by the double vision of the poet, as an artist and Irish citizen, and from his double national identity consciousness. In the centre, there is “the tower of prior Irelandness”, the “original insular dwelling”, which in time has been altered by the numberless influences received, detectable for instance in the layers of Heaney’s bog. Similar to Yeats with his imaginary Ireland of poets and peasants, Heaney is a creator of “a country of the mind” in the sense that he has brought the Irish bogland to the canon of poetry in English. The bog may be considered an 210 “objective correlative” for the memory of the landscape, “a landscape that remembered everything that happened in and to it” (Preoccupations 54). Heaney’s series of bog poems integrate contemporary violence in Ireland in a wider European cycle of violence in the sense that There seems to be continuity between the sacrificial practices of the Iron Age tribes in Northern Europe and the psychology of the contemporary Irishmen committing crimes. Through these volumes the poet places himself in the tradition of the redemptive ethnography of European Revivalism. Thus, the Irish bog has always seemed to be part of the European heritage. In the south, the quincunx features Kilcolman Castle, Edmund Spenser’s tower, the tower of the linguistic, cultural and institutional Anglicization of Ireland. A clear call for the conquest of Ireland, the castle was destroyed during the Irish revolts in the 16th century. With Heaney, the English literary heritage of Wordsworth, Ted Hughes and G. M. Hopkins has been mingled with other European literary influences, such as Dante, Chekhov or Milosz. Also, since Ulster is seen a space dominated by “the strain of being in two places at once” (Preoccupations 57), Heaney has created images to unite the cultures coexisting there, such as, Mossbawn, Heaney’s family farm when he was a child, described as a metaphor for Ulster culture (Preoccupations 17-27). The name reflects both English and Irish origins, in an attempt towards a unifying vision, annulling physical and cultural frontiers and widening boundaries through a common heritage. To the west of the figure, Yeats displays his sixteenth-century Norman tower, Thoor Ballylee, a symbol of the poet’s effort to restore the traditional values. Here, in this space full of romance and history, with a winding, gyring, ancestral stair, the lines of division between communities and cultures become prominent. Yeats’s Irish are essentially Celtic and Catholic, bards or peasants and different from the English, living on one side or the other. Conversely, the pilgrimage imagined by Heaney in his volume Station Island, consisting in an underworld journey on St. Patrick’s Purgatory, undermines both the Catholic tradition and the European cultural tradition set by Dante, in order to prove the poet’s artistic creed. The ghosts Heaney encounters here – writers, teachers, acquaintances, family – echo the poet’s condition, his vocation, the religious and political tensions, as possible alternative voices for the poet’s self. Coming from families with a powerful Catholic background, with Heaney, just like with Joyce, the religious vocation has somehow always been in the air but the priestly soothing role of the poet needs to be challenged. And the most impressive questioning of the poet’s healing role is contained in the poet’s encounter with his cousin, a victim of sectarian killing; the poet’s feeling of failure (“I felt like the bottom of a dried lake”) 211 to his cousin’s accusations that poetry cannot have a redemptive function is painful. However, since creation requires religious intensity, as suggested in poems, such as, “The Master” and “The Artist” (“his fortitude held and hardened” Station Island), Ireland remains the land of poets and priests. To balance this approach, in the east, Joyce has his Martello Tower, one of a series of Martello towers built to withstand an invasion by Napoleon. The Martello chains on the south and east coast of England and the east coast of Ireland were considered part of a defensive system designed to protect the British Isles. Thanks to the role played by the tower as a setting for the writer’s first chapter in his Ulysses, it has become a symbol of the artist’s attempt to integrate Ireland in the European tradition. The Joycean pattern is illustrated for example in Heaney’s volumes The Haw Lantern (1987) and Seeing Things (1991). After the so called dark volumes Door into the Dark, Wintering Out and North, Heaney claims: “I want a door into the light’” (O’Driscoll 113). When leaving Northern Ireland, the poet carries with him the consciousness of his internal exile wherever he goes to live. And he also lives inside what T.S. Eliot called the literary “mind of Europe”. By leaving Ireland at the end of Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist, is trying to redefine the centralities of Irish identity. Similarly Heaney leaves the North, calling these centralities the “old markings” that “keep the east bank from west”. So: we can say that Spenser’s tower faces in to the round tower of the mythic first Irish place and sees popery, barbarism and the Dark Ages; Yeats’s tower faces it and sees a possible unity of being, an Irish nation retrieved and enabled by repossession of its Gaelic heritage; Joyce’s tower faces it and sees an archetypal symbol, the omphalos, the navel of a reinvented order, or maybe the ivory tower from which the chaste maid of Irish Catholic provincialism must be liberated into the secular freedoms of Europe. (Redress of Poetry 200) Also, in the north, there is Louis MacNeice’s Carrickfergus Castle, a key to the Anglo-Norman hold on Ulster, besieged in turn by the Scots, Irish, English and French and an anti-air raid spot in World War II. The tower is associated with the Glorious Revolution (William II’s victory in 1690) but since MacNeice grew up in pre-partitioned Ireland he did not allow the border enter his imagination. The last two towers, Joyce’s and MacNeice’s, reveal the integrative vision searched for by Heaney. 212 Seamus Heaney’s merit is that of designing in his essays a coherent figure showing a vision tolerant of possibilities, equally embraced by Eamonn Wall’s vision in his volumes: It may be that there is not yet a political structure to reflect this poetic diagram, but the admission of MacNeice in this way within the symbolic ordering of Ireland also admits a hope for the evolution of a political order, one tolerant of difference and capable of metamorphoses within all the multivalent possibilities of Irishness, Britishness, Europeanness, planetariness, creaturileness, whatever. (Redress of Poetry 200) In conclusion, this diagram best completes contemporary Irish poets’ inclusive poetic (space) vision. Also, this is how geographical, historical, cultural and linguistic borders may lose their power faced with the poet’s imaginative frontiers of writing, which become wider and more welcoming. The Ireland of the mind incorporates the diversity of Ireland’s complex history and geography within its generous dual poetic design (Stanca, Duality of Vision in Seamus Heaney’s Writings 109-115). The revival of northern voices is paralleled by ecocritical, regional voice of poets, such as Richard Murphy and Mary O’Malley, creative female voices of Medbh McGuckian and Eavan Boland and transatlantic voices, such as that of Eamonn Wall. McGuckian and Boland rewrote the long-established tradition of poetry written by male poets mapping Ireland in the shape of a woman figure in the context of the presidency of Mary Robinson, the first woman president of Ireland, who had “a great liberalising influence on a changing Ireland” (Campbell 3). Boland’s feminine aesthetics deals with the absence of women from received version of history. In the context of her grandmother’s hospitalization and death in the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin, Boland tries to reconstruct the woman story in Object Lessons: “I know nothing about her childhood. There are no photographs. No letters. Nobody ever recalled her to me as a living memory. It is another erasure” (Boland qtd. in Tobin 257), the poet wanting to eradicate the official family history that silenced many aspects. In a larger context, that of Irish migration to the US, Boland wants to remember in the poem “The Emigrant Irish” the devastation caused by the famine in Ireland in mid-nineteenth century, the voyages of the “coffin ships” to America, New York’s crowded Five Points and Hell’s Kitchen, the ritual of the American wake performed by the Irish people back home for those who had decided to emigrate. Boland refuses to forget that the Irish 213 entry into modernity shares with other immigrant groups in America a “traumatic legacy of passage to life on these shores” (Tobin 259). Boland has also challenged the use of woman as a figure of Ireland. To the lady poet, language becomes a living place: “That is what language is:/ a habitable grief.” (qtd. in Giráldez 28) and place is a chronotope, a combination of real and imaginary. McGuckian’s lyric displays the feminine features described by Cixous quoted in the introduction to the book, of fluid, non-linear nature. Her poems are set in a world of houses, rooms, family, relationships, but also seasons, weather, gardens and vegetation, to dramatize the experiences of being daughter, mother, lover, wife and poet. Both lady poets have come up with a new pastoral: I’m a lost, last inhabitant displaced person in a pastoral chaos. All day I listen to the loud distress, the switch and tick of new herds. But I am no shepherdess. (Boland, “The New Pastoral” in Faggen 232) Generations of poets being inspired by the lady poets mentioned previously would not feel bound to represent the body of the nation in their works. Interestingly, there are texts by male poets, such as Longley’s “The Linen Industry” that tackle the affirmation of feminine powers repressed. This text is about flax and linen, the basis of Belfast’s industrial power and its male-fisted politics which refused the feminine element: Pulling up flax after the blue flowers have fallen And laying our handfuls in the peaty water To rot those grasses to the bone, or building stooks That recall the skirts of an invisible dancer, We became a part of the linen industry And follow its processes to the grubby town Where fields are compacted into window-boxes And there is little room among the big machines. (in Heaney Finders Keepers 120) 214 Equally relevant to woman’s sensitivity is Longley’s “Self-Heal” from the Mayo monologues sequence, the title referring to the name of a flower used by a woman molested by a mongoloid neighbour; she has been marginalized by the community as innocently responsible; she has been suffering while understanding her role. Her role in the story is likened to that of the Northern Irish poets, according to Seamus Heaney: Although in no way personally responsible for the violence that occurred, they comprehend its causes and effects and have been inclined to make poetry a process of self-healing, neither deliberately nor culpably detached. (Finders Keepers 133) 215 216 WORKS CITED Allen, Michael, ed. Seamus Heaney: New Casebooks. Hampshire: Macmillan, 1997. Ardagh, John. Ireland and the Irish: Portrait of a Changing Society. London: Penguin Books, 1995. Batten, Guinn. “Boland, McGuckian, Ni Chuilleanáin and the body of the nation”. 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