The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry, Vol. IV

By Trevor Joyce, Aidan Mathews, Peter McDonald and 2 more

The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry brings lesser-known Irish voices to an American audience. In this fourth volume, editor David Wheatley, himself an established poet and critic, has selected poetry by Trevor Joyce, Aidan Mathews, Peter McDonald, Ailbhe Darcy, and Ailbhe N Ghearbhuigh. Each section is introduced with an essay by Wheatley which offers some background, context, and general illumination about the poet. As Wheatley writes in his preface, "Irish poetry is a peregrine entity, making and manifesting itself in a wide variety of ways, in and out of Ireland, and as a book of Irish poetry edited by a Scotland-based Irishman and published in the US, this volume enters the marketplace from another angle again. The balance of power between Dublin, Belfast, London, and other traditional publishing centers is not a primary concern of this book, however. Instead, I sidestep questions of generational groups and territoriality to explore a series of related but distinct issues, as focused on these five poets' distinguished bodies of work."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wake Forest University Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781943666324

Book preview

Table of Contents

Editor's Preface

Trevor Joyce

Trevor Joyce and the Irish Experimental Tradition

from WITH THE FIRST DREAM OF FIRE THEY HUNT THE COLD (2001)

Elegy of the Shut Mirror

The Opening

Fast Rivers

The Turlough

Strands

Chimaera

To-Do

from Syzygy: The Net

The Fishers Fished

Concentration

Let Happen

from WHAT'S IN STORE (2007)

Romance

Limitless

Kindling

o tiny / universe

i walked / through / the universe / of parmenides

Sanctioned

Elements

De Iron Trote

from COURTS OF AIR AND EARTH (2008)

Seán Ó Duibhir of the Glen

She is my love

I will not die for you

Cry Help

from ROME'S WRECK (2014)

from Rome’s Wreck: I, IV, XX, XXXII

Aidan Mathews

Aidan Mathews and the Irish Religious Poem

from WINDFALLS (1977)

Returning to Kilcoole

An Answer

from MINDING RUTH (1983)

Talismans

The Death of Irish

The River’s Elegy

from ACCORDING TO THE SMALL HOURS (1998)

The Acoustic of Water

Surgeon at Seventy-Five

Drawn in the Sand

Fatherlands

Ex Cathedra

Eye Witness

All Burials Are at Sea

Sea-Change

Telling the Time

Guardians

Oven Gloves

The Ceiling Rose

Handicap

Genesis

Total Immersion

from Night Lights from Lorca: III. Deadwood

The Head Appears

Out of the Ark

Thee

from Psalms for a Mammal: IV. Long After Catullus

Wearings

NEW POEMS

After Omagh

Healing the Lepers

Kyrie for a Counsellor

Magdalenes

Perpetual Outing

Murals

The State of the Church

The Elements of Leaving

Imperial War Museum

Watercolour for a Widower

Nostalgias

Courtship

Peter McDonald

Peter McDonald and the Northern-Irish Poem

from COLLECTED POEMS (2012)

The Dog

Ether

Galatea

Out of Ireland

The South

The Green, Grassy Slopes of the Boyne

The Third Day

Meissen

The Creatures

From the Porch

The Glass Harmonica

Adam’s Dream

The Aftermath

Lines on the Demolition of the Adelphi, 1937

A Gloss

Work: 1958

At Rosses Point

A Fall

The Risk

Hush

War Diary

Inventory

Quis Separabit

Late Morning

The Bees

Coda

The Interruption

Augury

A Castaway

This Earth

from THE HOMERIC HYMNS (2016)

To the Earth, Mother of All

from HERNE THE HUNTER (2016)

Two Salmon

A Sting

The Names

The Swords

Hare

Sea Deer

Lebanon

Roe

Ailbhe Darcy

Ailbhe Darcy and the Post-National Poem

from IMAGINARY MENAGERIE (2011)

The mornings you turn into a grub

Icon

Telephone

Clues

You had not looked

He tells me I have a strange relationship

Christina’s World

Animal Biscuits

La rue est rentrée dans la chambre

Dog Song

Halo

Shoes

The Monster Surely

The Hotel

Molly Bán

The Art of Losing

Unheimlich

Caw Poem

A Report from the Mapparium, Boston

NEW POEMS

Hill Street

Small God Arrives

Bruce Conner Love Song

Birthday

Borrowed Time

Little Bird

Mushrooms

Windmill

Silver

Still

Tuffi

Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh

Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh and the Buntús Cainte ('Rudiments of Language')

from PÉACADH (2008)

Ciaróg / Beetle

Bac Seirce / The Love Bind

Glas / Green

Ionsaí na Bé / Fairy Attack

Meafair / Metaphors

Tionlacan / Accompaniment

Cneá / Wound

Áiféilín / A Matter of Some Regret

Filleadh ar an gCathair / Citybound

Moirt Seirce / Love Lees

Sárú Teorann / Border-Crossing

Iníon Báis / Daughter of Death

Ag Léamh ar an Tram / Reading on the Tram

Seal Fuachta / Cold Snap

Reathaí Oíche / Nightwaves

Geimhriú / Hibernation

from TOST AGUS ALLAGAR (2016)

Irrintzina / Irrintzina

St Nick’s / St Nick's

Buntús Cainte / Buntús Cainte

Bhís Dom’ Thiomáint Cois Trá / You Were Driving by the Sea

Druma an Chongó / Congo Drum

Deireadh na Feide / Last Blast

Bealtaine / May

Filleadh ón Antartach / Return from Antarctica

Conriocht / Werewolf

Biographical Notes

Permissions

THE WAKE FOREST SERIES OF IRISH POETRY VOLUME FOUR

THE WAKE FOREST SERIES OF

irish poetry

TREVOR JOYCE, AIDAN MATHEWS, PETER MCDONALD, AILBHE DARCY, and AILBHE NÍ GHEARBHUIGH

SELECTED, WITH A PREFACE

AND ESSAYS BY

DAVID WHEATLEY

WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2017 by

Wake Forest University Press

Preface and essays copyright

© 2017 by David Wheatley

All rights reserved

For permission to reproduce or

broadcast these poems, write to

Wake Forest University Press

Post Office Box 7333

Winston-Salem, NC 27109

wfupress.wfu.edu

[e-mail]

Cover design by Quemadura

ISBN 978-1-930630-77-2 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-943666-25-6 (epub)

ISBN 978-1-943666-26-3 (mobi)

LCCN 2016933278

Publication of this series is

generously supported by

the Boyle Family Fund.

EDITOR'S PREFACE

It is only quite lately that modern Irish poetry can claim to be fine art, wrote Stopford Brooke in the introduction to his and T. W. Rolleston’s 1900 anthology A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue. When the book was first projected, he adds, he had hoped to include nothing in it which did not reach a relatively high standard of excellence, but this proved incompatible with the historical reality of Irish poetry and its primitive beginnings. Luckily for Brooke, his own generation was at hand to supply the poetic maturity lacking in times past. Also in 1900, W. B. Yeats published The Shadowy Waters, while in 1895 he had done a spot of anthologizing of his own with A Book of Irish Verse. In his verse drama The Countess Cathleen, Yeats recounts the story of an enlightened aristocrat who intervenes to prevent her starving tenants selling their souls to the devil. Even as Yeats demonizes the nascent Catholic bourgeoisie, who would teach to ignorant men most middle-class ways, his own activities had more than a touch of bringing the Celtic soul to market about them.

There is a long tradition, then, of anthologies beginning with expressions of confidence in the rude good health of their chosen poetic tradition; and the twenty-first-century marketplace for Irish poetry is certainly buoyant. The naming of Irish navy patrol ships after James Joyce and Samuel Beckett represents a ne plus ultra in the incorporation of Irish writers into the hardware of the state, but in the two decades since his Nobel Prize victory Seamus Heaney has been elevated to near-comparable levels of canonization. Poets such as Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Eavan Boland, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, and Medbh McGuckian, are among the most widely fêted and studied in the Anglosphere. The purpose of the present anthology is to present five very different poets to the public, all bearing witness to different strengths of the Irish tradition and forming a broad church of divergent styles and interests; the age gap alone between oldest and youngest writers featured here (thirty-seven years) is enough to see to that. Even as I disavow any common front among my writers, however, another part of my intention is to suggest an alternative perspective on the business of Irish canon-formation and the ways in which non-dominant strands such as experimental writing have been unfairly overlooked; how the Irish language is treated; and how (or whether) younger poets can ever escape what Beckett termed the accredited themes of the past—the shibboleths of belonging, identity, and nation that still form the horizon of expectation for so much Irish poetry.

Among the most influential anthologies of the post-war period are, in the US, Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry (1960), and, in the UK, A. Alvarez’s The New Poetry (1962). Both books propose realignments of the contemporary canon, introducing lesser-known writers to a reading public hobbled by what Alvarez termed the gentility principle of ingrained conservative expectations. Though the tradition of Irish anthologizing is long and distinguished, the immediate post-war decades witnessed no equivalent of either Allen or Alvarez’s books, in terms of poetic achievement or readership. The reasons for this are various, and tell us significant things about how Irish poetry is received by a global readership. When the great generation of Northern Irish poets that spans Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon signalled their dominance in a generational anthology, it was in a British example of the genre, Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison’s Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982). Though Heaney bridled at the British label, penning a memorable squib of demurral, all the poets concerned published with UK presses; whatever the poets’ intrinsic Irishness, their reception was to a large extent a matter of Irish otherness seen against a British backdrop. Not all poets in the Republic were pleased with the success of their Northern contemporaries, or with the minimal representation of Southern poets in another British-published but Irish-focused anthology, Paul Muldoon’s Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1986), which featured a mere two non-Ulster poets (out of ten). Attempts to fight back with a contemporary canon arbitrated from Dublin rather than London largely came to naught: Sebastian Barry’s The Inherited Boundaries: Younger Poets of the Irish Republic (1986) and Gabriel Fitzmaurice’s Irish Poetry Now: Other Voices (1993) cannot be said to have found many takers. Was it the fate of Irish poetry, like the Irish labor-force in recession after recession, to serve the export market first? The relative size and resources of Irish (and Northern Irish) publishers is a factor here: the permission fees alone involved in anthologizing large chunks of Heaney or Muldoon would represent a serious deterrent to any Irish-based publisher.

Irish poetry is a peregrine entity, making and manifesting itself in a wide variety of ways, in and out of Ireland, and as a book of Irish poetry edited by a Scotland-based Irishman and published in the US, this volume enters the marketplace from another angle again. The balance of power between Dublin, Belfast, London, and other traditional publishing centers is not a primary concern of this book, however. Instead, I sidestep questions of generational groups and territoriality to explore a series of related but distinct issues, as focused on my five poets’ distinguished bodies of work. Trevor Joyce is perhaps the leading Irish experimental poet of modern times, one whose work is very much in the line of James Clarence Mangan and Samuel Beckett but is yet to have its due among a wider readership. No less than experiment, religion has been central to the Irish poetic experience: rarely has it found a more humane, high-brow, and humorous celebrant than Aidan Mathews, whose poems share with his fictions a gift for rambling and kaleidoscopic narrative. A translator of Homer, Peter McDonald speaks for the classical tradition in Irish, or more properly Northern Irish poetry. A profound elegist, he combines a learned wit (as one might expect from the author of a study entitled Serious Poetry) with direct and sensuous lyricism. As someone who has lived in Ireland, the US, Germany, and now Wales, Ailbhe Darcy is a citizen of a globalized poetic economy, and a writer for whom the pieties of previous generations might be expected to mean little or nothing. Quirky and wide-ranging though her poems are, Darcy is no rootless cosmopolitan, but a writer boldly overhauling the received categories of the Irish poem. Finally, Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh is among the finest young writers in the Irish language. A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue is full of translations from Irish, but it did not occur to its editors that Irish itself had any business sharing an anthology with works in English. Discussions of the Irish language in English have a tendency to focus unduly, like the madcap Gaeilgeoir in Myles na gCopaleen’s An Béal Bocht/The Poor Mouth, on the identity politics of writing in that language. Interesting though these are, it is salutary to remember the separateness of these questions from the impulse to create complex and beautiful literary artifacts, in whatever language, an impulse that Ní Ghearbhuigh shares with the other four poets assembled here.

Selections from each poet are prefaced by a short essay offering some background, context, and—I hope—general illumination.

DAVID WHEATLEY

Trevor Joyce

TREVOR JOYCE AND THE IRISH EXPERIMENTAL TRADITION

Among Thom Gunn’s witty short poems is a couplet titled Jamesian: Their relationship consisted / In discussing if it existed. Anyone who has trekked through a late Henry James novel will recognize the tendency of all discussion to move to a meta-level of intellectualization rather than anything as banal as mere communication. In the same way, the discussion surrounding the Irish avant-garde can often seem hung up in self-inhibited ways on the question of whether it exists at all. Anthologies and critical studies of Irish poetry come and go with no reference to the avant-garde, or sense that anything is lost by not engaging with Irish writing of a self-confessed modernist hue. By titling his 1985 critical study Irish Poetry After Joyce, Dillon Johnston drew attention to the existence of other wellheads than Yeats for modern Irish poetry, placing in fruitful dialogue the traditions that emerge from Yeatsian cultural nationalism and the alternatives of silence, exile and cunning identified by James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus. Where poetry is concerned, an often-cited foundational moment for Irish modernism is Samuel Beckett’s 1934 Recent Irish Poetry, published in The Bookman under the pseudonym Andrew Belis. The phrase foundational moment may be something of a misnomer for a manifesto which achieved so little purchase on the landscape of 1930s Irish poetry, but eight decades later the force of Beckett’s opposition to neo-Revivalist poetics has lost none of its urgency.

Just as T. S. Eliot had theorized a modernist aesthetic into existence on the basis of striking but fanciful generalizations—the dissociation of sensibility, the objective correlative—Beckett announces that Irish poets can be divided into those who have and those who have not taken cognizance of the breakdown of the object. Those who fail this test are the antiquarians, trapped in the flight from self-awareness that Beckett sees as the legacy of a myth-besotted nineteenth century.[1] George Russell, Austin Clarke, Francis Ledwidge, and a host of others are mockingly dismissed and praise heaped on the work of Thomas MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, and Denis Devlin: cosmopolitan poets whose poems constitute elucidations and a sophisticated alternative to dying of mirage. In no practical terms can Beckett’s manifesto be said to have been a success: no sooner had the poets he champions begun to publish than they vanished from the scene, either ceasing gradually to write altogether (MacGreevy) or enduring lengthy creative hiatuses (Devlin, Coffey), not to mention the even more obscure fate of Irish women modernists such as Blanaid Salkeld and Freda Laughton. Several factors conspired against this modernist moment. Beckett’s dislike of Yeats’s imitators in the Celtic mode blinds him to the possibility of any worthwhile poetry being written in this style, driving him to scapegoat the work of Austin Clarke (scandalously traduced in his 1938 novel Murphy as Austin Ticklepenny). Given how slender were the achievements of at least two of his favored poets in 1934, Devlin and Coffey, the element of special pleading in Beckett’s advocacy of their work is unmistakable. And finally, the essay predates the emergence of Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice, figures who would transform Irish poetry of the 1930s and further dilute the impact of the Irish modernists.

Nevertheless, much was lost when the moment of Recent Irish Poetry passed into semi-remembered literary history. The poetry of Beckett himself, an influence on Derek Mahon, Thomas Kinsella, and Trevor Joyce (b. 1947), remained in penumbra even after his winning of the Nobel Prize. Publishers of Irish poetry led a precarious existence, often leaving innovative writing without a port of call for decades at a time: between the closure of the Belfast-born George Reavey’s Europa Press in London (which had published Beckett’s Echo’s Bones) before the Second World War and the founding of New Writers’ Press in 1967, innovative writing was a scarcely registered absence on the island of Ireland. The New Writers’ Press sponsored the first real revival of the 1930s modernist poets, reprinting work by MacGreevy and Coffey, as well as publishing a wide spectrum of poetry in translation and fostering the early work of Paul Durcan, Michael Hartnett, and Joyce himself. In a peculiar repetition of the gapped careers endured by the 1930s poets, Joyce’s writing life is punctuated by a nineteen-year interval between the publication of The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine (1976) and stone floods (1995), years that coincide with the consolidation of the global celebrity of the Northern Irish poets. Histories of the avant-garde specialize in fall narratives, as a moment of radical promise is squandered or betrayed, and in what if questions framing counterfactual versions of literary history. What if Recent Irish Poetry had led to the coronation of Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin, and Thomas MacGreevy at the