by Richard Tillinghast
Poetry Ireland Review, Issue 89
In 2005 Wake Forest University Press published the first volume in a projected series of anthologies of Irish poetry. Though it is not the only new anthology of contemporary work coming out of Ireland, it is as good a place as any to do some thinking about what has been happening recently on the poetry scene in Ireland. The poets chosen by editor Jefferson Holdridge for this anthology are Harry Clifton, born in 1952; Dennis O'Driscoll, born in 1954; David Wheatley, born in 1970; Sinead Morrissey, born in 1972; and Caitriona O'Reilly, born in 1973. It is illuminating to read these poets against a background of those who preceded them. One thing W B Yeats, Louis MacNiece, Patrick Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney—to pick four poets from the generations preceding the current one—had in common was their preoccupation with their native country both as a nation and as a place. But when asked to define Ireland, each would have given a different answer.
If MacNiece, Kavanagh, Heaney and Yeats each defined Ireland differently when they addressed the subject, still there is an attitude toward their native country that is typical of all of them. The sense of place has traditionally been as strong in Ireland as anywhere in the world. From my earliest readings of Yeats as a boy growing up in Tennessee, I was led to feel there was something—for lack of a better word—'special' about Ireland, magical if you will. The mystique of landscape appears early in the poetry written by the young man living in London, dreaming of Sligo, in almost every poem he wrote—'The Stolen Child', for instance:
Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star. . .
And one cannot fail to respond to the sense of place in middle and late Yeats; in 'My House' from 'Meditations in Time of Civil War,' to give another example:
An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,
A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,
An acre of stony ground,
Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,
Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,
The sound of the rain or sound
Of every wind that blows . . .
I hardly need to quote from Heaney and Kavanagh, poets whose meat and drink are evocations of local landscape. Even the work of the acerbic and cosmopolitan MacNiece and of Derek Mahon, who was strongly influenced by the older Ulsterman, is at times drenched with a love of the landscape, as witness this stanza from MacNiece's 'Train to Dublin':
I give you the smell of Norman stone, the squelch
Of bog beneath your boots, the red bog-grass,
The vivid chequer of the Antrim hills, the trough of dark
Golden water for the cart-horses, the brass
Belt of serene sun upon the lough.
When we come to the poets included in the Wake Forest anthology, that old sense of Ireland seems to have gone up in smoke. It would seem that now, as a prosperous member of the European Union, host to waves of emigration from Eastern Europe and elsewhere, Ireland is just like everywhere else.
Harry Clifton's poetry raises several questions of poetic identity. Is Clifton an Irish poet? He was born and educated in Ireland, spent his first twenty-five years here. On the other hand, from the age of about twenty-five to almost fifty-five he spent as much time away from Ireland as in it. He has taught English in Nigeria, England, France and Italy, worked for the Irish Civil Service in refugee aid programmes in Thailand, and lived in Paris for many years. In 2004 he returned to this country and now lives in Dublin. Yet if Beckett was Ireland's first European playwright, Derek Mahon and Harry Clifton may be the country's first European poets.
The sense of rootedness in Ireland as a place is not found in the selections from Clifton's work in this anthology. That doesn't mean he is lacking in a sense of place—simply that his sense of place attaches more to landscapes like the one evoked in 'The Desert Route', a bizarre, in-between place near the border between, one supposes, two Saharan countries. The focus on geometry and abstraction in the desert superhighway's 'lines of purpose' is characteristic of Clifton's philosophical cast of mind:
...the camel trains,
The slow asphalting-gangs
On the superhighway, laying down
Lines of purpose, almost merging
At times, almost parallel,
Except at the border, where a soldier
With three stripes, wishing himself elsewhere
Is waving the landrovers on.
The self in Clifton's poetry is attenuated, impersonal, a kind of philosophical equivalent of the figures in Giacometti's sculptures. Clifton's poem 'Reductio' is an homage to the sculptor. An Existentialist understanding very close to Giacometti's spirit informs the self presented in 'The Waking Hour':
. . .I float upwards, from my own depths,
With a woman beside me
Wondering, wondering am I real
Or an angel trapped in the glass of a bedside prayer
And have I come into her life, and will I stay thereWith the other objects, nailed to the wall
Like permanence, or habit,
Achieving humanity, averaging out
Between sacred and profane, through the long attritions
Marriage and work ordain. . . .
Marriage is one of Clifton's preoccupations. 'The Better Portion' tells of a couple whose harmonious routines are shattered by a sudden eruption from the wife's subconscious, reminiscent of Sylvia Plath's disturbed and disturbing self-discovery when she suddenly found herself able to articulate the depth of her rage toward her dead father. Here are the last two stanzas of the poem:
Suddenly
One evening, she talked a blue streak
From half-past-eleven
To four-fifteen, then fell asleep
Like a stone disappearing into the deep.
All this comes from nowhere,He told himself, flabbergasted
And unmanned, with the working surface
Of marriage all around him
To hold on to—heart and head,
The better portion neither disputed
In all their years of breaking bread
Before she emerged, from the underworld.
Figures like Ignazio Silone, Soren Kierkegaard, Thomas Merton, haunt Clifton's work like familiars; he addresses them, contemplates their lives as object-lessons. Going further back, Saint Augustine and his world exert a particular fascination, in 'Reading Saint Augustine':
As for myself, I was desperate to get back
Behind Augustine's City of God
To a time before our time, of plunder and sack,
Where the word Apocalypse was clearly stated.
The act of reading history, and thinking about history, have seldom been presented so palpably.
Eleven thirty. Carthage and Thagaste
Long since fallen, knew their gods had failed.
Alaric and his Huns had stove them in
Like Rome before them. Adeodatus the bastard
Of Augustine, and Augustine himself, were dead.
All that was left, now; was the City of God.
The orgies, the pomaded boys, the love-ins,
All were over. Outside, sirens wailed —
A truck rolled by, the windowglass vibrated.
Otherwise all was normal.
The effect of these poems, with their cool surfaces and lack of obvious affect, is a certain disengagement. If we compare Clifton's stance with those of his predecessors, we might wonder why, finally, his poetry feels so different from theirs. Yeats, Kavanagh, MacNiece, Heaney all in their own ways also maintain a certain distance and reserve. Perhaps Clifton's work simply shows us how much the world has changed, how glaringly its inequalities, brutality and exploitation impress themselves on someone who has put himself in a position to see first-hand what is happening in other parts of the world—other cultures that MacNiece, Heaney and Kavanagh would seem to have had little interest in, while Yeats mined other cultures such as Byzantium, China and Japan largely for their mythic value. To show how deep and how informed and genuine the specifically European identity is, I need to quote one poem in its entirety. To read it in bits and pieces is to miss out on the wealth of connections Clifton is able to make, in bringing to the continent of Europe that bracing and powerful sense of place Kavanagh and Heaney brought to their Irish poems.
TAKING THE WATERS
There are taps that flow, all day and all night,
From the depths of Europe,
Inexhaustible, taken for granted,Slaking our casual thirsts
At a railway station
Heading south, or here in the AbruzzoBursting cold from an iron standpipe
While our blind mouths
Suck at essentials, straight from the water table.Our health is too good, we are not pilgrims.
And the nineteenth century
Led to disaster. Aix, and Baden Baden -Where are they now, those ladies with the vapours
Sipping at glasses of hydrogen sulphide
Every morning, while the pump-house piano playedAnd Russian radicals steamed and stewed
For hours in their sulphur tubs
Plugged in to the cathodes of Revolution?Real cures, for imaginary ailments -
Diocletian's, or Vespasian's.
History passes, only the waters remain,Bubbling up, through their carbon sheets,
To the other side of catastrophe
Where we drink, at a forgotten source,Through the old crust of Europe
Centuries deep, restored by a local merchant
Of poultry and greens, inscribing his name in Latin.
Dennis O'Driscoll brings to his poetry a distinctiveness that could perhaps only be attained by someone who has on the one hand read a tremendous amount of poetry and who on the other hand is unhampered by an academic study of literature. Commentators on his work tend to stress the latter influence; O'Driscoll studied law and has worked for decades as an Irish civil servant—not stationed abroad like Harry Clifton, but in the heart of the capital at Dublin Castle. Part of his distinctiveness is that you will hardly ever encounter in his work the poem-in-a-setting that is a staple of the genre—the kind of writing that begins with the poet positioned in a particular place, where the poem unfolds as a meditation occasioned by that positioning. I open Paul Muldoon's anthology, Contemporary Irish Poetry, at random, and the first poem I find is Thomas Kinsella's 'Mirror in February', which begins 'The day dawns with scent of must and rain, / Of opened soil, dark trees, dry bedroom air.'
Many great poems, many good poems have been written, for centuries, in the poem-in-a-setting mode, but perhaps this has become a bit too comfortable a way to proceed. O'Driscoll's poems tend to come at you from out of nowhere, often seemingly prompted by an idea—the idea behind 'Someone', for example, being the unpredictability of death. Here is how it begins:
someone is dressing up for death today, a change of skirt or tie
eating a final feast of buttered sliced pan, tea
scarcely having noticed the erection that was his last
shaving his face to marble for the icy laying out
spraying with deodorant her coarse armpit grass
someone today is leaving home on business
saluting, terminally, the neighbours who will join in the cortege
Perhaps the first thing one notices about this poem, beyond its boldness of presentation, is its impersonality, its evocation of all these different 'someones', each saved from abstraction by precise details: 'some one's waist will not be marked with elastic in the future / someone is putting out milkbottles for a day that will not come.' O'Driscoll's poems are at home with unrealised potentiality—'Spoiled Child', for instance, begins:
my child recedes inside me
and need never puzzle where it came from
or lose a football in the dusty laurel bushes
or sneak change from my jacket to buy sweetsmy child will not engage in active military service
or make excuses about its school report
or look up from a picture book, dribbling a pink smile
or qualify for free glasses or school lunch
Another quality that makes his poetry distinctive is that while many poets project a personality that is strikingly exceptional, O'Driscoll likes to write impersonally about the typical, the ordinary. Perhaps he has absorbed some of the impersonality of his role as a civil servant. There may be early poems by O'Driscoll that show the influence of Irish exemplars, but I've no evidence of such an influence. Obviously the raptures and high rhetoric of Yeats would not suit his temperament, while the rootedness of Kavanagh and Heaney might have seemed a bit too familiar to a young man growing up in the town of Thurles, Co Tipperary. I catch a note of Larkin's hard-bittenness from time to time in O'Driscoll's lines; but on the whole it seems to me that he has gone to school to the Eastern Europeans and the Americans.
He has evidently learned impersonality and simplicity from translations of poets like Holub, Muosz and Szymborska, and he has acquired the 'common touch' from his reading of American poetry. 'Them and You' deftly summarises the class divide in an Ireland where the beneficiaries of the Celtic Tiger live uneasily side by side with those for whom the new Ireland is no different from the old, only everything is more expensive. Here are the first four couplets:
They wait for the bus.
You spray them with puddles.They queue for curry and chips.
You phone an order for delivery.They place themselves under the protection
of the Marian Grotto at the front of their estate.You put your trust in gilts, managed funds,
income continuation plans.
Perhaps through his job with the Customs department, O'Driscoll has acquired a familiarity with the world of business, a familiarity he uses to advantage in the long sequence The Bottom Line. In the following stanza he constructs a chilling metaphor for death taken from that world. You can see here how clearly he has subverted the familiar emblems of death:
Death, once brushed against,
does not seem in the least
like a stubbly ghost with scythe
reaping dry grass in the graveyard,
but shows up as a brash executive
cutting recklessly across your lane,
lights making eye-contact with yours,
ready to meet head-on as though
by previous appointment; ram home
your car horn like a panic button:
his cellphone's bell will toll for you.
If literature's two great themes are death and love, you won't find much of the latter here. Love poetry is, in fact, a territory that most Irish writers have approached only with hesitation and reticence. It is not really surprising that one of Heaney's most forthright attempts in this genre is called 'The Skunk'! Tenderness enters the world of O'Driscoll's poetry in a most indirect and qualified way, in the rather horrifying 'In Memory of Alois Alzheimer', a graphic description of the gruesome effects of the disease. The last section, distanced from any personal construance by being printed in italics, goes as following:
Lie closer to me in the dry sheets
while I can still tell who you are.Let me declare how much I love you
before our bed is sorely tested.Love me with drooling toxins, with carbon monoxide,
with rope, with arrows through my heart.
I would credit his readings of American poetry for O'Driscoll's way of using the 'you' to suggest 'one', as a stand-in for the first-person singular when he ventures onto personal ground. 'Vigil' sounds like the closest thing to a personal statement we are likely to get from this quintessentially circumspect poet—though even here no doubt I am reading something into the poem. Here is part of it, from the middle of the poem:
You are alone in the bone-weary tower
of your bleary-eyed, blinking lighthouse,
watching the spillage of tide on the shingle inlet.
You are the single-minded one who hears
time shaking from the clock's fingertips
like drops, who watches its hands
chop years into diced seconds. . . .
Dennis O'Driscoll has produced an extraordinary body of work by rolling up his sleeves and going to work patiently and quietly on what would appear to be the most ordinary things. Some of his poems have already achieved the status of classics.
To include in a single book five poets, two in their fifties, three in their thirties, does not make for an ideal collection. The reader implicitly makes comparisons which are not really fair to the younger poets. Unlike philosophers and mathematicians, few poets really fmd themselves before the age of forty. In his role as literary entrepreneur, Wheatley reminds me of the young Ezra Pound fomenting the various movements, the little magazines, that constituted early Modernism first in Londonand then on the Left Bank; of the young Robert Bly, a Harvard graduate snowed-in at his farm on the plains of Minnesota, rallying the forces of the Midwestern 'deepimage' school of James Wright, Galway Kinnell, Donald Hall, with his influentialmagazine The Fifties, which later became The Sixties. The trick for the poetry entrepreneur is to keep focused on his own writing without getting carried away by peripheral activities. Pound, whose early poetry is still his lasting achievement in my view, had seriously lost focus during his last years in London and Paris, and only gained it again whenhe moved to Italy and poured his awe-inspiring energies into the composition of the Cantos. Many readers of Bly would feel that his poetry has, over the years, taken second place to his work in the 'New Man' movement and to his activities as a performer of his own work.
Pardon me if I am getting carried away by speculation: comparisons, as the saying goes, are odious. For whatever reason, David Wheatley is still in the process of finding his way. There is a brittleness, a tentative and emotionally veiled quality to his poems that reminds me both of Michael Hofmarm and of the early Paul Muldoon. Like Muldoon he is an accomplished rhymer, an extraordinarily rare quality these days. Wheatley's skill shows itself to advantage in 'Autumn, the Nightwalk, the City, the River'. Dublin, like London and Paris, is drenched in literary associations, and it is good to see an unliterary update. Here are a few lines from the middle of the poem with its crisp, satisfying couplets:
Anywhere would do: I remember suburbs
plush with hatchbacks parked on tidy kerbs,
privets, cherry blossoms, nouveau riches'
houses named for saints, complete with cable dishes;
and then the streets where every window was
an iron grid across its pane of glass,
the garden weeds in cracks, a noise ahead—
a bird, a car—enough to make me cross the road.
Another Dublin poem, 'Misery Hill', seizes on the evocative street-name, captures the atmosphere of urban decay which is not hard to find in the city, but fails to rise above undifferentiated irony, ending:
...a post-office van
passes silently by with letters
for anywhere but this grim street
with its rubble and wire-topped walls,
featureless and empty besides.
More daring and kinetic is Wheatley's jeu d'esprit 'St. John and the Eagle', based on illuminations executed for the gospel of John from the medieval Lindisfarne Gospels. The saint's emblematic eagle lifts right off the illuminated page in this brilliantly self-consuming poem, and onto the page of the poem:
...the eagle will swoop,
scattering doves as he goes.
Evangelist's bird, tired
of the easy kill, the flocculent hareand deckchair legs of the deer
folding under a ton's worth of rapt
persuasion in its claw: from a thousand
yards up the eagle has spiedand will snatch from your hands
your book, leaving you only
a feather with which to scatter
and sow the Word in hisfugitive image, imago aquilae:
no sooner will you have finished
this page than talons will
puncture and carry it off.
Like the young Muldoon, Wheatley is curious and ranges widely in search of poetic models. I enjoy seeing his poetic experiments that have been appearing in literary magazines since this anthology was published. For example, two poems in the autumn 2005 Poetry Ireland Review, 'An Errancy' and 'Drift', playoff traditional models from Irish folklore and Gaelic poetry with a welcome playfulness and emotional accessibility often lacking in the selections in the Wake Forest anthology. David Wheatley's poetry is still very much a work in progress.
Parenthetically, the efforts of Yeats, MacNiece, Heaney and—in his idiosyncratic and oblique way—Kavanagh, to define the Irish nation in its early years must seem largely the work of the past to the poets in the Wake Forest anthology. But this is not to say that they would agree with Margaret Thatcher that 'there is no such thing as society.' Clifton's short poem, 'Military Presence, Cobh 1899' obliquely addresses British colonialism in Ireland; its terse ending—'all you lack / Is consciousness, judgement, the twentieth century'—suggests that Irish independence is less a matter of heroism than of historical inevitability. This would ruffle a few feathers among Republican patriots. O'Driscoll's 'Them and You' points to the presence of a class structure in Ireland unforeseen by the visionaries of 1916.
Wheatley's social awareness would seem to attach, at least in these poems, more to the city of Dublin than to the country of Ireland. Derek Mahon in The Yellow Book has chronicled the metamorphosis of the city into 'a Georgian theme-park for the tourist', 'aliens, space invaders clicking at the front door, / goofy in baseball caps and nylon leisurewear', in a Dublin where 'foreign investment conspires against old decency, / computer talks to computer, machine to answering machine.' In a sonnet sequence addressed to the nineteenth-century poet James Clarence Mangan, Wheatley writes more caustically:
Let the city sleep on undisturbed,
new hotels and apartment blocks replace
the Dublin that we brick by brick erase;
let your city die without a word
of pity, indignation, grief or blame,
the vampire crime lords fatten on its flesh
and planners zone the corpse for laundered cash...
Sinead Morrissey, who was born in Armagh and grew up in Belfast, bears witness to urban destruction brought on not by prosperity, corruption and 'progress' but by bombs. In a startling little poem she personifies the Europa Hotel, a landmark in downtown Belfast which regularly used to be targeted by IRA bombers, and addresses the building as if it had a consciousness:
It's a hard truth to have to take in the face—
You wake up one morning with your windows
Round your ankles and your forehead billowing smoke;
Your view impaired for another fortnight
Of the green hills they shatter you for.
The last line briskly anatomises the ironies of destroying in the name of building a new society.
In the first fifteen pages of the thirty-odd pages devoted to Morrissey it is clear that we are in the presence of a talent whose 'new angels', as she puts it, 'are howling, hard', sandpapery, open-hearted. Work of this order renews one's faith in the art of poetry. 'Sea Stones' is a poem one is unlikely to forget. This brilliant study in the experience of receiving violence, of the complications of jealousy, of the unfathomable labyrinths of love and passion, begins,
It is exactly a year today since you slapped me in public.
I took it standing up. You claimed I just ignored it,
that I pretended to be hooked on the dumb-show of a sunset,
splashing, a mile off. Too hooked to register
the sting of your ring finger
as it caught on my mouth and brought my skin with it.
I'll pass over an intermediate stanza and quote the ending of this poem, that almost in itself is worth the price of the anthology. It is both deeply romantic and at the same time informed by a sophisticated sense of human deviousness:
He gave me roses. The surprise of butterflies caged in the palms.
And sea stones with tracings of juvenile kisses, scented with risk.
I wrapped them in black at the back of a bottom drawer,
hidden in underwear. The truth—that you never were so vivid
or so huge as the second the street turned towards us
in shock—got dropped between us like a fallen match.You turned away as the sun disappeared like a ship. And I,
Suddenly wanting to be struck again, to keep the fire of your anger lit,
I bit my lip.
The companion piece to this is '& Forgive Us Our Trespasses', which begins, 'Of which the first is love'. I leave this one to the reader to discover. Morrissey is an astute student of the human heart.
To an American, it is always interesting to see what a writer from another country makes of the United States. Harry Clifton's 'Absinthe at New Orleans' combines vivid sketches of American cityscapes with some trenchant criticism of social inequalities in the United States; at the same time the poem is informed by bizarre Kafkaesque fantasies of the State Department agency that is paying for his tour of the US as a sinister, all-seeing Big Brother pulling strings behind the scenes. True, America under Bush is going through its most disastrous period since the McCarthy era. But reading Clifton's take, one can only wonder, as the expression goes, what this otherwise seemingly sensible poet had been smoking. In today's world an intense and wary scrutiny of America has become almost a necessity, but it needs to be more acute than this.
Sinead Morrissey takes a view less driven by fantasy, more attuned to sensory perception. Her American landscapes are vivid and crisp. Her extraordinary poem, 'An Anatomy of Smell', contains a portrait of a couple, one American from the Southwest, one Irish, rendered in terms of smell:
From you, the smell of the Tucson desert:
copper deposits, animal skulls, the chalk trajectory
of stars no cloud covers or strains, ochre and chilli.
From me, bog cotton, coal fires, wild garlic, river dirt.
And from the two of us, salt. When we move house
such genealogies as these will follow us.
To me the earlier poems in the selection speak more convincingly than the more recent ones, which would appear to grow out of travel to places like Japan, New York, New Zealand—places that are not as evocative for this poet as those about the American Southwest or her own emotional home places. The meditations on history, the poem about whales off the Ulster coast, all of these read like 'occasional' poems. Except for 'Genetics', a haunting exploration of how a separated mother and father have left their legacy in their daughter's hands—'My father's in my fingers, but my mother's in my palms'—they lack the rough edge of necessity. One hopes this splendid poet will eventually find a path back to her roots.
Caitriona O'Reilly, just a year younger than Sinead Morrissey, is a startlingly accomplished young poet who is struggling, I feel, to emerge from the weight of the many things she can do well, before she can write the poetry she is capable of. She's like a woman with seventeen pieces of expensive luggage who can't find the perfect 'little black dress' that is folded away somewhere. Look how well she does the Plath-influenced ominous landscape (in 'Fragment'):
This night-breathing deceives, it is so calm.
The headland glitters with beached faces, lunar stares,
a tidal moon-haul of wrecks and drownings.
Their gazes are blank and lasting,
outfacing constellations even, crystalline.
Jefferson Holdridge closes his thirty-page introduction to this volume with a couple of sentences that chilled me to the bone: 'Poetry is ridding itself of everything that is not concerned with poetic perception, impersonal and self-mortifying. Caitriona O'Reilly's efforts to look at the changing world with new eyes are ambitious, even historic, at this pivotal period in Ireland.' My own view is that poetry commits suicide when it rids itself of everything that is not concerned with poetic perception. Two adjectives float at the end of Mr. Holdridge's sentence, so one cannot be dead sure what they modify, but presumably he is praising a poetic vision that is impersonal and self-mortifying. 'Impersonal' is all right with me if applied to, say, Dennis O'Driscoll's poems which by-pass the self in order to achieve what Matthew Arnold called 'a criticism of life'. But 'self-mortifying'? Does one read poetry in order to be self-mortified? I don't.
The first of Caitriona O'Reilly's 'Two Night Time Pieces', called 'Pisces', is a place—Mr. Holdridge would probably say a locus—where something vital and not at all impersonal or self-mortifying tries and succeeds in making itself felt through a scaffolding of perceptions that are perhaps so precise and 'poetic' that they actually get in the way. This very sexy poem, given the reservations I have expressed, made me gasp with pleasure and interrupt the person who was reading beside me in bed, to insist she hear it read aloud:
Thirteen Februaries slept through
before I learned what going under meant.Pale and thin as sheets,
the near fields burst free of mooring.Then the turn of the tide,
the sea stack,the pier-light's onyx eye.
Those teenage dreamswere cuttle-ink tattoos
describing blue-rinse mermen,each muscular wave awash
with sex and phosphor.I was awash and rocked,
rocked hard to wakeand woke, drenched to the roots,
my flannelette pyjamas stiff with sand.
To concentrate on diction here for a moment, 'blue-rinse mermen' is overly fussy, and I even have my doubts about 'cuttle-ink tattoos', which is recherché in a manner reminiscent of Marianne Moore at her most fastidious. But the assonance, the repetitions, the wood-block tones of 'awash and rocked, / rocked hard to wake / / and woke, drenched to the roots' are thrilling—there's no other word for it. And the domestically diminutive, adolescent note introduced by 'flannelette pyjamas' reminds me, in its rightness, of Leonard Cohen's lines in 'Boogie Street' from Ten New Songs: 'I tidied up the kitchenette; / I tuned the old banjo.'
A beautiful example of transformation is O'Reilly's suite of poems, 'A Quartet for the Falcon', based, I should think, on her readings in falconry and alchemy—or at least it would seem so. Perhaps she has just made it all up and made it sounds plausible. Here is a peregrine falcon hunting a heron:
They go ringing up the air,
each in its separate spiral stair
to the indigo rim of the skies,
then descend
swift as a murderer's hand
with a knife. Death's gesture liquefiesin bringing the priestly heron down.
Her prize, the marrow from a wing-bone
in which she delights, her spurred
fleur-de-lys tongue
stained gold-vermilion—
little angel in her hangman's hood.
I believe that Caitriona O'Reilly is on her way to becoming a stunning lyric poet. She is not the first poet to have earned a PhD, nor will she be the last. But a way must be found to transmute all the learning into lore and then to become so thoroughly assimilated that it becomes pure instinct.
Wake Forest, founded by Dillon Johnston, has always been a pioneer—almost the pioneer—in introducing new Irish poetry to American readers. It will be interesting to see which poets from Ireland's standing army the press decides to present next.
About the Author
Richard Tillinghast's most recent book is Poetry and What is Real, a collection of essays published in 2004 by University of Michigan Press.
Editor: Peter Sirr
Assistant Editor: Paul Lenehan
Copyright © 2007 by Poetry Ireland Ltd
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
