Reflections on Irish Writing in 2008

David Pierce

The Fifty Minute Mermaid  (2007)

by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill / Paul Muldoon (Translator)

Luz Mar González

Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow (2007)

by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne

Pauline Hall

Folk Women and Indirection in Morrison, Ní Dhuibhne, Hurston, and Lavin (2007)

by Jacqueline Fulmer

Mª Elena Jaime de Pablos

Dublin Noir: the Celtic Tiger vs. the Ugly American (2006)

ed. by Ken Bruen

Dermot Kelly

For All We Know (2008)

by Ciaran Carson

Kevin Kiely

Scottish and Irish Romanticism (2008)

by Murray Pittock

Jane Moore

The Truth Commissioner (2008)

 by David Park

Danny Morrison

Northern Irish Literature: The Imprint of History. 1956-2006 (2007)

by Michael Parker

John L. Murphy

The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800-2000 (2008)

by Justin Quinn

Vanessa Silva Fernández

The Irish Celebrating: Festive and Tragic Overtones (2008)

ed. by Marie-Claire Considère-Charon, Philippe Laplace, Michel Savaric

Patricia Trainor

Reflections on Irish Writing in 2008

David Pierce

If anyone needed evidence that the Celtic Tiger was in terminal decline, 2008 was the year that proved conclusively that we are at the end of something — though, in truth, any year in the last five or so gave good indications. Yet, equally it is the case that we are at the start of something both inside and outside Ireland. In terms of banking and the economy 2008 was the end; the new beginning might be heralded by the election of the first African American to the White House. So, while the focus of the discussion here in this journal is quite properly ‘Ireland’, we find ourselves almost immediately talking this year about the global situation. How could it be otherwise when, as I write this in January 2009, the American computer company Dell, which is among the biggest employers in Ireland, has just announced the loss of 1900 jobs at its plant in Limerick?

At the cultural level, however, the downturn is being played out in ways that require patient observation and hard thinking, much of it outside the box. Writers and film-makers might feel compelled to jump in and give us the world as it is, but often contemporary reality eludes them. It is as if there needs to be a passage of time before a story can be adequately told or indeed discerned. Equally, critics in the field of cultural analysis will need to do more with the traditional concept of determination than simply suggesting that X caused Y or that in a time of recession people turn to fantasy to fill the void within or without. All around us, therefore, at every level there is a rewriting going on, and this makes for a certain excitement as new configurations or possibilities forge themselves.

In terms of the wider historical picture, among the first things to be distinguished are the overlaps from the preceding period and a sense of continuity therefore. In Irish culture, to take a recent example from the field of drama, the emptiness on display in Edna Walsh’s plays, such as The Walworth Farce (2007), and The New Electric Ballroom (2008), suddenly seems not so much prescient as immediate and descriptive of the world surrounding the theatre. At the beginning of The Walworth Farce, as we listen to a tape-recording of ‘An Irish Lullaby’ and ‘A Nation Once Again’, the message insists on itself: this is a play about post-romantic Ireland, where rituals serve as a distressing and unsentimental reminder of both what was lost and what cannot now be recuperated. ‘Shite’ says Dinny as, without more ado, he switches off the tape-recorder to begin the farce (p. 7). In history, as Thomas Davis’s unofficial anthem from the nineteenth century attests, there could once be heard the optimistic strains of a future, of a clear national identity, a nation once again as the rallying call of the song has it, but by the end of this play we cannot escape the conclusion that we have been witnessing not a farce but an excursion into a modern tragedy and an exploration, inside a council flat in South London where everything is ‘worn and colourless and stuck in the 1970s’ (p. 5), of the Irish dark. 

With its echoes of William Trevor’s short story ‘The Ballroom of Romance’ (1972), Walsh’s next play, The New Electric Ballroom, evokes a different sense of loss. The play begins with talk and with the desultory observation that ‘[b]y their nature people are talkers’ (p. 5), but it ends more dramatically with ‘Blackout. Silence. The End.’ (p 46). Hanging on a wall on the stage three sets of retro clothes stare out at us: a cashmere jumper and rara skirt, a 1950s red blouse and pleated skirt, and a glitzy show-business man’s suit. Punctuating the play are memories of possible romance enjoyed by the three sisters at the Electric Ballroom in rural Ireland and other dreams of unfulfilment. In this play, unlike Trevor’s story, we imagine at first that it is we who are looking on but in fact it is the other way round, for with its mixture of claustrophobia and dreadful provincialism this is a cruel world that stares at us. On the other hand, with 2008 in mind, another complicating thought prompts itself, and it has to do as much with the power of context in our reading and re-reading as with any sense of the discontinuous present. For while the credit crunch across the globe has ironically thrown us all together, Walsh reminds us not only of personal alienation but also of a particular Irish history which seems destined at this juncture to play itself out inside a wider recessionary context.

Loss and struggle, as I explore elsewhere in my own work, have accompanied modern Irish history since its inception, and perhaps it is for this reason that an Irish writer living largely in the diaspora should give us one of the most engaging and intelligent novels about American loss after 9/11. Netherland by Joseph O’Neill has received widespread acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. The novel supplies its own contexts, both fictional and documentary: the (once Dutch) city of New York after 9/11, a childhood in The Netherlands, an epigraph from Walt Whitman (and the theme of male friendship therefore), perhaps echoes from the Great American Novel such as Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) (as in the figure of Mehmet Taspinar, the Turkish angel, in one and Ras the Exhorter in the other), and so on. But, even as we find ourselves having to supply such a context (and we might now add to the list the credit crunch, for it is more than a post-9/11 novel as it was initially marketed), O’Neill’s Irishness shouldn’t be overlooked. For this is a novel about loss and struggle, loss of a friend, loss of the past, loss of direction, a marriage in dissolution, and then the struggle for meaning, for a narrative that would make sense beyond simply the world of gangsterism and intrigue, a novel about the struggle for family life amid separation, above all a struggle for friendship. Like the pervasive imagery of water in a novel about submersion, loss and struggle go hand in hand suggesting that the exiled writer was being driven by even stronger currents or by a more inclusive and older structure of feeling.

At one point in the novel, Hans, the protagonist, explains he is ‘given to self-estrangement’ (p. 46). It is a slightly old-fashioned way of putting it, as if he was in the same creative writing class as the young boy in Joyce’s first story ‘The Sisters’. He’s thinking about the game of cricket and how his new-found team-mates from the West Indies and the Indian sub-continent have no difficulty adapting themselves to the new environment and to a less than hospitable field on Staten Island that they claim for cricket. Chuck Ramkissoon, the Gatsby figure, has dreams of creating a New York Cricket Club and making lots of money in the process. As the novel constantly reminds us, it is an impossible dream, and yet, as O’Neill also reminds us, there is something in it. Cricket after all was widely played in nineteenth-century North America and, with the huge numbers of immigrants from countries where the game is pre-eminent, it could be revived again. Hans even insists, at least to himself, that cricket is a civilising game  —  and this in spite of disputes about umpiring decisions, one of which comes to overshadow the novel as it unfolds.

The idea of using cricket as a structuring device in the novel is such a daring move on O’Neill’s part. Indeed, although he is, like his character, given to self-estrangement, O’Neill still manages to get inside American culture through this alien corridor. With some justification, we might see it as Netherland’s answer to Underworld (1997) and a riposte therefore to Don DeLillo’s trumpeting of baseball in the famous opening to that novel. As if he were consciously writing back, there is something playful about O’Neill getting one of his characters to spend time surveying New York’s boroughs for a piece of land to purchase and build post-colonial dreams on. I am reminded of American readers’ objections to my chapter on Joyce and cricket in Light, Freedom and Song (2005) when it was still being considered by Yale University Press, and how, if it wasn’t taken out, the book would never produce any sales in the States. My response was to add a long footnote (see p. 289) detailing the nineteenth-century American interest in the game and quoting from Jones Wister’s A ‘Bawl’ for American Cricket (1893), an early account explaining why the game of ‘base ball’, played by professionals, won out over the ‘amateur’ game of cricket. O’Neill, whose Irish grandfather, as we learn from his investigations in Blood Dark Track (2000), was imprisoned in the Curragh during the Second World War for IRA activities, is more daring and confrontational for, while I was interested in ‘beyond a boundary’ and the colonial encounter between Britain and Ireland, his focus is inside the boundary and how cricket abroad serves as a home for exiles, a place of longing, and even ‘an environment of justice’ (p. 116). 

Sebastian Barry’s new novel, The Secret Scripture (2008), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008 and which won the Costa Prize in 2009, returns us more surely to an Irish context. The territory is familiar to those who know Barry’s work, only now it is fiction and not drama that is the form. The setting is a mental hospital in County Roscommon where Roseanne McNulty (née Clear), a patient perhaps nearing her centenary, has a series of meetings with her psychiatrist Dr Grene, himself grieving over the death of his wife. Roseanne recalls, not always accurately, growing up in Sligo, memories of her own family and relationships. The narrative or course of her life, we surmise early on, is shaped, overshadowed or silenced by trauma. Throughout, the mood music of loss is heard in the two alternating centres of consciousness, where monologues never quite manage to become dialogues.

As in his earlier plays such as The Steward of Christendom (1995) and Our Lady of Sligo (1998), there is an often exquisite lyricism in Barry’s writing about loss and, for those who have not encountered his previous work, The Secret Scripture must be a genuine pleasure. The achievement, though, is perhaps less impressive on second reading. You never know with Barry if he is giving us his point of view or that of his characters. For example I assume this sequence of reflections expressed by Dr Grene is related to the overall theme of the novel: ‘The fact is, we are missing so many threads in our story that the tapestry of Irish life cannot but fall apart. There is nothing to hold it together. The first breath of wind, the next huge war that touches us, will blow us to the Azores’ (p. 183). Barry’s long-standing, self-appointed task has been to recuperate voices of those who lost out in the emergence of modern Ireland, such as those like the protagonist in The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998) who had fought for the Crown and who had worked for the Royal Irish Constabulary before Independence in the 1920s, or those who, for most of the duration of the new State, had been locked away in asylums as happened to Eneas’s sister-in-law Roseanne in this novel. But, to broaden the discussion away from the issue of families in this particular novel and their hidden skeletons, I am not sure if this is the secret scripture that contemporary Ireland has lost. The Yeatsian vocabulary and imagery that Dr Grene deploys, especially evident in phrases from his poem ‘The Second Coming’, has its power, but whether it persuades is another matter.

The sympathetic imagination works differently with me. Some things cannot be retrieved without doing injustice to other struggles in history, and, even if they could be recuperated, we would still have other losses to prick our consciences. Ruins of the Big House are today dotted all over the Irish countryside; 40 years after Ireland’s entry into the European Union, the creamery as an institution has virtually disappeared. So to live in the present is to live with a sense of loss, some of which is worth lamenting, some not. In spite of Barry’s at times searing indictment of Roseanne’s treatment by Church and State in the new Ireland that emerged after Independence, the point is worth making: all those hidden from history in Ireland share something of the history of loss but the missing-from-history idea can take us only so far. In this regard there is something telling about one of Roseanne’s last entries in her jotter: ‘I once lived among humankind, and found them in their generality to be cruel and cold’ (p. 268). The note is not so much plangent as tinny or slightly false, either on Roseanne’s part or on Barry’s, and the effect is to distance the reader from her plight and diminish her representative or tragic status.

The Secret Scripture, then, constitutes a study not only in alienation but also in the relationship between politics and style, a relationship which seems to me more rewarding to investigate than the frequently noticed twist at the end of the novel. Also central to the novel is an exploration of the Irish dark, which to Barry is close to mystery or silence or deceit or concealment or ‘something deep in the water’ as the black-listed Sligoman Eneas McNulty affirms on discovering his brother Tom and his wife Roseanne have separated (The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, p. 187). However, although families may indeed conceal their histories from themselves and others, I do not believe the Irish dark is irrational or that dark. What holds the tapestry of Irish life together is the complex interlocking of loss and struggle, a necessary tension or over-layering and, at the same time, a refusal to buy into Yeats’s Second Coming in 1919 or end-of-world despair in 2008. Barry’s beautifully crafted prose invites assent, but somehow my mind continues to resist the secret scripture it embodies and I find myself, almost perversely, searching for the light.

Among the critics there have been several ambitious attempts at reconfiguring conventional ideas about the course of Irish letters. Let me touch on two here. John Kerrrigan’s Archipelagic English: Literature, History and Politics 1603-1707 (2008) is part of a wider devolutionary concern to detach Eng.Lit. from its more conventional Anglo-centric moorings. His title derives from the phrase ‘the Atlantic archipelago’, which appeared in an article written by J.A.G. Pocock in 1974 and entitled ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’. Kerrigan’s focus is Anglophone literature written in Britain and Ireland between the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne in 1603 and the 1707 Anglo-Scottish Treaty of 1707. His concern is to ‘recover the ethnic affiliations, the pride in ancient institutions…and the growing confidence in vernacular literary achievements that contributed to the configuration of early modern Englishness’ (p. 12).

Archipelagic English is an ambitious project and in its own way constitutes a plea for a new subject. His discussion of Irish authors is limited but everywhere the presence of Ireland can be felt. In a chapter on the ‘Derry School of Drama’, he considers such plays as John Michelburne’s Ireland Preserv’d: Or the Siege of London-Derry (1705) and William Philips’s Hibernia Freed: A Tragedy (1722), and Kerrigan writes well about ‘the dynamic ambiguity of patriot drama’ (p. 323). All this is the necessary work of adjustment, which we might see as ‘clearing work’ to create a space for others. In systematically attending to the suffix ‘ness’ that we attach to words such as Scottish, Irish, British, or English, and in tackling issues of nationality head-on, the study is more sophisticated than many efforts made in the past. Not for nothing did the word ‘hybrid’ as applied to affiliation and a person’s identity come into the language in the period covered by Kerrigan’s study. I suspect, however, that the awkward phrase ‘archipelagic English’ will never appear on an undergraduate list as the title of a course.

John Wilson Foster’s Irish Novels 1890-1940: New Bearings in Culture and Fiction (2008) affords ‘a portrait of Ireland in fiction [which] departs from the story we have told ourselves under the auspices of the Irish Literary Revival’ (p. 4). Katharine Tynan, George A. Birmingham, Shan F. Bullock, Kathleen Coyle are the names of some of Foster’s chosen novelists, while his organising topics include religion, family and marriage, science and the supernatural, the New Woman, the Big House, and the Great War. Q.D. Leavis in Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) took her cue from what people were reading; in the same year, in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), her husband, F.R. Leavis, outlined what he saw as the significant changes in the modern movement of verse from Gerard Manley Hopkins to T.S. Eliot. In spite of its Leavisite title, Foster is concerned not with significance per se but with the variety and scope of popular fiction and with the omissions, therefore, from the conventional highbrow story of Irish writing. His reading is formidable so that by the end of the book we feel inclined to be persuaded or at least hear him out when he insists that popular fiction embodies Irish conversation in history.

In an appendix, Foster includes a piece on Joyce and popular fiction. It is perhaps a little too short to do justice to the topic but let me just correct a small detail. When discussing what Bloom and Molly read, Foster writes: ‘Bloom reads Tit-Bits and picks up soft pornographic romances for his wife Molly, on this occasion The Sweets of Sin’ (p. 494). It is one of the few occasions in this valuable study where Foster slips up, for he must have been thinking about the more salacious, modern-day version of Titbits. When Bloom would have been reading it in 1904, Tit-Bits was not in the least pornographic. It was simply a collection of short pieces about everything under the sun including short stories by P. Beaufoy, and it was read in the 1880s and 1890s by the Joyce household in Dublin and Virginia Woolf’s family in London, families that is whose offspring, a generation later, went on to give us some of the best highbrow modernist fiction. There are occasions, we might add, when too much can be made of the gulf between the popular and the highbrow imagination.

Speaking of errors and with glass houses in mind, I must correct something that appears in two of my own books. In Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Reader (2001), I inadvertently inserted Derek Mahon’s poem ‘A Disused Shed in Co Wexford’ into the decade of the 1960s (under Night Crossing, 1968). It should be in the 1970s for the poem is from Mahon’s collection The Snow Party (1975); it appeared in The Listener in 1973. Light, Freedom and Song (2005) perpetuates the error and in a footnote I take Tom Paulin to task for reading the poem in the light of the Troubles (p. 318). I stand by my general remarks about the poem, that it should be read in broader terms than the Troubles, but I readily admit my double error. What drew my attention to all this was reading Hugh Haughton’s The Poetry of Derek Mahon (2007), a careful and authoritative study which follows the course of the poet’s publishing career volume by volume.

Haughton’s study ends fittingly on home, home being the location around which Mahon’s poetry has characteristically circled. As Haughton indicates, Mahon and Peter Fallon in their introduction to The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1990) identify ‘home’ as the word most frequently dwelt on in their selection, ‘as if an uncertainty existed as to where that actually is’ (cited on p. 368). Mahon is in this sense a typical Irish poet, one who shares a home with other Irish poets, a home to dwell in and to dwell on, as Haughton neatly puts it. Just how big is the size of Mahon’s achievement as a poet is still not clear, but I was slightly taken aback reading Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (2008) to see Heaney in the 1960s bristling when told that Mahon was the better poet (p. 77).

Which brings us to Heaney himself and the page-turner that Dennis O’Driscoll has compiled of interviews with Ireland’s leading poet. Setting your house in order before you retire from the scene is no bad thing and there is no-one better at doing this than Heaney. I recall a public spat I had with him at the Lancaster Literature Festival in the late 1970s. The altercation seemed to be about the terms in which critics should describe Irish experience. I cannot remember the details, but I think he took umbrage when I began referring to Georg Lukács and talking about class consciousness. On reflection I am sure he was right about the sui generis nature of Irish experience and yet I suspected at the time something else lay behind it such as the protection of homeland against theory and comer-inners like myself. Anyway, I didn’t concede defeat and the following day, as if nothing had happened, I drove him to the airport in Manchester to catch his plane back to Dublin.

Protectiveness is no bad quality and I felt something similar towards him when Sean O’Hagan, in reviewing Stepping Stones in the Observer on 16 November 2008, zeroed in on Heaney’s politics and on his effectively saying nothing. According to O’Hagan, ‘What Heaney did not do, of course, was take sides, either as a poet, or, as his fame increased, a reluctant statesman.’ I’ve no brief to speak on Heaney’s behalf but such a statement or charge, which is frequently made, is to my mind debatable. ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’, to take a pointed example, was first published in The Listener in October 1971, two months after the introduction of Internment, and it was accompanied by a photo of Catholics fleeing their burnt-out homes in Belfast (reproduced in Light, Freedom and Song, p. 245). So, in one important respect, Heaney is not saying what the poem’s title says. The side the utopian Heaney has characteristically sought is ‘the far side of revenge’, a position which is beyond but not above the sectarian politics of his native province. However, we should be in no doubt of his nationalist sympathies, nor indeed that he is himself, as he once wrote about John Hume in 1969 before the Troubles began in earnest, like a ‘questing compass-needle of another hidden Ireland’ (cited on p. 766 of my Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Reader). At the time of the Hunger Strikes in 1981, Heaney’s own mantra, as he reveals in Stepping Stones, was a remark by Czeslaw Milosz that he quotes in ‘Away From It All’: ‘I was stretched between contemplation of a motionless point and the command to participate actively in history’ (p. 260). Such a position we may well agree might be precious, but it should not be confused with not taking sides. [For more on this book of interviews, see http://www.dannymorrison.com/index.php?s=heaney]

Reading this collection of interviews reminds us of a poet on a journey south through his native province and how he came to shake himself free of the nets which might have held him back. Heaney is a child of his time and, as the list of names in the Index suggests, he seems incapable of escaping a male-dominated world, but for all that the collection is as I say a page-turner and will enhance his reputation. Whether it will enhance his achievement as a poet is another matter. That distinction, between reputation and achievement, is one that is drawn by Heaney in remarks about Yeats. ‘There will always be attacks on the reputation, but the achievement is rock-sure’ (p. 466). Heaney, the fine critic that he is, must have also been thinking about his own achievement when making such an observation, but I cannot help wondering what his one-time rivals in the Belfast Group such as Derek Mahon or Michael Longley would make of such a comment. Or, indeed, what history will make of Heaney’s reputation and achievement.

2008 was, then, a memorable year. It also saw the passing of Conor Cruise O’Brien (1917-2008), one of the outstanding Irish intellectuals of the last century, who, among other things, made us all think very seriously about Yeats’s pro-fascist tendencies, about states of Ireland and Northern republicanism, and indeed about the nature of intellectuals in Ireland. On a lighter note, in reviews of the year published on 29 November 2008, the Irish Times carried this from the former Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, about his daughter: ‘I make no apologies for saying the best work of fiction I read this year is The Gift, by Cecelia Ahern (HarperCollins, £14.99). It has a seasonal theme and is a very clever story from a brilliant young writer.’  I make no apologies for offering no comment.

Let me end on a browsing note. I particularly enjoyed perusing the ‘Printed Books, Manuscripts and Artwork from the Collections of Cecil & Desmond Harmsworth’, which came up for auction in London in December 2008 [see http://www.bloomsburyauctions.com/auction/672]. What caught my eye were a number of items about the ‘daintical pair’, as they are called on page 295 of Finnegans Wake (1939), of Yeats and Joyce. One was a letter Yeats sent to Cecil Harmsworth in June 1927 in which he sought help in furthering a union between Southern and Northern Ireland, ‘for Ireland will never be a perfectly cordial partner in the British Commonwealth while North & South are playing up to one another’. In the accompanying photocopied manuscript, ‘cordial’ is spelt ‘cordeal’ by the would-be statesman Yeats! Another item contained a moving tribute to Yeats by his sisters after his death, a death which came as a shock to them, for they had always ‘trusted to his fine vitality that had triumphed so often’. Elsewhere, in a letter by Desmond to Cecil Harmsworth in June 1934, we learn that Joyce wanted to include material about the Harmsworth family in what was to become Finnegans Wake (1939). Joyce expressed interest in other Dublin notables such as the Guinness family, Dunlop, and ‘the man who started the tramways’. After accompanying Harmsworth to the Russian ballet in Paris and after two carafes of wine in an adjourning café, Joyce was in convivial mood and performed his own daintical ballet steps on the pavement outside. And as you might expect, a copy of Harmsworth’s famous sketch of Joyce kicking was also in the collection. Needless to say this browser could not afford any of the items.

Below are the reviews I have commissioned for this issue. As in previous years, they are by established and by less-well-known critics and they cover a wide range of material including fiction, poetry, and criticism. They will, I hope, interest a similarly wide range of people across the world who are interested in the continuing development of Irish Studies. This is my opportunity to thank all the reviewers for their contribution to fostering that development and for giving of their services so generously.

Works Cited

Barry, Sebastian. 1995. The Steward of Christendom. London: Methuen.

_______. 1998. Our Lady of Sligo. London: Methuen.

_______. 1998. The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty. London: Picador

_______. 2008. The Secret Scripture. London: Faber and Faber.

DeLillo, Don. 1997. Underworld. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Ellison, Ralph. 1952. Invisible Man. New York: Random House.

Fallon, Peter and Derek Mahon eds. 1990. The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. 1925. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Foster, John Wilson. 2008. Irish Novels 1890-1940: New Bearings in Culture and Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Haughton, Hugh. 2007. The Poetry of Derek Mahon. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Joyce, James. 1939. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber.

Kerrrigan, John. 2008. Archipelagic English: Literature, History and Politics 1603-1707. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Leavis, F.R. 1932. New Bearings in English Poetry. London: Chatto and Windus.

Leavis, Q.D. 1932. Fiction and the Reading Public. London: Chatto and Windus.

Mahon, Derek. 1968. Night Crossing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

_______. 1975. The Snow Party. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

O’Driscoll, Dennis. 2008. Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. London: Faber and Faber.

O’Neill, Joseph. 2000. Blood Dark Track. London: Granta.

_______. 2008. Netherland. London: Fourth Estate.

Pierce, David. 2001. Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Reader. Cork: Cork University Press.

_______. 2005. Light, Freedom and Song: A Cultural History of Modern Irish Writing. London and New Haven: Yale University Press.

Pocock, J.A.G. 1974. ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’ in New Zealand Historical Journal 8.

Trevor, William. 1972. The Ballroom of Romance and Other Stories. London: Bodley Head.

Walsh, Edna. 2007. The Walworth Farce. London: Nick Hern Books.

_______. 2008. The New Electric Ballroom. London: Nick Hern Books.

Wister, Jones. 1893. A ‘Bawl’ for American Cricket. Philadelphia. 

 Top

The Fifty Minute Mermaid by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill / Translations by Paul Muldoon. (Loughcrew, Co Meath: The Gallery Press, 2007)

Reviewer: Luz Mar González Arias

‘from a bottomless well’ [1]

The Fifty Minute Mermaid, with poetry written in Irish and with translations into English by Paul Muldoon, continues Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s fruitful bilingual project first seen in The Astrakhan Cloak published by The Gallery Press in 1992.[2]   At a recent seminar held in Dublin College University on the issue of translation, Ní Dhomhnaill stated that she understands translation as an act of artistic creativity, by this intimating that both fidelity and infidelity to the original source will necessarily be part and parcel of the process of rendering her texts into a new language. As is the case with so many other readers of Ní Dhomhnaill’s work, my access to her poetry is mediated by that creative act that inevitably transforms the original Irish version  —  adding nuances to it in order to help it into the transition towards a different language, while at the same time making it lose some of its initial connotations somewhere along the way. Our awareness of reading a parallel text, versus an existing original, thus acquires an added dimension when it comes to Ní Dhomhnaill.

The book is divided into two distinct sections, the first of which contains only three poems, the second comprised of a long sequence of thirty-seven texts that focus on the figures of the Mermaid and Merfolk and their fate on “dry land”. Although apparently disconnected with the second section, the first part of the book, whether intentionally or unintentionally on the part of Ní Dhomhnaill, prepares us for what is to come and directs us towards a particular reading of the biography of the Mermaid. It is not Andersen’s fairy tale we are about to encounter but a much harsher and more realistic — also highly mythical and unconscious at the same time — confrontation with loss, the mental and bodily consequences of that loss and the possibilities of healing.

Death and human suffering acquire the thematic weight of “Mo Mháistir Dorcha leathanach”/“My Dark Master”, “Dubh”/“Black” and “An Obair”/“The Task”. While at times engaging with the specificities of real and/or imaginary Irish landscapes, this first sequence is best read in an international context of war, misunderstandings between cultures and atrocities. “Dubh”/“Black”, for instance, is written as a protest against the fall of Srebrenica and the ethnic cleansing that triggered the massacre of 8000 women, children and men of Bosnian origin in July 1995. Relying on the strategy of repetition, the poem is an intelligent deconstruction of the absurd binary opposites that have pervaded Western thought and provides an egalitarian status for all peoples of the globe through the metaphor of blackness. Roddy Doyle’s famous racialization of Irish ethnicity is here elevated to an international level that colours all earthly communities and leaves no one immune to the tragedy of genocide: “The Catholics are black. / The Protestants are black. / The Serbs and the Croatians are black. / Every tribe on the face of the earth this blackest of black / mornings black” [“Tá na Caitlicigh dubh. / Tá na Protastúnaigh dubh. / Tá na Seirbigh is na Crótaigh dubh. / Tá gach uile chine a shiúlann ar dhromchla na cruinne / an mhaidin dhubh seo samhraidh, dubh”] (18-19).

Ní Dhomhnaill frequently draws on the realm of myths and folklore in her poetry, using them as signifiers to be decoded by means of the cultural references of contemporary Ireland. At one level, the long Mermaid sequence can be read as an artistic articulation of what it means for these sea-people to leave their element and come to live above the water, in the Irish “dry” landscape. In this sense, the texts become a powerful tool to inscribe the cultural trauma that the Irish went through when the English language superseded their previous mode of communication and skillfully address the stagnation and anti-creative implications of such a transition. In many of the poems, both the written word and music are left behind by the Mermaid, confused as she is by the new order of things and the new linguistic codes she must abide by. Her rejection of getting involved with her previous tongue can be interpreted as the schizophrenia faced by communities where bilingual situations result from a colonial past. In “Na Murúcha agus Ceol”/”The Merfolk and Music” the speaking voice describes how the sea-people turned their backs on music and concludes that “[w]hat lies at the bottom of all this, of course, is the trauma / of their being left high and dry” [“Sé bunús an scéil go léir, ar ndóigh, ná tráma a dtriomaithe”] (106-107).

The poems offer an in-depth analysis of the struggle of both adapting to and being accepted by a new environment. One of the most attractive aspects of this transition is the involvement of both body and mind. As it is only to be expected in Ní Dhomhnaill’s work, far from an exclusive interrogation of the psychological consequences of cultural clashes, the poet analyses the challenges of difference in terms of physicality too. And so, in “An Mhurúch san Ospidéal”/“The Mermaid in the Hospital” the mythic figure “awoke / to find her fishtail / clean gone / but in the bed with her / were two long, cold thingammies” [“Dhúisigh sí / agus ní raibh a heireaball éisc ann / níos mó / ach istigh sa leaba léi /bhí an dá rud fada fuar sea”] (34-35). The poetic voice wonders if in the long months that followed, during which the mermaid had to learn what those new legs could do, “her heart fell / the way her arches fell, / her instep arches” [“Ins na míosa fada / a lean / n’fheadar ar thit a croí / de réir mar a thit / trácht na coise uirthi, / a háirsí?”] (36-37).

The “Lack of Sympathy” the newcomers feel in the new land (59) and the admission that they had been the victims of some sort of “ethnic cleansing” (87) turns them into the representatives of oppressed peoples everywhere. It certainly connects them to the massacred Bosnians referred to in “Dubh”/”Black”. A clear-cut contextualization for the poems is problematised as all through the book there is a sense of fluidity, not only implied by the symbol of water but also by the body and language of the mermaids, both escaping fixed definitions and stable categorization. In “Teoranna”/“Boundaries” (128-131) the poetic voice contends that the language of the merfolk is “pelagic” [“peiligeach”], since “it covers the seven seas”. This fluidity is further emphasized by the statement that “everything in the language runs into everything else, / [… ] there are no strict boundaries between one thing and / another”. However, and despite this poststructuralist sense of free-floating (perhaps we should say “free-swimming”) signifiers, the constant references to the Irish countryside and to the gender-specific experience of the Mermaid also trigger a more parochial postcolonial and feminist reading of Ní Dhomhnaill’s texts. Her mermaids can thus be perceived as standing for the doubly marginalized subjects of Irish society, namely the historically oppressed colonial and female selves.

For the reader interested in the identitarian debates of present-day Ireland, there is perhaps something missing in The Fifty Minute Mermaid: a more engaged interrogation of the label “margin” to make it overtly inclusive of the “new” discriminated-against subjects of the nation, that is, the many different ethnic communities in today’s Ireland. However, and despite the absence of specific references to the minorities that have arrived in Ireland as a direct consequence of the Celtic Tiger phenomenon, this level of interpretation can also be there. The date of publication of the collection coincides with debates on the issue of Irishness and on the processes of othering the newcomers have been experiencing. In this respect, The Fifty Minute Mermaid invokes the history of the Irish as a colonized people (an archetypal Other for British imperialism) and contributes to creating an atmosphere of understanding and welcoming of difference for those who are now, in the wake of the Tiger, occupying marginal positions previously assigned to Irish speakers.

The Fifty Minute Mermaid uses myths and fairy tales as visible surfaces through which to approach everyday societal problems: mother-daughter relationships (“An Mhurúch is a hIníon”/”The Mermaid and Her Daughter”: 132-135), domesticity (“An Mhurúch is a Tigh”/”The Mermaid and Her House”: 124-127), sexual abuses and religious institutions (“An Mhurúch agus an Sagart Paróiste”/”Mermaid with Parish Priest”: 108-113) are interrogated and problematised. But in spite of the recognizable issues of “reality”, Ní Dhohmnaill’s collection is rich in references to the magical world of superstition, unconsciousness and dreams. This is probably what makes the book a fascinating piece of poetry, where the author delves into areas of the mind we are not fully aware of. Her “pre-colonial” language may be lost, but the Mermaid retains some sense of “the old order of things” (29) that will guarantee its preservation and survival in whatever new shape it may acquire with the passage of time. And whereas she may be talking to us from the “bottomless well” (141) of her confusing, new post-structural fluid identity, she is still powerful in her magic, other-worldly dimension. At the end of the book, the reader is left with a feeling of having experienced a journey through the lands of conscious and unconscious landscapes, not knowing for certain where the boundary between the real and the imaginary lies, no doubt one of the greatest achievements of good poetry. As the poetic voice of “Bunmhiotas na Murúch”/”Founding Myth” (44-47) admits, when it comes to superstition having to do with the mermaids, we do not believe it but we “don’t not believe it” either.

Folk Women and Indirection in Morrison, Ní Dhuibhne, Hurston, and Lavin by Jacqueline Fulmer (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) ISBN: 978-0-7546-5537-4, 207 pages.

Reviewer: Mª Elena Jaime de Pablos

In the very first line of the first chapter of the book: “Impossible Stories for Impossible Conversations”, readers are told that the work “is concerned with the propulsion of story […] towards new ideas, even ideas we resist” (1). In it, Jacqueline Fulmer analyses the way prestigious African American and Irish women writers have presented volatile subjects to “unwilling audiences” in their countries of origin by means of indirection, a term employed “when rhetors [orators or teachers] wish to delay or obstruct their audience’s comprehension of their position on a subject, which may contradict that of the audience” (12).

In order to examine the short stories and novels of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Mary Lavin and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne in the context of rhetoric and indirection, Fulmer resorts to theories put forward by standing-out figures in the fields of African American feminist and womanist criticism, postcolonial criticism, and folklore studies, such as Barbara Christian, Katherine Clay Bassard, Alice Walker, David Lloyd, Sarah Briggs, Derek Hand, Homi K. Bhabha, Andrea O’Reilly, Alan Dundes, Angela Bourke or Cristina Bacchilega, to mention but a few.

The basis for tracing the line of descent from Hurston to Morrison and from Lavin to Ní Dhuibnhe lies precisely in the strategies of indirection they use to break down patriarchal discriminating assumptions, among them, the dichotomy of woman as either the “angel in the house” or the “monster”, a binary that dehumanizes her by placing her at the margins. The four writers consider references to folk traditions essential “to push the image of woman away from the edges, and into the center of human activity” (10). They draw on folklore to create “vivid, complicated, humorous, imperfect, self-aware female characters whose actions carry the stories and whose inner thoughts capture the readers’ sympathies” (10).

Fulmer distinguishes two categories of folkloric female characters: “the magical characters”, women who share features with non-human figures from the Otherworld: the sí, mermaids, selkies, witches, hags, or ghosts; and “the wise women”, who share features with more human-like folk figures from legends, folk tales, or religious oral traditions. These possess healing powers and privileged knowledge either mystical or magisterial.

Whether magical or magisterial, the folkloric female characters that the four authors depict in their short stories and novels insert controversy aimed at subverting some extreme of Otherness in ways that appeal to rather than ways that alienate readers through forms of rhetorical indirection that, Fulmer illustrates, were employed thousands of years ago by Jesus or  Aristotle.

In chapter two, “Rhetorial Indirection: Roots and Routes”, Fulmer defines and gives examples of strategies of indirection (ambiguity, metaphor, signifying, masking, sly civility, mimicry, exaggeration, double-voiced dialogue, and the use of the grotesque or bizarre, among others) as used by Hurston, Lavin, Morrison, and Ní Dhuibhne to tackle problematic issues such as colonialism, racism, sexism, religious prejudice, taboos, etc.

Their folkloric approach to indirection let them explore these unpopular topics by referring to proverbs, legends, tales, or other folk references. In subsequent chapters, Fulmer demonstrates how strategies with folkloric elements provide these four female authors cover from audience rejection while enabling them to communicate with audience members ready to receive new ideas. Thus, in chapter 3, “Folk Women versus the Authorities”, Fulmer presents folk-women characters by these authors who advocate civil rights and women’s rights by reworking binaries, reversing the western hero patterns, or disrupting stereotypes:  Nanny and Janie (in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Eyes), Mary O’Grady (in Lavin’s  Mary O’Grady),  Circe (in Morrison’s Song of Solomon), Jenny and Maggie (in Ní Dhuibhne’s The Bray House), etc. They all “offer model stories of women freeing themselves from the extremes of othering, binary images set upon them by dominant Anglo culture and sometimes by the men in their own culture” (53).

In the following chapter, “Otherworldly folk-women characters”, Fulmer examines the ways these writers employ indirection to avoid censorship when dealing with assumptions regarding marriage, sex, reproduction, abortion, infanticide and religious prejudices and practices.  Special attention is devoted to Hurston’s, Lavin’s, Morrison’s and Ní Dhuibhne’s figuring of the mermaid, an otherworldly female character often appearing in folklore doing things forbidden for human women, for instance, seducing men at will. The sex goddess Erzulie in Hurston’s Tell My Horse or the mermaid in Ní Dhuibhne’s “The mermaid legend” constitute two of the most representative cases.

 Chapter five, “Reproducing Wise Women”, gathers instances where folk women in these four authors’ works function mostly as “wise women” who force readers into thinking about the discriminating sexual stereotypes associated with the passive and desexualised Virgin Mary. Marys, “anti-Marys” and folk culture midwives appear in their short stories and novels to dismantle the “virgin” versus “whore”, “flesh” versus “spirit”, “men” versus “women”, or “mother” versus “child” binaries:  Lavin’s Mary O’Grady (from Mary O’Grady) and Onny (from The House in Clewe Street), Ní Dhuibhne’s Jenny (from The Bray House), Hurston’s Erzulie (from Tell My Horse), Morrison’s Consolata (from Paradise), etc.

The last chapter, “Final Indirections”, offers some conclusions after having analysed the multilayered narratives of the African American and Irish female authors who seem to work in parallel to demolish the above/below binary of women in western literature. This is followed by an “Appendix: Correspondence with Éilís Ní Dhuibhne”, which brings together Ní Dhuibhne’s opinions about some of the topics dealt with in the book.

Without doubt, Folk Women and Indirection in Morrison, Ní Dhuibhne, Hurston, and Lavin accomplishes Fulmer’s goal of allowing readers to observe the effectiveness of folklore and indirection in helping these authors express their subaltern voices. Apart from being an enlightening work on feminist fiction, rhetoric, folklore, otherness and censorship, this book also stands as a significant contribution to the study of African American women writers and Irish women writers on the basis of comparative literature.

Top

Dublin Noir: the Celtic Tiger vs. the Ugly American ed. by Ken Bruen (Dingle and London: Brandon, 2006)

Reviewer: Dermot Kelly

In Dublin Noir Ken Bruen has assembled a formidable posse of crime writers. Eoin Colfer leads off with “Taking on PJ” and, even though he’s from Wexford and only lived in the capital city for three years, he sounds like Roddy Doyle’s anarchic younger cousin from the tower blocks. Listen to his two young hoodlums bracing themselves for their encounter with the enforcer sent by a gangster called Warren:

Little Mike was sucked in by his friend’s enthusiasm. “And just how am I supposed to distract him?”

“You know how,” said Christy meaningfully, nodding in a respectful and non-homosexual way at Little Mike’s bollock area (p. 19).

The hilarious yarn ends with Christy telling Little Mike they’ll spend the loot “like Bono and the Edge” down in Waterford (p. 30).

Next up is the editor of the volume himself with “Black Stuff”, a story of art theft featuring a black Dubliner named for Phil Lynott who drinks in the snug in Mulligan’s. The real subject of the book, the love affair between Ireland and America, comes to the fore in this hardboiled piece. The narrative voice is as clipped and slangy as Elmore Leonard’s, but Ken Bruen can’t hide his mastery of the native lexicon: “But you use fierce in both senses, like terrific, and like woesome  —  gotta be Irish to instinctively get that. You can learn the sense of it, but never the full usage” (p. 42). 

Pat Mullan’s “Tribunal” could hardly be more timely, all about the price of affluence: “If you’re telling me the truth, then you were the bagman for these bastards for years. Selling your own people down the drain” (p. 51). The corrupt political territory will be familiar to fans of Jimmy Breslin and George V. Higgins. 

Bruen has divided his book into four parts with himself, Colfer and Mullan making up “Part I: The Inside Job”. Reed Farrell Coleman kicks off “Part II: The Manhattan Connection” with “Portrait of the Killer as a Young Man”, an all too believable tale of revenge involving a Dublin taxi driver and his American fares. The lurid authenticity is maintained in Peter Spiegelman’s “The Best Part”, which includes Ken Bruen’s favourite line of dialogue  —  “Yer pretty feckin’ Irish for a New York Jew, Jimmy  —  you’ll fit right in in Dublin”  —  delivered by a truly chilling femme fatale called Kathryn Margot Flynn (p. 72). 

“The Ghost of Rory Gallagher” by Jim Fusilli will remind readers that squalor can still be found in Celtic Tigerland as a disgraced financial trader emerges from an English jail to buy himself a pub in the Hibernian metropolis:  

A dump over on the north side of the Liffey, off the Royal Canal, a regular shitehole it was, a right kip. Entrance in a stone alley beyond mounds of rubbish, and you couldn’t stumble upon it without a map. Celtic Tiger my arse, it seemed to say. Two steps down and the rainwater flooded the drain, and that was all right too. Mold and rotten wood, the floorboards sagging (p. 78).

Fusilli is a wonderful writer who manages to jam in references to Yeats (born in Sligo, the disgraced trader briefly considers calling his pub the Rag and Bone, thinking of the bard of his home county) and Beckett (he describes the denizens of his joint as “a motley bunch straight out of Beckett, and moths flew up from under their tattered greatcoats.”) without sounding pretentious (p. 80). As well as the uncanny presence heralded by the story’s title, Fusilli’s contribution offers the book’s most resonant justification for vengeance, as far as this reviewer is concerned: “We’re from Limerick , and we don’t forget” (p. 90). 

Following the Donegal blues played by “The Ghost of Rory Gallagher” Jason Starr’s “Lost in Dublin” comes off as a slight showing by a writer of real ability. Its treatment of twenty-first-century Dublin crime has the ring of truth but nevertheless fails to sustain the fever pitch of the pieces before and after it. Maybe Starr saves his best material for his novels. The last of the Manhattan dispatches, Charlie Stella’s “Tainted Goods”, opens with a foulmouthed, politically incorrect monologue from one Jack Dugan that recalls George V. Higgins from around the time of The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972): “A broad tells you you’re a comfortable fit, what it means, make no mistake about it, boyos, it means you have a small dick, she’s trying not to hurt your feelings” (p. 104). 

“Part III: Heart of the Old Country” contains a quartet of writers from elsewhere in Europe (Scotland, Hungary and England, to be precise). Ray Banks takes his title, “Wrong ‘Em, Boyo”, from a vintage track by the Clash and spits out Caledonian wisecracks at the velocity of early Irvine Welsh. The coarseness is an appropriate vehicle for exploring the great sibling rivalry of those islands, the one between the Scots and the Irish, as an Edinburgh thug crosses the sea to settle a score in Dublin. Banks even uses the Ulster Scots verb ‘greet’, recorded by P. W. Joyce in English As We Speak It In Ireland (1910): “Cunts didn’t cry at the funeral, but stick on Patsy Cline and they greeted like bairns” (p. 126). 

From Budapest, Olen Steinhauer opens “The Piss-Stained Czech” with what sounds like the book’s most sincere homage to Joyce: “The door Toman knocked on was opened by a skinny Irishman with a beard that made me think of drunks lingering in the corners of pubs in Ulysses  —  everything I knew about Dublin came from that book” (p. 129). Of course this foreign Joycean ends up talking to a Garda who, upon learning that the narrator, who coincidentally has the same name as the author, wants to be a writer, quips, “Don’t get much better than McBain” (p. 133). 

“Wish” by John Rickards captures the menace of Dublin at its noir best: “It’s a shithole of a flat, though, overlooking the railway tracks not far from where they cross the Tolka, north of Dublin’s city center. Building that smells of boiled vegetables and cat piss” (p. 137). Rickards conjures the spectre of neo-Nazis terrorizing the city’s waifs and strays and, amazingly, he pulls it off with creepy aplomb. 

Kevin Wignall’s “The Death of Jeffers” throws us into a bewildering world of what just might be Anglo-Irish intrigue as an Englishman of Irish descent pays an unexpected visit to a lecturer at Trinity College. A recognizable setting that includes Wynn’s Hotel is evoked in convincing detail, but, even after four readings, the significance of the ending still eludes this reviewer. Maybe another four readings will unravel the beguiling puzzle. 

“Part Four: New World Noir” starts with a very entertaining story called “The Honor Bar” by the Baltimore writer Laura Lippman, author of the P. I. Tess Monaghan series. Among other jokes, Lippman deploys the most suggestive Joycean allusion in Dublin Noir. It happens when an American with the unlikely name of Bliss Dewitt queries her Irish partner who has the altogether more likely name of Rory Malone about a name (not hers) he breathed into the nape of her neck during coitus: 

“Whose name are you saying?”

“Why, Millie. Like in the novel, Ulysses. I was pretending you were Millie and I was Bloom.”

“It’s Molly, you idiot. Even I know that.” (pp. 168-9)

In “Tourist Trade” James O. Born’s career in law enforcement helps him create a taut conversation between a perpetrator and a cop, but for this reviewer the story’s final twist was excessive, although that is undoubtedly the whole point. Sarah Weinman’s “Hen Night” makes a poignant stopover at the Irish-Jewish Museum off the South Circular Road before embarking on a suitably rancid night in Temple Bar. Zelmont Raines, the tough-talking hero of Gary Phillips’s “The Man for the Job”, an American football player dropped from the NFL and searching for a crack fix after an exhibition game at Lansdowne Road, recounts a story that more than lives up to its sordid premise. Patrick J. Lambe has done an impressive job imagining the racial repertoire of what he calls “The New Prosperity.” With “Lonely and Gone” Duane Swierczynski achieves an unnerving effect by transcribing just one voice in a scary barroom dialogue that leads to a surprising reversal. Finally, the title of Craig McDonald’s “Rope-A-Dope” refers to the one-two punch of Ecstasy and Rohypnol one George Lipsanos is planning to administer to a woman he meets in a Harcourt Street downstairs bar  —  that is, until he gets the shock of his life. So Ken Bruen should be applauded for getting all these talents together to share their gripping and amusing tales of setups, pickups, stickups and shagups.

Top

For All We Know by Ciaran Carson (Loughcrew, Co Meath: The Gallery Press, 2008), 113 pp.  

Hb ISBN: 978-1-85235-440-4, €20.00
Pb ISBN: 978-1-85235-439-8, €13.90

Reviewer: Kevin Kiely

A strange departure for Carson who chose a somewhat old-fashioned form: this is a long narrative poem; a hail and robust tradition more ancient than the sonnet. For instance, the unrhymed dactylic hexameters of Longfellow’s Evangeline reads better than For All We Know; it springs to mind as both have a Gabriel ‘character’. Carson’s sequence falls down on many fronts: the grasp of postmodernist narrative is not well handled; the overall impression is that the form is ill fitting: the entire impetus may have come from the few good poems—

blue, you said. It puts me in mind of winters in Paris.

It is frosty, and if you stand in Montmartre you can

see for miles. I’m looking at the patchwork quilt of Paris:

parks, avenues, cemeteries, temples, impasses, arcades.

I can see the house where I was raised, and my mother’s house.

I am in her boudoir looking at her in the mirror

as she, pouting, not looking, puts on L’Air du Temps, a spurt

of perfume on each wrist before she puts her wristwatch on.

                                                             L’Air du Temps (pp. 36-37)

This is early on in the sequence but these high points dizzily topple, so it is a choppy terrain to traverse and when other peaks are reached as in the following (quoted below) there is a double nostalgia more for the better verse than for the ‘story’ of the poem. Sustained performance is not the hallmark here but the perennial problem with poetry is the good, the bad and the indifferent. T.S. Eliot wrote of a preordained hierarchy of poetry and ipso facto of poets: hence, a corollary that long poems have high and low pressure, so to speak, despite and according to T.S.E. that there is a corresponding high and low in performance. Carson may be implying that to turn off the poetry is in itself artistic, somewhat like a painter who leaves deliberate incompleteness of form proving that what has been well done need not be re-achieved, what has been a pinnacle must not be re-iterated; still, one looks for more of what one likes. There has always been the presumption of a reader for poetry, the imposition of a critic, as well as the longing beyond the longing for oblivion that is the assumed reward for the poet’s implicit melancholy as opposed to the gladness and madness. There is the useful Wallace Stevens prescription for evaluation within his own long poem ‘Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction’ about the necessity of change within the composition, but equally there is the demand for pleasure. The harshest critics of poets are other poets who never have the village schoolteacher’s encouraging, ‘could do better’ rather ‘must do better, must do the uttermost.’ So, when the lines of ore run out towards workable lines there is the longing that is only resolved and healed in the better stuff, such as

I’m the lady in charge of the airport lingerie store

who asks you if there is anything she can help with.

I’m the lady in question whose dimensions you reveal

To the lady in charge of the airport lingerie store.

I’m the lady you bump into unwittingly before

you know her name or age or what she does for a living.

I’m the lady propped up at the bar beside you, who puts

words into your mouth before you even know what they are.

I’m the lady who sleeps in you until death do you part.

I’m the lady you see in your dreams though she be long dead  

                                                             ‘Filling the Blank’ (p. 104)

There is a hint of French modernism, since the poem titles are duplicated between ‘part one’ and ‘part two’. However, this merely results in some spinning out of the text and displays major slack and slippage as to what it is all meant to be: Poetry.

What Carson has managed, if nothing else, is to get out of Belfast metaphorically speaking, still the Northern city intrudes as in ‘Revolution’ with the Remote Bomb Disposal Unit. ‘The helicopter hovering on its down-swash of noise.’ (p. 73). Otherwise in ‘L’Air du Temps’ (in part two) the narrator (of which more later) notes: ‘They were showing the latest news from my native city./It looked like a Sixties newsreel where it always drizzled,’ (p.87) Drizzle was the only benevolence in Ulster during the Troubles. Central to the ‘story’ is a bomb-blast while Gabriel and Nina (Miranda) are in the Crown pub. Otherwise, they are not ‘framed’ particularly well within their largely continental setting, which is non-exotic, seeing as this is a tale of romance but lacks ‘Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance.’ The erotic is non-existent also. Any lovemaking by our two lovers, as ‘depicted’ by the hesitant narrator is quickly brushed aside, as if this were a tale only fit for Sunday school. Carson is not to be blamed if he comes from the screwed-up-about-sex writers’ club of Ireland but it certainly shows in ‘For All We Know’. The wit is also thin being NI, as in the long awaited introduction to our unfleshly pair via his contorted postmodernist Belfastianisms: ‘I’m Miranda, you said, though some people call me Nina./Gabriel, I said, though some people call me Gabriel.’ (p.85)

While the immaculate Gabriel and immaculate Nina cavort covertly in Germany, somewhere in the Dresden region, their location is mainly Paris and beyond, ‘Remember those radiating pathways of Versailles where/you confessed yourself happy to be known to me?’ “Treaty” (p. 19). The latter is not even good Margaret Mitchell. ‘Treaty’ in part two is a particularly weak poem. Gabriel is too much centre stage, and feminists who read this (?) will cavil at Nina’s walk-on-part and over-glorification by the narrator. The narrative comes unstuck also with the intellectual overlay, and the use of Bach, Beethoven, and Hermann Hesse. If this material was blended in artistically, it might have marginal validity but still is top-heavy and pedantic by his treatment. In addition, there were never such twentieth-century lovers in Northern Europe solely discussing B, B, and HH in such superficial banalities. Not even Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir ever spoke like this even with hangovers; had they ever done so, they would have been removed by the gendarmerie for lowering cultural standards on the Left Bank. Similarly, his use of bierkeller and ‘Vous êtes étranger?’ does not exactly authenticate the scenery or set one dreaming, it all comes across as inept use of a Rough Guide Book appendix.

The treatment of Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel or The Glass Bead Game, an indisputable masterpiece of vast polemics with implications that reach as far as Gallery Press: its actions and drawbacks, is far too awkward and nervously pasted into the narrative. Nina is the Hesse expert apparently, and Gabriel the doddering disciple in a cruel echo of Joseph Knecht, Magister Ludi of the Glass Bead Game from the novel. ‘I gather the glass beads became metaphorical beads,/not to be fingered by hand but tuned to some other sense.’ “The Shadow” (p. 80). Jesus wept, and by God no wonder. Is the Mona Lisa a woman? No, she’s a box of chocolates. Carson’s intellectualism gets the better of him. Cue Bach and Beethoven. Of Johann Sebastian B it is queried, ‘I’ve often wondered/how many quills Bach went through over those twenty-two/years.’ “Le Mot Juste” (p.28) (Count the geese that Bach cooked over a lifetime: is that the answer you are looking for?) Beethoven’s deafness is remarked on, as you might expect while Van Gogh’s ear does not get a mention but you feel it might easily have entered the soporific conversation of these lovers.  Also unfortunately, in “Le Mot Juste” Eliot’s oft-quoted lines from East Coker are misquoted: ‘...the intolerable wrestle/With words and meanings’.  Even after getting one of the words ‘wrestle’ right, he changes it to ‘struggle’ twelve lines on: the unforgiveable, is misquoting ‘intolerable’ as ‘interminable’. Eliot is Eliot primarily because of his original mellifluous language: vers libre for a poet requires the same artistry as for composers such as Chopin, John Field or Lizst, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase. Carson royally screws it up with ‘interminable’. It is surprising that as a teacher of ‘fledging poets’, he clunked on this one: the fact that Fallon and Gallery did not catch it in the proofs, might actually be poetic justice, or perhaps, Eliot has not yet permeated the consciousness of Loughcrew?

The biggest ‘no-no’ is that having botched ‘the plot’, Carson unravels the denouement early on in ‘Second Hand’ (‘part two’), ‘You drove too fast. I’d wonder how long it would be before/they’d pull you from the wreck of the immobilized Déesse,/and know by its sweeping hand that your watch was still working.’ (p. 76). Before this, crucially, the watch is ‘placed’ in some present that implies the death of Nina. In “The Anniversary” near the end of the sequence (in every respect it is a sequence) much is made of her death in a car accident in the Citroën: this had already been set up pages back as ‘a midnight blue vintage Déesse’ (p. 76). One does not expect strict adherence to a linear narrative, however, the often clumsy and implicit spooling out of details brings too much attention to the flow and makes the denouement inconsequential when it belatedly arrives.

To their detriment, the poems are littered with materials that generate banalities, resulting in a sequence that never lifts into orbit about the travail of these nebulous lovers. However much this may be confessional or based on experience, there is the mawkish stemming of a thumb wound accidentally caused with an oyster knife by Nina, ‘When you raised your head I kissed my blood on your open lips.’ ‘Anniversary’ (p. 103). This out-Stokers Stoker’s Dracula for repression but could not create a moment of the Gothic masterpiece.  Prior to this in the sequence one reads, ‘The Oyster is synonymous with its watertight case,/ you explained./’ (p. 102). The Marine Biology is also banal. Carson gives a jerky performance: the blurb states 10 collections, proving that over-production does not mean you can label each according to the manufacturer’s seal of approval and worst of all, foreigners are noticing this; we would want to watch it: people are liable to quote Bono, Van Morrison, The Pogues, and Paul Brady instead of some of our homemade-reputation-poets who like Guinness do not travel very well. Brady is another nervous performer when it comes to writing about the birds and the bees, as in the chorus of ‘The Island’, ‘We’ll make love to the sound of the ocean.’ That is about as horny as a picnic in the Gaeltacht in the rain. The same lack of an artful core of erotica makes Carson’s efforts desultory. What is it about Belfast and sex? It is another unmentionable.    

Top