Entering The Mare by Katie Donovan / The Twelfth of Never by Ciaran Carson / O Rathaille by Michael Hartnett / C P Cavafy, Selected Poems, English Versions by Desmond O’Grady

There is little point in trying to impose some faux unifying theme or thread on these four volumes of poetry, but one can note that two comprise of translations, two are from Gallery Press, and all four are by Irish poets, even if one is made up of versions from a poet who was born in Alexandria, Egypt to Greek parents from Constantinople, and spent seven years of his childhood and early adolescence in England. Only one woman and one Northerner, so no chance of a general link in those departments. But nevertheless, here we go.

Entering The Mare

Katie Donovan

(Bloodaxe, £6.95 p/b)

Ladies first. In this, her second collection, after 1993’s debut, Watermelon Man, Katie Donovan continues to stake out her territory, which is, according to Carol Rumens, ‘the womanly erotic’. The book is divided into two parts, ‘Hunger’ and ‘Totem’, and the enabling myth of the title poem, which begins the second section and informs everything else here, is drawn from the inauguration of an Irish chieftain, as observed by Geraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales) in the 12th century. A white mare, symbolising the Goddess (is she also, as would please Robert Graves, white?) is ritually raped by him, and then he swims in the ‘soup of her flesh’, and eats her meat. He must enter, slay and swallow her, then take a ceremonial bath in her remains, as his initiation. This destruction of the female principle is pointedly contrasted with the procedure in the last poem of the first section, ‘Muse’, where the muse for a change is male, and is welcomed by the female poet as he enters her, and she finds ‘the lost music/of my throat/in the piping/of his melodies’. She wants to be entered by the muse, so that she can create, her surrender gives her power, while the Chieftain wants to enter the Goddess only to destroy, his dominance based on subjugation. Images of hunger, literal and figurative, pervade the collection, as do attempts to satisfy these longings, through bread, meat, travel, sex, even love. We are reminded incidentally in ‘Workhorse’, for example, that ‘butcher shops/sell equine steaks/on Paris streets’, while ‘Strike’ deals with hunger strikes as an ancient form of protest in Ireland, and ‘Hunger at Doolough’ with an actual episode from the Great Famine.

‘Yearn On’, ‘Sweet Woman’ and ‘Warm Hand, Cold Heart’ are spiky love poems, the ending of the first particularly effective, as the poet realises the source of her maledictions on her former lover is the distance that ‘...leaves me weeping,/and storming,/and bereft.’ ‘Making Shapes’ maintains the fallacy that all heterosexual men are suckers for big breasts, dealing as it does with the ill-effects of silicone implants. While it is commendable to see a younger female poet dealing with some of the larger issues, this poem will appeal only to those women (and men) who imagine that all men haven’t yet realised that sometimes less is more. (Personally, I’m intrigued by the variety and even, occasionally, by to whom these wonderful appendages are attached.) ‘Macha’s Curse’ and ‘Horse Sense’ are more or less straight narratives, the latter contrasting good sex and bad sex in the horsy world, its last two lines suggesting that maybe the mare, and by implication the Goddess, existed before God. ‘A Vision of Hell’ quite subtly and sexily hints at the affinities between the poet and her cat. ‘Out of Her Clay’, ‘Display’ and ‘She Whale’ show ecological concerns and are good ideas, but suffer because of their flat, prosy execution. There are also a number of family remembrances, including ‘New York City, 1947’, ‘Magic Brushes’, ‘Tenterhooks’, ‘Stitching’, ‘Grooming’ and ‘Totem’.

Only by the loosest understanding of the word could Donovan’s work here be described as lyrical, and one does tire eventually of so many poems written in short, staccato line bursts. Carol Rumens describes Donovan’s work as characterised by ‘Terseness, sharp observation and a nice sense of cadence’, and while an admirable directness of statement and simplicity of thought is evident, it is odd that at a time when many novelists are trying to imbue their work with the qualities and effects of language which are traditionally thought of as ‘poetic’, many poets seem to be striving for what are usually considered the more pejorative properties and limitations of ‘mere prose’. Because of their ease of comprehension and colloquial repetition, one suspects that many of these pieces have more force in performance than they do on the page.

There is at times an annoying earnestness about Donovan’s poetry, as though the poet, or more correctly, the poetic voice, is that of a nice woman deliberately seeking out particular experiences (usually erotic), because she thinks it is her duty, or because she wants to write about them. But even this trait is parodied nicely in ‘Sweet Woman’.

Finally, what is this thing with women and horses? Patti Smith, Katie Donovan, and now Sarah Corbett, to name only a few. Of course, Edwin Muir – a man – had a poem called ‘The Horses’ in One Foot in Eden, his final collection, an apocalyptic vision of war and destruction and of the primal grace and endurance of horses and their necessary relationship to humankind. But it’s the girls who really seem to love their ponies. Are they trying to tell us something here? Maybe we should listen to them.

The Twelfth of Never

Ciaran Carson

(Gallery Press, £13.95 h/b, £7.95 p/b)

If ease of accessibility can sometimes make Donovan’s work unchallenging, downright incomprehensibility can force you to ask if Ciaran Carson’s latest offering is always worth the trouble. Although an avowed fan of much that Carson has done previously, particularly in The Irish For No, I cannot help but wonder if in his current prolific spate he is in danger of starting to seem profligate, his barrierless, boundless facility running the risk of beginning to border on making his work seem facile. (Is the style catching?) It is as though, having made the sonnet form and the Alexandrine line his own, he is dashing off poems at the slightest suggestion of every passing thought or idea flitting by, and placing them in the comforting conformity of this grid that he has mastered, until the method and its results can seem at once both a little too easy and a little too forced.

The components thrown together to make up the simmering concoction this time include: poppies; Japan; traditional Irish ballads, jigs and reels; bread; salt; tobacco; beer; the Red hand of Ulster; 1798; magic mushrooms; President Mary McAlesse; fairies; Egypt; and Paradise. These tropes recur throughout the seventy-seven sonnets (when you add each digit of this number you get fourteen, the number of lines in each poem). However, you’d be hard put to say what the diverse elements and multiple allusions amount to at the end of the day, except a vague belief that a more imaginative approach would solve all the problems in the North, by placing the situation in alternative historical circumstances, or viewing it in an overall global context.

It is difficult to sustain inspiration over a long cycle of interrelated poems, but whereas in John Berryman’s Dreamsongs, for example, there are the obvious gems which more than compensate for some of the slack, with The Twelfth of Never it is hard to select any individual poems that stand out above any others. There are bright lights everywhere, but none dazzles you more than another. With the work of Paul Muldoon, the Northern poet with whom Carson has most in common and is most often compared, the adventurousness and playfulness, the linguistic and formal experimentation, the incredible dexterity and sheer imaginative flights, still have some relationship to what is being said. Carson can become merely clever, for the sake of it. Not that I’ve anything against cleverness (unlike, say, Eileen Battersby of The Irish Times, the chief leitmotif of whose criticism is that things are ‘too clever’ - except when she’s dealing with John Banville, of course). Intelligence is just as much a part of being human as the emotions, or sexuality. Nor do I mind that so much of Carson’s work is ludic, since life itself is ludicrous. But it is only rarely here that things seem as just and right, and just right, as they do in Muldoon.

Maybe ten or twenty years hence, when all the dust has settled, we will be in a better position to go about interpreting this book. But this review has already missed its copy-date because of this very volume (perhaps over-conscientiously, I went back and read or reread all of Carson’s poetry prior to this, to see if that would help me shed some light on the matter in hand, and start making sense of it). So for the moment, when it comes to discovering what the rich ingredients of this strange stew might be distilled to mean, much less determining its value and giving a verdict on it, your guess is as good as mine.

O Rathaille

Michael Hartnett

(Gallery Press, £13.95 h/b, £7.95 p/b)

My inadequacies when reviewing this volume of Michael Hartnett’s translations from the 17th and 18th century Irish of Aodhagan O Rathaille are manifest and manifold, woefully under-qualified as I am in the native tongue. Perhaps a Gaelic scholar or folklorist will write more comprehensively about Hartnett’s skills as a translator in a future issue of this magazine. In the meantime, all I can offer is the view that Hartnett’s English versions of the aislings and elegies, political and satirical poems of this great Gaelic poet have all the delicacy and finesse we associate with much of his own poetry in English, most notably that in Inchicore Haiku and Poems to Younger Women, while at the same time capturing a sense of the capacious energy available in the original metres, and giving a flavour of the rambunctious colloquial speech of the language of the originals. They are ultimately very sad, chronicling as they do personal demise, as well as that of an entire civilisation.

C P Cavafy, Selected Poems, English Versions

Desmond O’Grady

(Dedalus, £5.95)

Which, in a rather more complex and resonant way, was what Constantine Cavafy was doing in his poetry too. But with all due respects to the many fine virtues displayed by O Rathaille and his translator, and the two other poets in the preceding volumes, it is clear that when coming to deal with Cavafy we are, quite simply, moving into a kind of Super League, that of the ten or twelve most talented and original poetic voices of this century.

Born in 1863, dying in 1933, his canon consists of 220 poems, 33 of which are rendered here. He never published a collection in his lifetime, but circulated pamphlets and broadsheets privately to close friends, earning his living initially as a part-time journalist and broker on the Egyptian Stock Exchange, then at twenty-nine getting his first full-time job as a temporary clerk at the Department of Irrigation (Third Circle) in the Ministry of Public Works, which turned out to be pretty permanent, since he held it for the next thirty years. He remained a Greek citizen living in Alexandria, with his mother who died in 1899, and after that living alone until his own death from cancer of the larynx, thirty-four years later.

Like most of the greatest poets, according to Auden (the Romantics who outlived their inspiration proving an obvious exception), he got better as he got older, and Joseph Brodsky would have us believe that Cavafy really only found his voice and his theme when he had turned forty. The phrase ‘...his stylized diffidence/conservative decadence’ occurs in O’Grady’s poem ‘Cavafy in Alexandria’ which prefaces the translations, as a description of the poet, but it could equally apply to his poetry. As O’Grady tells us in his Afterward:

Cavafy’s epiphany had been to see that the squalid, by-passed, declining,

historical Alexandria of his own day was the stage on which to present

his perception of Alexandria during the last three centuries B.C. and the

first four centuries A.D. (with a cast familiar to the educated world) in

demotic, or spoken, Greek with some purist, or refined, and Byzantine

Greek inset when it served his purpose – the history of his language.

He saw how to record in poems his personal (actual and imagined) life

in historic Alexandria for like-minded other persons, including his own

‘other person’. Ten years later, between 1903-7 James Joyce, knowing

nothing of Cavafy, saw this possibility for prose while writing certain

stories of Dubliners and expanded it in his Ulysses.

O’Grady goes on to draw a parallel between what Cavafy did for poetry, and what Picasso, Schoenberg and Brancusi, not to mention Einstein, Freud and Jung, did in their respective fields. But what is really remarkable, as O’Grady writes elsewhere, in the short biography of Cavafy at the beginning of the book, is that: ‘His sophisticated modernity is all the more astonishing because it appeared so early, before most European ‘moderns’ and seemingly from nowhere, as though by instinct.’

Whatever about Brodsky’s contention that Cavafy’s poetic life began at forty, his output before 1903 still includes some of his better known poems, for example ‘Ithaka’ and ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ (here ‘Expecting the Barbarians’). These poems work on many levels, naturalistically, symbolically, metaphorically, historically and mythically, forming a kind of archaeology of society. But after the turn of the century his work became both more personal and psychological, but at the same time more objective and dispassionate, and he also began to strip his poems of all poetic paraphernalia, such as rich imagery, similes, metric flamboyance and rhyme, becoming almost lapidary or, as we would say these days, minimalist. Brodsky calls this ‘the economy of maturity’, and says of Cavafy’s use of deliberately ‘poor’ adjectives (using words in their primary meanings, like calling emeralds ‘green’ and describing bodies as ‘young and beautiful’ – in contrast to Carson, perhaps?) that it ‘creates the unexpected effect of establishing a certain mental tautology, which loosens the reader’s imagination, whereas more elaborate images or similes would capture that imagination or confine it to their accomplishments.’

The poems also became intensely erotic, but it is a retrospective eroticism, a nostalgia of the physical. ‘Ninety percent of the best lyric poetry is written post-coitum, as was Cavafy’s. ... More often than not, the protagonist of these lyric poems is a solitary, aging person who despises his own features, which have been disfigured by that very time which has altered so many other things that were central to his existence.’ (Brodsky again). Like Proust, the sex was for his art, although he didn’t know it at the time, as much as for pleasure, since memory itself is his theme, as much as it is his means of trying to regain lost time and make sense of experience, and the most forceful memories are those of desire, since the body remembers as much as the mind. Aesthetic pleasure is not so much substituted for, as made equivalent to, the sexual variety, out of sheer necessity, and there are few more simultaneously heartbreaking but pleasing paradoxes than that of someone remembering what happened to them before they even knew what it is to have a memory, much less what it means. Again, like Proust, he was gay, and according to Brodsky:

In a way, homosexuality is a form of sensual maximalism which

absorbs and consumes both the rational and the emotional faculties

of a person so completely that T. S. Eliot’s old friend, “felt thought”,

is likely to be the result. The homosexual’s notion of life might, in

the end, have more facets than that of his heterosexual counterpart.

but:

What matter in art are not one’s sexual affiliations, of course, but

what is made of them. Only a superficial or partisan critic would

label Cavafy’s poems simply “homosexual”, or reduce them to

examples of his “hedonistic bias”.

But what it takes Proust a volume of orotund phrases and serpentine sentences to achieve, Cavafy does in five or ten deceptively simple lines. The pleasures of ‘I Went’, ‘He Swears’ and ‘One Night’ are immense. In ‘Rites of Passage’ a schoolboy’s forbidden pleasures while cruising town give an intimation of ‘the Sublime World of Poetry’, while ‘Remember, Body’ goes to the nub of the matter. ‘Tomb of Iasis’ could be read as an AIDS poem avant le lettre, never mind the malady, worthy of anything in Thom Gunn’s The Man With Night Sweats. In ‘That House’, youthful indulgence provides the basis for a transforming beatific vision in the present, while in ‘Since Nine O’Clock’ the remembered young body becomes the direct source of both comfort and elegy.

The essay by Joseph Brodsky which has been threatening to engulf this review is entitled ‘Pendulum’s Song’, and is available in Less Than One. It should be read by anyone interested in understanding more about Cavafy’s work and his world, since it explores his art with greater acuity than I could muster. In it Brodsky characterises Cavafy as swinging between the pagan Hellenistic world and the Roman Christian one. To quote one last time:

The only instrument that a human being has at his disposal for coping

with time is memory, and it is his unique, sensual historical memory

that makes Cavafy so distinctive. The mechanics of love imply some

sort of bridge between the sensual and the spiritual, sometimes to the

point of deification; the notion of an afterlife is implicit not only in our

couplings but also in our separations. Paradoxically enough, Cavafy’s

poems, in dealing with that Hellenic “special love”, and touching en

passant upon conventional broodings and longings, are attempts – or

rather recognised failures – to resurrect once-loved shadows. Or:

photographs.

Criticism of Cavafy tends to domesticate his perspective, taking his

hopelessness for detachment, his absurdity for irony. Cavafy’s love

poetry is not “tragic” but terrifying, for while tragedy deals with the

fait accompli, terror is the product of the imagination (no matter where

it is directed, toward the future or toward the past). His sense of loss is

much more acute than his sense of gain simply because separation is a

more lasting experience than being together. It almost looks as though

Cavafy was more sensual on paper than in reality, where guilt and

inhibitions alone provide strong restraints. Poems like ‘Before Time

Altered Them’ or ‘Hidden Things’ represent a complete reversal of

Susan Sontag’s formula ‘Life is a movie; death is a photograph’. To

put it another way, Cavafy’s hedonistic bias, if such it is, is biased

itself by his historical sense, since history, among other things, implies

irreversibility. Alternatively, if Cavafy’s historical poems had not been

hedonistically slanted, they would have turned into mere anecdotes.

Since my ancient Greek was always rudimentary and is now very rusty, and my modern Greek is limited to a few words for greeting and getting things done, I am in no position to comment on the quality of the translations. But O’Grady is the first Irish poet to translate Cavafy, with whom, after two years spent teaching at Alexandria University, he obviously feels a special affinity, and he is to be congratulated on the undertaking.

‘What is poetry?’ the critic asks, and can usually only provide the most makeshift of working answers. Perhaps poetry is that which uniquely gifted individuals like Constantine Cavafy were born to write.

What The Hammer by Dermot Healy / Scarecrow Sean Lysaght / The Alexandrine Plan by Ciaran Carson

These three collections from the indispensable Gallery Press were launched simultaneously with a reading by all three poets in Waterstone’s of Dawson Street, Dublin, in July. Although they should each be done the service of being read as separate entities, putting them together in the same review inevitably invites comparisons and contrasts. In that light, it’s very much a case of ‘Two of these things are much like the other/Two of these things are kinda the same/But one of these things is not like the others...’, as the old Sesame Street ditty used to have it. To be sure, there are differences between the Healy and Lysaght volumes, but it is Ciaran Carson’s book which is the real odd one out.        

This blatant division has to do with some handy, if reductive, conventional dichotomies, most notably those between nature and culture, and the rural and the urban.  What The Hammer and Scarecrow consist largely of gentle nature lyrics, while The Alexandrine Plan is made up of translations of thirty-four sonnets by three of the greatest French poets of the nineteenth century, Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Mallarme, which provides rather more sophisticated fare than the other two, with all that that adjective connotes. This classification feeds further into an ongoing debate about contemporary Irish poetry, made current yet again by Peter Porter’s recent Daily Telegraph review of Seamus Heaney’s Opened Ground, about how Irish poets alone in the English-speaking world have been granted immunity from engaging with the virtues and vices of late twentieth century life, being allowed instead to take refuge in Wordsworthian lyrical romanticism. Whatever about the validity or otherwise of his views, it is notable that Carson and Paul Muldoon, to whom Carson incidentally dedicates his book, are the only Irish poets Porter exempts from his strictures. (He might usefully have added Derek Mahon and, among emerging voices, David Wheatley, of this parish, who are taking poetry in radically different directions from the one that is usually perceived as ‘Irish’.)

While I realise that to take sides in this argument is to become trapped by its preconceptions, I must declare a bias, before moving on to deal individually, if unfortunately but necessarily briefly, with each book. If forced to choose between nature and culture (which of course I am not), I would choose culture every time. To me, there are few more sublime passages in all literature than when in Beckett’s Malone Dies the narrator stops short suddenly in the middle of an elaborate description of the grounds of St John of God’s Hospital, and declares, ‘- but to hell with all this fucking scenery.’ ‘I think that I shall never see/A tree as lovely as a poem’, to slightly misquote another old song. Of course, there are good poems about trees, and bad poems that have nothing to do with trees. Indeed, there are even good trees. But you get my drift. Perhaps if I had grown up on a farm, or in the country, my formative experiences would have given me a greater appreciation of nature, and so more interest in art which takes it as its subject matter, or tries to engage with it, but a suburban council estate was my lot. But, then again, perhaps it is the artistry I should concentrate on, regardless of what the art is supposed to be about. It’s all about sensibility, isn’t it?

What The Hammer

Dermot Healy

(Gallery Press, £12.95 Hardback, £6.95 Paperback)

The poems in What The Hammer are the most simple and direct of what is on offer in the three volumes under review here, and this ingenuousness pushes the required buttons that make critical commonplaces about them consequently also being the most ‘honest’ and ‘heartfelt’ swing into action. As always, when this is done well, we cannot tell if the naiveté is faux or not.

Some are obviously, even down to their titles, locked into the natural world through observing the changes wrought on the poet’s coastal Sligo surroundings by the passing months and seasons - ‘June’, ‘July Storm’, ‘August’ and ‘September’. Some are whimsical – ‘Colours’, ‘Signs’, ‘Other Signs’, some anecdotal – ‘The Prayer’, and this can veer dangerously into the banal and the bathetic – ‘My House is Tiny’, ‘Approaching Car’. Random collections of images – like those in ‘Raining in Georgia’, seem to owe something to chaos theory. My favourites include the delicate love poem ‘Serenities’, the intimation of mortality that is ‘Death, The Cat’, and the meditation on memory and memories in ‘Footfalls’. ‘The Cuckoo-pint in a Commonage in Ennis’ is quite sexy, in a very natural kind of way.  

Few writers excel with equal facility in poetry, plays, short stories and novels. Joyce’s poetry, the funny stuff apart, is nothing to write home about. With the achievement of  A Goat’s Song behind him, Dermot Healy doesn’t have to worry if his poetry is less than earth-shattering.

Scarecrow

Sean Lysaght

(Gallery Press, £12.95 Hardback, £6.95 Paperback)

If there is little sense in Healy’s work of Emerson’s observation about nature being ‘red in tooth and claw’, Lysaght is rather more aware that the natural world can be as malevolent as it is benevolent towards humankind. Which is perhaps why he seeks to impose order on it, through a careful classification and naming, a precise use of language. He is very concerned with the tools man uses when interfacing with nature, which usually means trying to bend it to his will, such as bird traps, boats, fences, gazebos, maps. And so the scarecrow, as the title suggests, is a central image and motif throughout the collection. And what city boy would have thought that there are so many different kinds of scarecrow, until taught how to look at them anew by these poems? Lysaght is also aware of the vulnerability man leaves himself open to by his dependency on nature –   what are boats made of, after all, but trees? – and this fragility is mirrored in the fastidiousness of the poetry.

But writing poems about nature is, at the end of the day, just a further imposition of something which is man-made upon something which is not. At times here, as in ‘Watching Trees’, a dangerous and even subversive yearning to be at one with nature, without any mediation, breaks through:

                    ...while you’re still watching trees

                    when you could be the flap-man,

                    your arms spread out in the square.

                    Admit it, you could join them now

                    with disposable bags tied to your wrists

                    and tinsel streamers fluttering in your hair.  

The sentiment is expressed, of course, through the medium of language.

The Alexandrine Plan

Ciaran Carson

(Gallery Press, £13.95 Hardback, £7.95 Paperback)

Finally, on to a collection which is the result of a task that to some may seem distinctly outre in its cosmopolitanism, Ciaran Carson’s new versions in English (rather than direct translations) of sonnets by Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Mallarme. As Éilís Ní Dhuibhne quipped, with characteristic insight, in her review of these self-same books in The Sunday Tribune, ‘None of these would have felt happy in Sligo, or on a farm.’ Why not quote her more fully, since I would only be using different words to express the same idea myself: ‘Baudelaire liked cats. Otherwise, nature for these poets takes the form of sex, food, wine and perfume. A more startling transition, from the gentle nature lyrics of modern Ireland, to these rambunctious, sophisticated, decadent poems, could hardly be imagined (one understands, instantly, why Joyce would have had to move out of here).’ Quite. One also thinks of Beckett, returned briefly to Dublin from Paris in 1937 to appear on the plaintiff’s side in a libel action, where his suitability as a witness was shown to be dubious and he was subjected to ridicule, because he corrected his cross-examiner’s deliberate mispronunciation ‘Prowst’ to ‘Proust’, and so betrayed his interest in these dirty French writers, which did not find favour with either the judge or the plain people of Dublin on the jury. 

My secondary school French is not adequate enough to judge the quality of these free translations in comparison with the originals upon which they are based, but they do include some up-to-the-minute topical references. Thus, Rimbaud’s ‘La Maline’ (which according to my dictionary translates as ‘mischievous’, ‘shrewd’, ‘shy’) becomes ‘Miss Malinger’, and a serving girl is transformed into a page-three Stunner. His ‘Ma Boheme’ becomes ‘On the Road’, and:

                    I strummed the black elastic of my tattered boot

                    Held to my heart like youthful violin or lute,

                    A veritable pop-star of the awful rhyme.

embellishes the flavour, even if it deviates from the sense of:

                    Ou, rimant au milien des ombres fantastiques,

                    Commes des lyres, je tirais les elastiques

                    De mes souliers blesses, un pied pres de mon coeur!

Similarly playful liberties are taken throughout, with references to ‘tacky ’50s decor’ in the same poet’s ‘The Green Bar’, and to ‘Fingal’s Cave’ in Baudelaire’s ‘I Had a Life’. Carson has tried as much as possible to stick to the rhyme scheme of the originals, and has used Alexandrines instead of iambic pentameters, and so allows himself a lot of imaginative latitude when it comes to the arrangement of words in, and at the end of, lines. Mallarme is the most difficult of the three to get a handle on, in either French or English, but it’s a difficulty that pleases, in that Wallace Stevens/John Ashbery not-quite-sure-what-he’s-on-about-but-like-it-anyway kind of way.

It is worth noting that linguistic experimentation and playfulness seem to go hand in hand with the more louche outlook on life which runs through these poems, whereas clarity, conservatism and convention would be the keynotes for the back-to-nature boys. What am I talking about? These poems are sonnets. But they speak of a warped romanticism, struggling to retain some semblance of purity, whose closest contemporary parallels could perhaps be found in the American Gothic of movies like those of David Lynch, or the sounds of new country music, like that of The Handsome Family.

Phoenix: Irish Short Stories 1997 Edited by David Marcus / Fish Anthology - dog days and other stories Edited by Clem Cairns

Two more short story anthologies reviewed, a lifetime ago. 

At the risk of finding this review dwarfed under the Maileresque headline ‘Advertisements For Myself’, in other words, of being accused of what we used to call ‘blowing my own trumpet’, I should declare interests in relation to these two books which might be interpreted as vested, and could thus lead to conflicts. I do this only to forestall the even more grievous accusation of insider trading, an invidious fate which befell a more well-known namesake of mine from the world of high finance, who is, I wish to state, loudly and clearly, here and now, once and for all, NO RELATION (Neither, by the way, is an individual with criminal underworld connections, who happens to share my surname.) A story of mine will be appearing in next year’s Phoenix Anthology, and I was short-listed for this year’s Fish Anthology, but failed to make it into the final fourteen in the book. Also, I have entered the 1998 Fish Short Story Competition, from which the stories in next year’s anthology will be chosen. So I will leave it to the reader to decide whether my comments here are motivated by: a) gratitude for current success; b) a desire to flatter in the hope of future success; or c) pique at lack of success in the past. Needless to say, I consider myself totally impartial.

A couple of other points to be made are that with these books, as with any anthology of short stories, there are bound to be some contributions one likes more than others, some one loves, some one hates, some one feels indifferent to; and also that one’s assessment can change radically on a second or third reading. For these reasons, and because many of the contributors, especially in the Fish, are beginners, or at least have not published full-length collections, I will try to err on the side of praise and pass over in diplomatic silence what I feel deserves censure. Of course, this will amount to merely highlighting my own particular favourites, but adverse conclusions should not necessarily be drawn about those pieces which fail to get a mention.

Phoenix: Irish Short Stories 1997

Edited by David Marcus

(Phoenix House, £15.99)

This is the second annual anthology of short stories by Irish writers, edited by that tireless promoter of Irish writing, David Marcus, and published by Phoenix House. It contains sixteen stories, some by established or beginning to be established names, some by newcomers for whom this is the first time in print.

Among the ones which impressed me most were: ‘A Door in Holborn’ by Padraig Rooney, who is obviously a consummate lover of language and a master of atmosphere and the telling detail; ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’ by Colum McCann, with its echoes of John McGahern’s ‘Korea’, and its delicate, almost surrealist surprises; and ‘Writing Cookbooks’ by Maxim Crowley, who is, on the evidence of this contribution, the possessor of a macabre imagination and subversive sensibility which, while uniquely his own, read like a riveting cross between the alienation of any of Beckett’s many anti-heroes with the Baroque obsessiveness of Peter Greenaway, especially as exemplified in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover.

Since its publication early last year, I have been extolling right, left and centre to anyone who cares to listen, the many virtues and merits of Mike McCormack’s debut collection Getting It In The Head. He is represented here by ‘The Angel Of Ruin’ which, while not the best story from his book, and probably chosen with the American market in mind, does give a sampler of the enormous talent displayed in Getting It In The Head, which in its turn gave indications that McCormack is a worthy aspirant to the mantle of Poe, Borges, Calvino, Ballard and Pynchon, and might one day be worthy to join that pantheon and live on the same plane inhabited by these God-like geniuses.

‘Eel’ by John Dunne, of this parish, is a pithy tale of domesticity and vasectomy. (There is a difference between men and women, and it is a vas deferens.) ‘Fortune-Teller’ by Shelia Barrett partakes of the succintness and deadpan tone of Alice Munro.

But the real stone classic here is the last, long, story ‘Heaven Lies About Us’ by Eugene McCabe. Sure, it’s set in the past, and it takes place against a backdrop of an Irish identity constructed around Catholicism and Nationalism which is all but dead and gone, but in its treatment of the genuine horror of child abuse and incest it reaches emotional depths only plummeted in fiction of the highest order. It is not its choice of theme which makes this story great (everyone is writing about child abuse these days), but the sensitivity with which it is handled and the powerful punch it packs. It should also be remembered that the Kerry Babies, Ann Lovett and the X case are events which cannot yet be consigned to ancient history, and that they have become deeply ingrained in the national psyche. I have not read any of McCabe’s other work, but on the evidence of this story alone he is a great writer, and I will be rectifying my omission as soon as possible.

There are traces in this book of what Beckett termed ‘antiquarianism’ (and the new antiquarianism is designed to please the expatriate Irish-American rather than the indigenous Catholic Nationalist audience), an elevation of the grand realist tradition at the expense of the more experimental tradition. In other words, one is more likely to discover a fledgling Corkery, O’Flaherty, O’Faolain or O’Connor here than a budding Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien or Banville. Also, the book is ill-served by its cover, an embarrassing collage of a pint of Guinness, a statue of the Virgin Mary, a pair of hurley sticks and a harp on a tricolour. Are we, worryingly, meant to take these symbols seriously, or are they, one hopes, intentionally kitsch? (The best cover of an anthology of Irish writing undoubtedly has to be that of the Picador book edited by Dermot Bolger, with its photograph of Marilyn Monroe reading Molly Bloom’s soliloquy.) These criticisms aside, the Phoenix: Irish Short Stories series is one of the very best ventures of its kind, and this year’s volume will serve to bring some published writers to the attention of a wider readership, and some unpublished ones to the attention of publishers.

dog days and other stories

Edited by Clem Cairns

(Fish Publishing, £6.50)

This, too, is the second Fish Anthology, and consists of fourteen stories in all, these being the winner, runners-up and some of the short-listed entries for the Fish Short Story Prize. Unlike the Phoenix Anthology, entrants need not necessarily be Irish, and there were over a thousand submissions this year. Incidentally, the choice of the appealing cover painting by Amanda Addison was also arrived at by running a competition.

I have already commented adversely in the pages of this journal on an excerpt from Joseph O’Connor’s introduction to the book, which told us that ‘Fundamental accuracy of statement is the one morality of writing’. All I can say by way of apology is that Mr. O’Connor’s introduction reads much better and makes more sense in its entirety than it did in isolated snippets. However, I was surprised to learn that the above quotation is actually attributable to Ezra Pound. The search for such ‘fundamental accuracy’ is obviously what prompted him to include Chinese ideographs in the Cantos and to edit Eliot’s The Wasteland.

As chief judge, O’Connor’s aesthetic preferences are evident in the choice of winner, and in some of the other selections. These days it sometimes seems that unless one is writing in the dirty realist mode most usually associated with Raymond Carver or Richard Ford, one is never going to get anywhere. (This vogue can also be seen in ‘Transplants’ by Anthony Glavin in the Phoenix, which has been extended into a novel entitled Nighthawk Alley and just published by New Island Books, and in the collection Freak Nights by Ciaran Fagan, again published by New Island. Indeed, yet another example is O’Connor’s own soon to be published new novel, The Salesman).

It is almost axiomatic, as the Booker Prize has shown time and again, that the best story (in your opinion) never wins these kinds of competitions. Last year, the best story in the Fish Anthology (in my opinion) was ‘Virtuoso’ by Conor Farrington, but it didn’t win either. ‘Dog Days’ by Karl Iagnemma is a fine story, but it is very much of the now popular genre described above. My own preferences here would be: ‘Compound Interest’ by Tim Booth, an apocalyptic, post-nuclear dystopian vision, full of wannabe artists, computer hackers, designer labels and Zippo lighters, reminiscent of William Gibson - apparently it is the prologue to a novel entitled Altergeist, which I will be looking forward to seeing; ‘White Goods’ by Carmen Walton, which is cool, smart and perceptive; ‘Johnny Mok’s Universe’ by Frank O’Donovan, a tale of madness begetting madness; ‘Walking The Dog On Mars’ by Geraldine Taylor, a subtle study of obsessiveness and the role of chance in life; and ‘Letter to a Cat’ by Sheelagh Morris, a hilariously satiric send-up of middle-class mores and venality, which should give hope to taken-for-granted wives everywhere. ‘Florence - The Rough Guide’ by Pat Boran is also worth a mention.

The foregoing recommendations aren’t meant to imply that the other inclusions are turkeys. The great thing about both of these collections, apart from nurturing and providing a platform for emerging talent, is that if one doesn’t like one contribution, one is sure to like another. There is something here for everyone, or something for everyone who still reads books of short stories.