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.
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