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.
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