Review: Bernard O’Donoghue: Gunpowder
London: Chatto. £6.99.
Poets and liars have good memories, so it’s said. They certainly need them. Bernard O’Donoghue’s memory is a kind of authoritative summons to the past to smarten itself up and make itself present, to account for itself Ibsen said that poetry is a court of judgement on the soul; in Bernard O’Donoghue’s case that judgement is carried out by summoned images and moments which, once they agree to participate in the present, judge the poet and his poems with ruthless cunning and perception. Too often, the past is softened and distorted because it is denied its judging role; hence the plague of nostalgia in many Irish songs and poems. In O’Donoghue’s poetry, the past is a sharp pair of eyes, a scream, a story, a cutting voice, a burst of passion, a magic mist in which rough things happen. In other words, O’Donoghue achieves in Gunpowder what all poets dream of doing: he creates his own world. That world is fascinating and strange.
It is a world of pictures and proverbs, of wisdom distilled from hard physical work. It is a world where stories are more important than ideas; stories often contain ideas whereas ideas never contain stories. O’Donoghue’s parable-poems, for example ‘Coronach’, ‘Amateurs’, ‘The Great Famine’, haunt the reader’s mind with their quietly but powerfully suggested ideas. Writing about gardening in ‘Stealing Up’, he says “I don’t plan it, I steal up on it”. This is precisely what his poems do: they steal into the heart and steal the heart away with their calm passion, their gentle intensity.
As I read and re-read this wise, delightful book, I keep thinking of the phrase from a letter Keats wrote to Jill. Reynolds in February 1818, “Man should not dispute or assert but whisper results to his neighbour”. It’s a long time since I’ve read a book of poetry that has the confidence to whisper in the way these poems do. This must help to explain why the book slowly, gently and inexorably takes possession of the reader. Gunpowder is not explosive. It’s a slow burner. It may well be inextinguishable.
Page(s) 73-74
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