Review
Brendan Kennelly Breathing Spaces
BRENDAN KENNELLY
Breathing Spaces -
Early Poems
Bloodaxe, £8.95
MEDBH MCGUCKIAN
Marconi's Cottage
Bloodaxe/Gallery, £6.95
Breathing Spaces collects sixty-one (mostly early) poems omitted from Kennelly's Selected Poems, A Time For Voices, together with four poem-sequences and a cycle of twenty-two songs, A Girl (also available on record and cassette from Gael Linn). This book may disturb and disappoint at first, but, traversed from beginning to end, it also engages. I felt myself 'reading' less a book than a man, and Kennelly's disarmingly frank prose interpolations increase the impression of witnessing a quarrel with himself out of which the best-known later poetry -including Cromwell (1981) and The Book of Judas (1991) - was to come.
Augustine Martin has written, about Judas, "you would have to fare far to encounter in literature or life such naked fear - and its attendant self-loathing so bravely confronted". Such dissonances can be heard throughout Kennelly's work. In early poems and the sequence Love-Cry (1972), they remain largely undefined, unassuaged, untranscended, whether evoked through the first or third person. But persona can, in Kennelly's own words, "be a liberating agent" for such a writer, and with Islandman (1977), composed during a year's depression when “a small room became for me an island", the sequence-long persona definitively (at least in this collection) appears. An alter ego, able to wrestle with and on behalf of the poet, is able also to provide the reader with a welcome increase in 'showing' as against 'telling', without jettisoning that sense of direct address so typical of Kennelly.
As this technical modulation comes about, there is also a more consistent attempt to explore isolation, imprisonment and the significance of water, themes again evident in the personae of A Small Light (1979) and A Girl (1981). Water -rain, river, canal, even wine and above all sea - haunts all the poet's work. It offers images with which counter human evil, whether through escape into death, as in 'After School', or through acceptance of forces - cold, perfect, silent - from which human kind has emerged and which the poet may lend a voice. Perhaps Islandman provides the clearest paradigm (this second, quintessentially Celtic, perception of the healing power of otherness:
This evening I can barely tell
The sea from the land.
I can make out the seabirds returning
Almost touching the sea's ground,
Heads low as though in gratitude
For the covering night,
Wings dipping the spindrift
Blowing darkly across my sightIn this light where everything
Becomes everything else.
When I close my eyes the beat of the waves
Is my own pulse.I see the nettles
Clean and wicked after rain.
They trouble me. I'll never see them
In this light again.
Medbh McGuckian's poetry is so precise relation to perception that it becomes obscure in relation to fact existing within coruscation of simile, metaphor, analogy, apposition. On must read, in the main, as one might look at painting, or even listen to music. For example, 'East of Mozart' begins:
Snow gleams like an old leaven
In one corner of my room, a feeling
With no name in actual language,
Which perhaps does not exist except in me.
We pass from that perhaps literal "snow" to the simile "like an old leaven" to "a feeling" that is beyond "actual" language and may not even have interpersonal existence. Then, in the following verse, we find "the room is also filled with white lilac" What is the relation of "white lilac" to "snow"? Does the lilac exist in time), as a transformation of snow (in memory or foresight), as an addition (despite a resulting dislocation of seasons), as an analogy (despite "also")...? As we read on, some possibilities seem to materialise more than others, but at the end the poet suggests that indeed some words may be "meant for at most/Ten people in the whole world".
Medbh McGuckian's acceptance of this possibility, and of the methods that derive from it, place her in danger of creating works analogous to the painting in Balzac's story 'Le Chef d'Oeuvre Inconnu', where only the model's toe remains recognisable amid a glacis of flesh-tones. Nevertheless, it is memorably defended in 'The Carrying Ring', and the final poem in this collection may presage a shift of emphasis:
I saw the edge of the forest
Which had no end,
Which I came dangerously close
To accepting as my life,And followed with my eye a shadow
Floating from horizon to horizon
Which I mistook for my own.
It grew greater while I grew less.
Gliding like a world, a tapestry
One looks at from the back.
Critical misgivings one may have -and to these must be added acute unease at the dangers that threaten such a 'snail horn' sensibility -but Medbh McGuckian's commitment to 'languageless' truths of experience does remind us how different in their tasks are poetry and philosophy. In poetry, fortunately for human beings, whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must not be silent.
Page(s) 59-60
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