'Growing like coral among shadows': literary life respectable
Michael Longley, The Ghost Orchid. London: Cape.
Michael Longley may have been fortunate in having been born in 1939, and in Ireland. Any list of contemporary Irish poets is sure to include Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon. Most probably such a list will contain Derek Mahon and his older contemporary, John Montague. Somewhere along the line, however, the name of Michael Longley will occur.
Michael Longley made his debut in the early 1960s in the Trinity College, Dublin, magazine, Icarus, along with Derek Mahon and Edna Longley - who contributed a warm and persuasive appreciation of the First World War poet, Edward Thomas. Edward Thomas was a writer that, along with the 1930s poet Louis MacNeice, may be held to embody in his work many of the techniques to which Longley has aspired. Longley was, still in the 1960s, taken up by the discerning editor of Poetry Ireland, John Jordan, who, along with some attractive juvenilia, published a few of Longley’ s translations. Longley, like MacNeice, was a classicist. Indeed, the Greek and Roman classics, along with modern influences already instanced, form part of the composite of influences that Longley has woven into his mature work.
By the 1970s, like any other young poet, Longley was beginning to have his anthology pieces disseminated. Among these was ‘In Memoriam’, from his first book, No Continuing City (1963-1968). In several respects, ‘In Memoriam’ is a typical Longley poem. First of all, it exhibits a heavy reliance on traditional form. The metre is iambic; the diction literary, even rhetorical; the rhyme scheme rather obtrusive. The first stanza reads:
My father, let no simile eclipse
Where crosses like some forest simplified
Sink roots into my mind; the slow sands
Of your history delay till through your eyes
I read you like a book. Before you died,
Re-enlisting with all the broken soldiers
You bent beneath your rucksack, near collapse,
In anecdote rehearsed and summarised
These words I write in memory. Let yours
And other heartbreaks play into my hands.
The rhymes obtrude. Longley makes heavy weather of their deployment. The scheme varies from one stanza to the next, suggesting that, for all his formality, Longley does not really have the structure under control. The diction employed, literary as it is, does not achieve the degree of precision the traditional form would seem to require. Longley knows enough to let his less likely rhymewords precede those that are more expected. But that verb, “eclipse”, does not have an adequate predicate. Eclipse what? The syntax slides away even as you look at it. The “similes”, it seems, are not to “eclipse” some unspecified place where “the crosses sink roots” into the speaker’s mind. The vagueness lies in that juxtaposition “eclipse/ Where”, and it is fairly typical early Longley. There is a show of formality, of precision, but the form is not under control and the diction suffers in an effort to meet the (not very exacting) exigencies of a rhyme scheme that, in any case, is almost immediately abandoned.
Fortunately, there is another early poem, even more anthologised and certainly far superior, with which this may be contrasted. It is called ‘Wounds’, from Longley’s second book, An Exploded View (1968-1972). The poem begins:
Here are two pictures from my father’s head -
I have kept them like secrets until now:
First, the Ulster Division at the Somme
Going over the top with ‘Fuck the Pope!’
‘No Surrender!’: a boy about to die,
Screanung ‘Give ‘em one for the Shankill!’
‘Wilder than Gurkhas’ were my father’s words
Of admiration and bewilderment.
Next comes the London-Scottish padre
Resettling kilts with his swagger-stick,
With a stylish backhand and a prayer.
Over a landscape of dead buttocks
My father followed him for fifty years.
At last, a belated casualty,
He said - lead traces flaring till they hurt -
‘I am dying for King and Country, slowly.’
I touched his hand, his thin head I touched.
This is a signal improvement on ‘In Memoriam’, and deserves its quasi-classical status. True, it has its flat moments: a line such as ‘Of admiration and bewilderment’ is too abstract to risk that extent of iambic conformity. Even at its best, this verse does not quite have the drama of other latter-day First World War poems, such as ‘Six Young Men’ by Ted Hughes or ‘Reasons for Refusal’ by Martin Bell. Nevertheless, there is a welcome evasion of rhetoric here: the diction does not get in the way of the poignancy. That poignancy is created partly by the quietly exact detail - “Resettling kilts with his swagger-stick”: “a landscape of dead buttocks”. Partly it is a matter of a determinedly unliterary diction.
This poem, unlike most of Longley’s earlier efforts, looks forward to Gorse Fires (1991), which was Longley’s first collection since The Echo Gate (1975-1979). The earlier book was very much the mixture as before. True, rhyme had largely been abandoned; but the verse still clung obediently to iambics, and the diction was too obviously faithful to its models.
Gorse Fires, on the other hand, was a remarkable and rare example of a poet in late middle age rethinking his verse from the foundation upwards. Notice the corrugation of the metres. This is a verse that is genuinely sprung:
I want my funeral to include this detour
Down the single street of a small market town,
On either side of the procession such names
As Philbin, O’Malley, MacNaniara, Keane.
It took some skill to incorporate that list of Irish names into the metrical framework. This is much more gripping than the earlier work.
Elsewhere in Gorse Fires, there are bold clashes of diction:
his grandfather
who beachcombed from the strand barrels and spars
and built the first velocipede in Thallabaun.
That confrontation between the Latinate “velocipede” and the distinctively Irish “Thallabaun” is worth noting. It is no mere decoration, but a verbal acting out of a real-life clash, between innovation and entrenched custom. There is, too, an imaginative use of enjambement; for example, in ‘Glass Flowers’:
the once and for all
Hard petals
and
The glass iron cooling in your hand will double as
A darning last.
Edward Thomas, whose inimitable example had been tantalising Longley all those years, at last comes into his own in the verse of Longley’s ‘The Ice Cream Man’:
thyme, valerian, boosestrife,
Meadowsweet, tway blade, crowfoot, ling, angelica,
Herb robert, marjoram, cow parsley, sundew, vetch,
Mountain avens, wood sage, ragged robin, stichwort,
Yarrow, lady’s bedstraw, bindweed, bog pimpernel.
This is considerably more than a list of wild flowers. These are the plants that grow in the apparently defoliated Burren, in County Clare. The blending of their names into the order in which they appear here is a matter of art. It is the kind of art one finds in the seemingly random collocations of Edward Thomas, which form their individual patterns and create an unmistakable rhythm of their own.
With all this, there is no direct comparison between Longley, a gifted minor poet, and Edward Thomas, whose reputation, great as it is, has yet to reach its zenith. What one misses in Longley, even at his best, is the urgency of an inner life, the patterns of an interesting mind made palpable. While one cannot call Gorse Fires merely decorative, there nevertheless is about it an air of “making poetry”. One finds oneself speaking of style rather than subject, as though manner itself were the poet’s material. There is nothing like the pressure that shapes Edward Thomas’s poems about the process of life: ‘Old Man’, ‘Wind and Mist’, ‘The Chalk-Pit’. The young Edna Longley wrote about Edward Thomas, “there is an austerity and deliberateness in his rhythms which accommodates dignified diction”. She could not have written so of her future husband. Michael Longley’s work is best when it gets down from the rhetorician’s stage.
Perhaps Louis MacNeice provides a more just comparison. His career has several parallels with that of Longley. Like MacNeice, Longley eamed his living as a cultural entrepreneur. Like MacNeice, he established himself as a likeable and competent poet but then burst forth late in his development with a book that was only imperfectly heralded in his previous practice.
Even so, there is nothing as intense in Gorse Fires as that series of poems, invoking time, that begins MacNeice’ s crucial collection, The Burning Perch. Longley has
Cattle out of their byres are dungy still, lambs
Have stepped from last year as from an enclosure.
(‘Gorse Fires’)
MacNeice, however, has
This brand of soap has the same smell as once in the big
House he visited when he was eight: the wall of the
bathroom
open
To reveal a lawn where a great yellow ball rolls back
through a
hoop.
('Soap Suds’)
It is a matter of handling transitions; of matching up the image with that which it symbolises; above and beyond all, absorbing the ego not allowing it to come between the word and the observed experience. It is that absorption that accounts for the apparent artlessness, the unexpectedness, of the verse in Edward Thomas and, to a lesser degree, in Louis MacNeice.
But it is no small tribute to Michael Longley that he can be compared, even if not to his advantage, with masters such as Edward Thomas and Louis MacNeice. MacNeice’s career ended abruptly, with The Burning Perch. Longley has been more fortunate. A year older than MacNeice was when he died, Longley has been able to add to his laurels with The Ghost Orchid.
This has certainly learned from Gorse Fires, but it does not substantially develop from it. There are poems here which one is undoubtedly glad to encounter. One appreciates the accomplished ease of ‘Autumn Lady’s Tresses’. This is a poem couched in the form of a question structured as a single unfolding sentence. There are suave rehandlings of the Daedalus myth in ‘Perdix’, and of Ovid’s story about Baucis and Philemon. The author’s father, who has played so seminal a role in his books, reappears in ‘The Kilt’, ‘Behind a Cloud’ and ‘A Pat of Butter’. One poem, ‘The CampFires’, is probably as good as anything Longley has done so far. It begins
All night crackling camp-fires boosted their morale
As they dozed in no-man’s-land and the killing fields.
(There are balmy nights - not a breath, constellations
Resplendent in the sky around a dazzling moon -
When a clearance high in the atmosphere unveils
The boundlessness of space...)
The diction may seem bland and inclusive, but, after all, the poem is suggesting that the camp-fires in the First World War are much like those in front of the tents pitched outside Ilium or, indeed, those of any other battle.
Although The Ghost Orchid is not Gorse Fires, it certainly has its charms. The title poem, brief as it is, has the assurance of an Old Master:
Added to its few remaining sites will be the stanza
I compose about leaves like flakes of skin, a colour
Dithering between pink and yellow, and then the root
That grows like coral among shadows and leaf-litter.
Just touching the petals bruises them into darkness.
There you have it: a poem about being a poem. Self-reflexiveness is erected into a virtue. Longley has come into his inheritance.
What was said of his earlier books was, perhaps, pitched rather high: “a lyric craftsman of genius”, “a custodian of griefs and wonders”, “the true Yeatsian gift”. That he has, with selected pieces from his earlier books and with his last two volumes, lived almost up to such encomia as these - well, that is ungainsayable.
His association with his Irish contemporaries, however, has been a mixed blessing. It cannot have done the poet much good to have been repeatedly compared with Seamus Heaney, who seems effortlessly to outclass everyone, at least in his own chosen genre. Longley is not, either, a latter-day metaphysical such as Paul Muldoon; it is like comparing Herrick with Marvell. Even Longley’s lifelong friend, Derek Mahon, is in reality a very different poet. There is nothing in Longley’s output that can be related to the prophetic utterance of ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’, surely one of the great poems of the later twentieth century. Longley’ s natural hinterland, as already indicated, is one that he shares with Thomas and MacNeice. It is quite possible that his work for the Arts Council and his residence in Belfast - he has lived nowhere else - have not, in the long run, been good for him. Imagine a Lawrence who had never left Derbyshire, and you get an idea of the limitations involved.
One has always been aware of there being a good deal more in Longley the man than has been allowed to come out in the poems. Or, to put it another way, there are intimations in the poems of both narrative skill and humour that have never been displayed on the scale they deserve. One thinks how limited Dylan Thomas would seem if we did not have his stories and Under Milk Wood to dwell on.
That is all in the past, however: there is, at this stage, unlikely to be a further advance similar to that of Gorse Fires over The Echo Gate. Longley has now reached an autumnal plateau, in much the same way as his older contemporaries, Peter Porter and U.A. Fanthorpe, have already done. What we have is delightful; it is considerably more than a good many other poets have been able to accomplish; and we must not torment ourselves and the poet by regretting what was little likely to have happened anyway. There are worse fates than being the author of ‘Wounds’, ‘Detour’, ‘The Velocipede’, ‘Glass Flowers’, and of ‘Gorse Fires’ itself. There are worse fates than being the author of so accomplished a collection as The Ghost Orchid. If, in the end, Michael Longley did not emulate the urgency of Louis MacNeice or the profundity of Edward Thomas, he has earned his place, and that a secure one, among the gifted lyric poets of his time.
Page(s) 54-61
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