Letters
Dear Tim Kendall,
I want to concentrate on only two of the poems by Michael Longley which Philip Hobsbaum manages to misrepresent or misunderstand in your last issue. (The misrepresentation I have in mind is carried forward by careful innuendo throughout Hobsbaum’s entire piece from its epigraph: ‘Growing like coral among shadows: literary life respectable’.) In the first case he does not seem to have noticed that the list of flowers he quotes from ‘The Ice-Cream Man’ is part of a dramatic exchange between the speaker and his daughter who had earlier rehearsed her list of favourite ice-cream flavours. The two lists are established by the rhythm of the poem as equally inadequate anecdotes to the “murder” of “the ice-cream man on the Lisburn Road”. Having failed to see the lines within their dramatic context (the first rule for his mentor, Leavis) it is no wonder that Hobsbaum misses here “the urgency of an inner life”, finds himself “speaking of style rather than subject”. It is not Edward Thomas’s “random collocations” but his weighing of age against youth, innocence against sad experience that one is reminded of by the child’s tribute of “carnations to lay outside his shop”.
In any case, having noted that the speaker’s list is of “plants that grow in the apparently defoliated Burren in County Clare”, it might have occurred to Hobsbaum to ask whether the ecological threat to that very area (and similar areas world-wide) might not also be part of the “subject” he finds missing from Longley’s poetry. He would then have avoided the gaffe of quoting The Ghost Orchid’s title poem (“Added to its few remaining sites will be the stanza/ I compose about leaves like flakes of skin”) while missing by a mile its hint of ecological and paramilitary (or military) depredation: “There you have it,” he says, “a poem about being a poem”! It might have helped him here to observe the careful pairing on a single page of ‘The Ghost Orchid’ with the sardonic “scribblings” of the custodian of ‘The White Garden’:
My memorandum to posterity? Listen. ‘The saw
Is under the garden bench and the gate is unlatched.'
When the significance of poems he does think worthy of comment escapes Hobsbaum so completely there is little reason to challenge his dismissal of almost all the rest.
Yours sincerely,
Michael Allen,
Belfast.
Page(s) 44-45
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