Ireland from Oxford
Bernard O’Donoghue: Here Nor There. London: Chatto & Windus, £8.99.
A British reader might be forgiven for wondering whether the watermark or qualification of an Irish poet, or at least of one who has taken silk, is to have grown up on a farm. As half the population of the whole island of Ireland lives in cities and 30% within commuting distance of Dublin this might make one imagine some conspiracy of pastoral nostalgics. The poets do not remain on the farms, of course, but (with the notable exception of Patrick Kavanagh) progress onwards and upwards to institutions of higher learning across the world. Bernard O’Donoghue appears to be one of this band, and his third collection draws as heavily as did The Weakness and Gunpowder on memories of the country and society in which he was raised.
The poems – some two-thirds of them about or referring to rural Ireland – are hard to resist, so enjoyable a reviewer might worry about being seduced into letting his critical standards fall. But given their clear-sightedness and their avoidance of sentimentality and vulgarity, why worry? The pleasure of reading what has been well written (as distinct from comprehensibly written) comes so seldom that it risks being forgotten; then suddenly the eye lights on sequences of words, as in these verses, through which it can move like a seal through fish-laden waters. But their quality is not easily conveyed through short quotations, which itself says something about coherence and the way in which the parts are interdependent. Cut off a few lines as a sample and they are apt to lie quietly on the plate, not dead perhaps, but deprived of the internal reflections that illuminate them when seen as part of a whole poem. In ‘The Owls at Willie Mac’s’, for example, the first stanza has the writer walking alone at night and listening to the barn owls. He encounters a stranger wheeling an unlit bicycle, who speaks to him in the dark about the birds’ flight. Then
He walked away from me,
Saving the battery by still not winding on
The squat flash lamp I pictured at the front.
Neither could my defective vision see
Him as he would be three months ahead,
Stretched in the road like the thirsty bittern
By a car that could hardly be expected
To pick him out against a wintering sky.
But the quotation fails to evoke the stranger as he has been conjured up so vividly earlier in the poem through his words, the sound of his boots, the ticking of the free-wheel and the odours of tobacco and Guinness that he exhaled on the night air.
As the sample suggests, O’Donoghue is not given to histrionics or coloratura flourishes, nor does he strip off to exhibit his psychological wounds. He winds up the spring of his observations and narratives and ironies in a level voice, achieving many of his best coups by quietly laying one everyday but carefully calculated image beside another, which may contrast with it, reinforce it or throw a sardonic or poignant light on it. While the style is far from flamboyant, the many-layered effects he extracts from the vernacular must be the envy of those to whom these usages are foreign. And by and large he gives the reader an easy ride. These are poems from which one emerges without an Empsonian headache or feelings of Ashberyan disorientation. And those who may have felt a shade buffeted by the turbulence that Ted Hughes’ intense language has recently generated need not brace themselves to withstand similarly muscular phraseology. Forced to categorise him, he would not be a duck out of water if placed somewhere between Robert Graves and Seamus Heaney and within shouting distance of Douglas Dunn.
Who O’Donoghue writes for is another question. Is it the general English-speaking poetry-reading public or a smaller group? There may be something apposite in Auden’s lines from Letter to Lord Byron:
Art if it doesn’t start there, at least ends,
Whether aesthetics likes the thought or not,
In an attempt to entertain our friends.
As well as mentioning by name a number of the poet’s acquaintances and relations from years gone by (all, it is safe to say, unknown to the average reader), the poems refer to twenty or so remote places in West Cork and Kerry of which no one in Britain – and relatively few in Ireland – will have any knowledge at all. These are tiny places – villages, hamlets, glens, town lands – but of course they have irresistible names, like Coalpits, Watergrasshill, Glenflesk and Cordal. So the reader is free to picture them as he will. But seeing the name ‘Kanturk’, for example, he is likely to imagine a locality considerably more exotic and colourful than reality has to offer eleven miles west of Mallow. Is that what the writer intends? This use of personal and place names is more marked than it was in Gunpowder and prompts one to turn back to the first poem in the new collection, ‘Nechtan’ (I cannot explain the title), which has to do with being homesick for Ireland and with the impossibility of return –
so now we’re fated
To sail for ever in the middle seas, outcast
Alike from one shore and the other.
– a thought not unlike Elizabeth Bowen’s remark about feeling at home only on the mail boat between Dun Laoghaire and Holyhead. But as well as the naming there is the increasing use of Irish, mostly without translation. And given that none of the words appears in Chambers or the COD, it is surely unrealistic to expect a British reader to know that “cronawning” is a sort of humming, that a hurley ball is called a “sliothar” and that “amhrán” means a song or refrain. One piece, ‘The Road to Doon School’, starts with two lines in Irish. If, as seems likely, the reader can neither construe them nor speak the words he sees on the page, why, he might ask, are they being presented to him? No one presumably expects him to buy or borrow an Irish-English dictionary in order to make them out. (The same question would arise if the lines were in, say, Danish – though not if they were in French or perhaps in German, Italian or Spanish.) The answer must be that the words and lines are addressed to people who are at least to some extent bilingual in Irish and English – unless O’Donoghue is just talking to himself, which seems improbable. However, this vagary affects only a few of the pieces, and the success of Gunpowder, which lacked the Irish phrases but had much the same geographical bent, shows that readers can take it all in their stride, caught up as they will be in the spells that O’Donoghue casts. This is one of the best collections of poems to come my way for many months.
Page(s) 79-81
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