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Michael Longley - Selected Poems [Cape £8]
Bernard O’Donoghue - Here nor There [Chatto £8.99]
Aidan Mathews - According to the Small Hours [Cape £8]

These three collections express distinct but representative reactions to the experience of being Irish in the present day. The sense of Ireland and Irishness is central to them, as it is to the work of Joyce, Yeats and Heaney, say, but not to that of Wilde, Shaw or Beckett.

Michael Longley is an Ulsterman who stayed. As a poet, editor, critic, leading figure in the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, he has devoted his life to promoting literature, chiefly but not exclusively in the north. In important ways, he is a citizen of the whole island. He read Classics at Trinity College, Dublin; many of his poems are set in locations in the Republic; he is a member of Aosdána, the Republic’s academy whose membership is limited to 200 Irish writers and artists. Selected Poems gives a good account of his work from 1963 to 1994. Reading the poems, one might have hoped for the distinctive perspective of a man who has spent almost all his life in Belfast. Longley is an exact contemporary of Heaney and might well have a different view of the tumultuous times through which they have both lived.

In this respect, his work is disappointing. Longley has the classicist’s view that poetry need do no more than describe nature, events, feelings, as they have always been described, provided that they are described well. (In this, he is wholly different from Tony Harrison who also took a Classics degree but for whom classical references are only part of a wide range of means for rendering late twentieth century sensibility.) Longley renders incidents from Greek myth without comment, irony or contemporary relevance, evidently in the belief that they are great stories which are permanently part of our culture and need no justifying. This is not a view that I share. I prefer Pound’s view that the only point of the classical world is to illuminate the modern one. The Butchers is a rollicking account of Odysseus’s revenge on his return home, but the other overtly classical poems are earnest and rather dull.

This classicist’s approach informs much of Longley’s writing. Many of his poems respond to the natural world as meditations on places, sights and creatures. Consider Gorse Fires, the title poem of his sixth collection which won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry in 1991:

Cattle out of their byres are dungy still, lambs
Have stepped from last year as from an enclosure.
Five or six men stand gazing at a rusty tractor
Before carrying implements to separate fields.

I am travelling from one April to another.
It is the same train between the same embankments.
Gorse fires are smoking, but primroses burn
And celandines and white may and gorse flowers.

This is the complete poem. One registers the agricultural realism of the first verse, the plangent sense of life passing inexorably (“I am travelling…” ) and the final uplift that, while nature is destroyed (“Gorse fires are burning”), it also renews itself in the flowers listed and they “burn”. This is poetry as consolation: that the same processes - agricultural and natural - occur each year, as certain as growing old and, indeed, accompanying it. Even the destruction is an agricultural process - burning gorse bushes - not a result of agribusiness stripping out the countryside or pollution by chemicals. The commercial savageries visited by man on nature do not appear in Longley’s verse.

Gorse Fires, like much of Longley’s work, could have been written at any time this century. In style and tenor, these poems remind me of Andrew Young, an Anglican clergyman whose Collected Poems, representing fifty year’s work, were published in 1960. There is the same lyrical quietness, exactness of language and restraint of form, and the same acceptance that there is nothing very new to be said.

But Longley also lived through a time like no other, in a city subject to prolonged if sporadic civil war. Only two poems address the sectarian strife directly and at length, but they are both masterly. Wounds relates the current killings to Longley’s father’s memories of the First World War:

     the Ulster Division at the Somme
Going over the top with ‘Fuck the Pope!’
‘No Surrender!’ : a boy about to die
Screaming ‘Give ‘em one for the Shankill!’
‘Wilder than Gurkhas were my father’s words . . .

To an Englishman, the thought that the Ulstermen’s extraordinary (and well-documented) courage in battle was inspired by sectarian hatred is profoundly disturbing, as Longley means it to be. In On Slieve Guillion, Longley relates the myth of Conor Mor, whose severed head was given drink by MacCecht, to the killing by the IRA of the British SAS Captain Robert Nairac, whose body was never found, and to meeting a British soldier:

I watch now through a gap in the hazels
A blackened face, the disembodied head
Of a mummer who has lost his bearings
Or, from the garrison at Dromintee,
A paratrooper on reconnaissance.

This is Longley’s only attempt to relate the conflict to Irish myth. Elsewhere he seems to wince and turn away. In Letter to Derek Mahon, he registers the political reality:

We traced in August sixty-nine
Our imaginary Peace Line
Around the burnt-out houses of
The Catholics we’d scarcely loved,
Two Sisyphuses come to budge
The sticks and stones of an old grudge . . .

but after sixteen lines he retreats to reminiscence of a visit with Mahon to Inisheer, an island in the Republic. The same process is seen, more briefly in a later poem, The Ice-cream Man, which is in full:

Rum and raison, vanilla, butter-scotch, walnut, peach;
You would rhyme off the flavours. That was before
They murdered the ice-cream man on the Lisburn Road
And you bought carnations to lay outside his shop.
I named for you all the wild flowers of the Burren
I had seen in one day: thyme, valerian, loosestrife,
Meadowsweet, tway blade, crowfoot, ling, angelica,
Herb robert, marjoram, cow parsley, sundew, vetch,
Mountain avens, wood sage, ragged robin, stitchwort,
Yarrow, lady’s bedstraw, bindweed, bog pimpernel.

It seems that the poet has given way to reciting plant names like an incantation to drive away horror. A similar motive seems to be at work in The Fishing Party, the strangest poem in the book, in which Christ is seen as a flyfisher on Lough Neagh, apparently saving the souls of murdered policemen and their killers. In a poem of ten lines, greatest emphasis is placed on listing the materials and the names of fishing flies.

Comparing poems like these with Heaney’s meditations on the bog people and his elegies for people murdered in the sectarian strife, there is obviously a severe foreshortening of ambition. It is not merely a question of talent. Rather, it is a question of audience. Heaney is able to write freely of the killings from a Catholic perspective because this is the perspective of most of the people of Ireland and of most poetry-reading people in Britain, the USA and elsewhere. As an Ulster Protestant, Longley knows that to espouse the Unionist cause openly would be to ally himself to a minority in Ireland and a right-wing (and definitely non-literary) political grouping in Britain.

There is an increasingly terse, short-breathed quality about Longley’s later poems, as if his stoicism is gradually throttling him. The exception is River & Fountain which is a warm and lively memoir of his time at Trinity College, Dublin. But it is shot through with a sense of opportunities missed and begins:

I am walking backwards into the future like a Greek.
I have nothing to say. There is nothing I would describe.

Apart from River & Fountain, there are some other perfectly achieved poems. Oddly, they are on obviously non-Irish subjects: An Amish Rug; Ghetto, a meditation on the Terezin ghetto in which the sudden references to Irish potatoes are as piercing as the red-coated child in Schindler’s List; meditations on a Lowry painting (Man Lying on a Wall) and a Mapplethorpe photo (Mr 10.5). They suggest what Longley might have achieved if he had left a Belfast which I sense has been finally stultifying. But he would have had to fight for attention in a wider world and would no longer have been an Irish poet in the same sense.

Bernard O’Donoghue is a Man of Cork who left. Born in 1945, he is now a lecturer in Mediaeval English at Oxford. Here nor There is his third collection. His second, Gunpowder, won the Whitbread Poetry Prize in 1995.

O’Donoghue’s primary impulse is nostalgia for the Ireland he has left. A majority of the poems recount incidents or remember people from his youth. They are described quietly, rather flatly, without recourse to obvious poetic technique. Pied Piper retells an eccentric farmer’s life, ending

And I suddenly remembered his most foolish
Unexecuted enterprise of all:
That underneath his bed for twenty years
He stored the wooden crates that held a Simplex
Milking machine for the stall he never built.

Remnants recalls some poor, rusting possessions and ends

                          why I’d rather pay
For these dying objects than replacements.
I hoped thereby to bring back to life the people:
Jack Sweeney, Phil Micheal and Mary-Ann John Riordan
Who prayed and prayed well into her nineties.

In Femmer, O’Donoghue mentions a rotting chair at his family’s “decaying farmyard” and continues

There’s one like it in the dying house
Of Padraig O’Keeffe at Glounthane Cross:
Not our Glounthane, but the one near Cordal
Where my forebears came from. I stole from there
A small piece of lino, geography-shaped
Like the booty map in Treasure Island,
Where it lay among foxed holy pictures.

Most of O’Donoghue’s writing is in this style and tone. One wonders whether, if their setting had been, say, Northamptonshire, the poems would not have found a publisher. Their flat recital of detail appeals to an English, mainly urban readership because they are set in rural Ireland which is seen as the last part of these islands where life is richly and authentically different. While the Scottish Highlands and North Wales are viewed as austere, depopulated and chilly, rural Ireland appeals to the English as having a warm alternative culture - spontaneous and intensely verbal, the very opposite of middle-class England. The current wave of excellent Irish plays in English theatres testifies that this perception is not mistaken.

O’Donoghue has ridden on this tide without, however, engaging with the actualities of Irish life. His accounts are distanced, disengaged and, at bottom, sentimental. He describes himself as saying “Farewell, Fieldfare” to the winter-visiting birds (Redwings); imagines woodpeckers drumming for him alone (The Drummers); hears women’s voices in deserted houses (Clara). These are clichés of late Romanticism against which Eliot, Yeats and Pound set their faces eighty years ago.

Most dubiously, he is willing to call on his Irish experience at irrelevant moments. To a child who disbelieves in the crocodile in Peter Pan, he replies with a resounding Ah, but...

You’d never been in Dan Riordan’s forge,
Watching the bellows drive the sparks to make
The horseshoes whiten like sucked ice-blues
Almost to non-existence, before re-emerging
Surly and blue-black in the water.

The relevance to crocodiles is, shall we say, tenuous, but it tells us that he, unlike most of his readers, has seen a blacksmith at work. In Getting Out he gains relief from urban life by going out and looking at the natural world: a coot, a flight of pigeons:

                   Or I could visit
The shopping quarter to experience
Something I’ve often noticed: the strange echo
Of the mountain falcon’s mew in Tesco’s checkout.

As someone who shops at Tesco every week, I have never noticed anything remotely like a falcon’s mew. Ah, O’Donoghue might say, how do you know? I have heard a mountain falcon’s mew. Have you? And, of course, I haven’t. On the other hand, I haven’t seen a patient etherised upon a table either, but can accept that an evening might be spread out against the sky like one. I haven’t seen a jaguar with eyes on a short fierce fuse, but can accept that a jaguar’s eyes might look as if they could explode. In other words, I can recognise the difference between genuine experience expressed in poetry and rural sentiment.

Aidan Mathews is a golden boy turned Catholic metaphysician. He is the most original of the three, with the potential of becoming permanently and disturbingly great.

Born in 1956 and brought up in Dublin, he won prestigious poetry prizes when he was scarcely out of his teens and had his first collection published at twenty-one with a second six years later in 1983. With this start, one would have expected a growing opus, with new collections each five to seven years. In fact, According to the Small Hours is only Mathews’ third collection, appearing after a fifteen year interval.

As one would hope after such a gap, Mathews’ style is now very different. The earlier poems were well formed, intelligent, sometimes witty, always intelligible. A good example is At the Wailing Wall from his 1983 collection which is subtitled in memory of my brother John 1945 - 1978. The poem envisions a photo of the brother at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and ends:

A four year illness;
And the lightly downed neck
That I clung to on rides,
Burnt only by sunlight;
Neither hairless nor sutured.

The poem is explicit, gently moving (the last line suggests both chemotherapy and surgery) and not especially original. In the new collection, the same subject is broached without subtitles or explanation as Two Johannine Hymns, of which the first, Eye-drops, begins:

Dropping them into my brother’s eye
Was like a bomb-bay opening over Germany.

This is the first of many striking images, all taken up suddenly and as suddenly dropped. The bomb-bay image is later explained, though not justified, by the fact that the brother hung models of World War Two bombers in his bedroom. Within six lines,

His cornea was an archer’s target
For Robin of Sherwood to start quivering,
A dartboard for the orbiting shots
Of morphine before shut-eye.  Lights-out.

We note the puns on ‘quiver’ and ‘orbit’, the double meanings of ‘shuteye’ and ‘Lights-out’, the second with its grim finality. But amid all the verbal wit, it is easy to miss the central point that the brother was in great pain and needed morphine to sleep. Similarly the shock of a later image

                         he stockpiled
Spectacles like a minor pogrom

distracts from the fact that the brother’s glasses were frequently replaced as his sight failed. Amid such density of imagery and double meaning, it is easy to miss such oddities as

The light-bulb bobbing in carbon copies
And my double, his three-legged, two-faced brother.

In schoolboy slang, “three-legged” refers to having a penis. I can find no other meaning here and the oblique smuttiness of some of Mathews’ other poems seems to confirm this interpretation.

Eye-drops is no longer an elegy on the death of a brother, as was At the Walling Wall. Rather, the brother’s death is the occasion for a performance to which all Mathews’ linguistic skills are brought to bear. There is something heartless about the elan with which image follows dazzling image, but Mathews has decided, like John Donne, that no effect is too bizarre or shocking to be used in a poem.

Surgeon at Seventy-five is about his father. It begins strikingly:

He has fed a whole family by cutting off breasts

and uses breasts as the central image of the poem, generating references to “His children’s milk-money”, the Milky Way, Krishna’s milkmaids,

Check them for lumps and they’ll love you like mammals,
My glorious gigolo roommate would tell me...

      my daughter’s breasts grow up in a circling world.
They will round on her.

And so on. But suddenly there is a reference to “the pin-up year of Stalingrad” and one sees Mathews over-reaching. Stalingrad, as the battle costing the greatest loss of life in World War Two, was certainly memorable, but “pin-up” is chosen only to fit the recurrent image of pictures of women’s breasts.

Mathews indeed has a gift for riveting imagery. On a dying grandmother, with all the associations of birth in the last four words:

In an Oxford Dictionary of Famous Last Words
I would pencil in the phrase, ‘My waters are breaking’

On the words from which poems are made, which are also the first words in the book:

There is a green ruin where they gather in twos and threes
Like Pentecostalists in the Soviet Union

(and I see ‘green ruin” as a pun on green room in the theatrical sense). At the beginning of Handicap:

You are always the first for Holy Communion
Though you take it out of your mouth then to inspect it
Like a postage stamp from some old, abolished country -
Iraq, say, when it was British Petroleum.

There is an overt regard for religion that does not appear in Mathews’ earlier collections. According to the Small Hours is divided into sections titled Compline, Vigil and Lauds, and a large proportion of the poems include religious imagery and themes. This sits oddly, however, with Mathews’ fondness for references to basic bodily functions, a fondness more common among adolescents. In Capitals, a meditation on his five year old daughter writing capital As, he recalls

                         that amorous, stammering Aaah
My mother used as a code word for defecation.

In Total Immersion:

Meantime I am happy to be
A puddle at the zebra,
Too muddy to look up anyone’s underwear.

In Face to Face, a meditation on handkerchiefs leading to St Veronica’s napkin, a wide variety of fluids are mentioned including “Semen from a cock-up in the bed-and-breakfast”. Photo-opportunity is a religious satire, including:

Up there three bodies bend in the foetal position.
On the left the rape-and-murder man is shitting bricks,
Right of him sobs the paedophile who’s found Jesus.
And torn between shit and piss like a burst perineum
The Son of Man is utterly alone . . .

It is impossible to gain any sense of Mathews’ religious beliefs, It seems that his Catholicism is a given, part of his mental make-up, something he grew up with and will never leave behind, like an adolescent fascination with piss, shit, sperm, breasts and underwear. In this connection, one of the book’s most consistent and successful poems is Entries which deals with adolescent erotic reverie gently and obliquely. However, this is a reversion to an earlier style that Mathews has now eschewed.

There is nothing overtly Irish about the poems - no Irish place-names such as Longley and O’Donogue use to locate their work, no Irish words - but they could have arisen nowhere else. Perhaps it is the very collocation of Catholicism and the defiantly repeated references to impulses that were unmentionable outside the confessional that marks them out as Irish. Yet they are hugely different in tone and ambition from Longley and O’Donoghue. Mathews writes as a citizen of the modern world with a wide range of reference and immense linguistic skill. He is writing of and from the experience of being a married man with two daughters and a residual Catholic faith. In poems like Relics, Way Out, Advent and Thee, the clatter of word-play and imagery is more restrained and the poems gain strength from this.

However, there is a final problem of weight. In declaring that nothing is off-limits in his poems, Mathews presents everything to us as having equal weight: the Angel of Death, an old lady who looks like Pope John in a Fiat, his corneas and kidneys, the Book of Kells, the Czech writer Milan Kundera, his wife’s brother “(a shit”), parents allowing their children to shit on traffic islands. All this and much else appears in the 32 lines of Way Out, presented calmly, if a little breathlessly, without preference or comment.

Kundera has written illuminatingly about the condition of the deracinated intellectual. The Unbearable Lightness of Being describes the freedom and loss of a situation in which all experience has equal value, where it is equally ‘light’. This, I guess, is Mathews’ situation, and he is original in presenting Catholic belief as ‘light’, as a source of imagery no more significant than any other. It is a distinctly post-modernist stance: my-feelings-are-private; the-surface-is-all-you-get. In the context of the spiritual matters with which the poems repeatedly deal, Mathews comes over, in an image from The Night Shifts, as “the man who put the bins out under the supernova”.

Mathews needs to gain weight if his remarkable gifts are to achieve greatness rather than continue producing post-modernist displays. Perhaps his future direction should be back towards the Ireland which in his emotional life he, unlike Longley and O’Donoghue, has attempted resolutely but unsuccessfully to leave.