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Chris Agee

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The Ivy Room

in memoriam Hubert Butler

The inches and ha-ha. Somewhere out of view
The last shimmy of the canal essing
Towards Bennettsbridge. Inside the Bernouilli Effect
Took little draught-sips out of the open sash

Like eddies at the edge of the Nore. It was all
Bareness and fresh paint and Shaker geometries
Of light on the vanished knots and dark varnish of pineboards
Burnished with use. Where Butler wrote, the shelves

Emptied of  The Bell but carrying, like this,
The ghost-ivy of lives. All at once I was back
To the Sufi house near Stolac: the sheer karst
Rising a thousand metres, the blue calligraphy of swallows,

Gushing subterranean river a Balkan jade. Brilliant fountain
Light of St John of the Cross flowing miles
Out of its mountain dark to the small wooden window
In a bare white prayer room furnished with kelims

And spared the internal cleansing. A single vocable
In green Arabic on the limewash of the walled river garden
Shaded by pomegranates. In the sash's distance
The round tower of Tullaherin and, invisible under Mt Leinster,

The hamlet of Graiguenamanagh. Now forsythia and Scullogue
Were blossoming in Kosova, a spring bonfire was a Shiva raging
In the walled garden. Small still point of the Ivy Room
In a lea of history. A sickle on whitewash. Zen in Kilkenny.

 

Stolac: a town in Herzegovina, the scene of much ethnic-cleansing

Scullogue: a notorious massacre during the Rising of 1798.

Hubert Butler (1900-1991) is modern Ireland's most distinguished essayist.  He lived in Zagreb for three years in the mid-thirties and wrote frequently  about Yugoslavia. Four volumes of his essays were published in Ireland in the 1980s and early 1990s and a selected British edition, The Sub-Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue was published by Penguin in 1992.

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