Posts Tagged Irish Poetry

For the next month or so, postings at MontanaWriter will be sparse by necessity, and I will be re-posting –with new content and edits– some older posts that were written and posted before readership here really began to grow. Soon, “and very soon,” there will be enough time again… for new directions and trajectories. But for now, patience is the order of the day.

The first  book of Seamus Heaney’s I ever purchased wasSweeney Astray at a used bookstore in Dinkytown, Minneapolis. That was in October 1986. Since then I have purchased and read many, many other books of his poetry and prose. I treasure each and every one.

By the time Heaney published Sweeny Astray in 1983, he had already written and published a number of volumes of poetry. On the day I purchased the book, a translation  of a medieval Irish work called Buile Suibhne, I was more familiar with the famous Irish  character of Mad Sweeney than I was of poet/translator Seamus Heaney. By the time I finished the book, I was a committed Heaney fan.

Those who are old enough to remember life before the internet, will remember that there was a time when finding information could be difficult, when was not as simple as just “googling” a name and sifting through hits.

In 1986, when I wanted to know more about this poet I had just “discovered,” and what other books he may have written, I had to go to the library at the University of Minnesota. I spent an entire weekend “researching” Heaney, taking notes in one of old  composition book I always used as a journal… and days combing the shelves of various used bookstores looking for his works. Almost 25 years later, out of habit I suppose, I still find myself looking for his works whenever I am at used bookstores, even though I think I have almost everything he has written.

Heaney was born in Northern Ireland. His best poetry centers around the places and faces of his childhood and youth. He is at his best when writing about those things. “Digging” is such a poem. It is also a wonderful poem about writing poetry.

Enjoy!

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pin rest; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pin rest; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

* * * * * * * * * *

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

This is one of Heaney’s first poems and in it we see so much that we have come to associate with him: sounds, themes, and that remarkable ear. There are few poets that are as delightful to read out-loud, or at least, few late 20th Century ones.

In Heaney we find the DNA of Yeats and Auden mixed with something earthier (Patrick Kavanaugh at his best). While Yeats and Auden have little of the the working class, the earthy, the common place in their language, perspective, or subject matter (something almost always a part of the best American poetry) , Heaney along with Ted Hughes, “rediscovered” the earth and earthliness and brought it back to British Isles poetry.

_____

Poet Paul Muldoon uses a number of unconventional devices to create some unconventional poetry: archaic language, unusual rhyme schemes, “mashing” together two completely different things to create something new.

In “Tell,” Muldoon is much more straight-forward than that… he does “mash” together William Tell and American Indians but his rhyme scheme is more a “slant” rhyme than an unusual one per se.

Muldoon, who was born in Northern Ireland, borrows heavily on childhood memories in many of his best poems. He does it in a much different way though than his fellow Northern Ireland poet, Seamus Heaney. In my mind, I have always thought of Muldoon as an Irish Theodore Roethke: darker, edgier. It may simply be that I read a lot of Muldoon and Roethke at the same time and so they have morphed together in my mind over the years.

Muldoon is admittedly not the most natural choice for a Sunday morning poet… and “Tell” is not the most Sunday morning of poems. And yet on another dreary-cold January morning… it seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

Tell

He opens the scullery door, and a sudden rush
of wind, as raw as raw,
brushes past him as he himself will brush
past the stacks of straw

that stood in earlier for Crow
or Comanche tepees hung with scalps
but tonight past muster, row upon row,
for the foothills of the Alps.

He opens the door of the peeling-shed
just as one of the apple-peelers
(one of almost a score
of red-cheeked men who pare

and core
the red-cheeked apples for a few spare
shillings) mutters something about “bloodshed”
and the “peelers.”

The red-cheeked men put down their knives
at one and the same
moment. All but his father, who somehow connives
to close one eye as if taking aim

or holding back a tear,
and shoots him a glance
he might take, as it whizzes past his ear,
for a Crow, or a Comanche, lance

hurled through the Tilley-lit
gloom of the peeling-shed,
when he hears what must be an apple split
above his head.

____

The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
~ Seamus Heaney

In “Death of a Naturalist” Seamus Heaney’s gifts as a poet are clearly on display: the clashing consonants, the onomatopoeia, the wonderful attention to detail, the evocative reminiscing. These are what make Heaney one of the greatest poets of our time.

I like reading Heaney in the cold of winter. Some of his best poems feature spring or summer memories. When you read a poem like “Death of a Naturalist” your own reminiscences of childhood mix and mingle with his. That is the nature of a great poem, it draw us in… and then draws out from us: emotion, memory, thoughts, wonder.

Enjoy!

Death of a Naturalist

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

____

Seamus Heaney

The first  book of Seamus Heaney’s I ever purchased was Sweeney Astray at a used bookstore in Dinkytown, Minneapolis. That was in October 1986. Since then I have purchased and read many, many other books of his poetry and prose. I treasure each and every one.

By the time Heaney published Sweeny Astray in 1983, he had already written and published a number of volumes of poetry. On the day I purchased the book, a translation  of a medieval Irish work called Buile Suibhne, I was more familiar with the famous Irish  character of Mad Sweeney than I was of poet/translator Seamus Heaney. By the time I finished the book, I was a committed Heaney fan.

Those who are old enough to remember life before the internet, will remember that there was a time when finding information could be difficult, it was not as simple as just googling a name and sifting through hits.

In 1986, when I wanted to know more about this poet I had just “discovered,” and what other books he may have written, I had to go to the library at the University of Minnesota. I spent an entire weekend “researching” Heaney, taking notes in an old  composition book I used as a journal… and days combing the shelves of various used bookstores looking for his works. Almost 25 years later, out of habit I suppose, I still find myself looking for his works when I am at used bookstores, even though I think I have almost everything he has written.

Heaney was born in Northern Ireland. His best poetry centers around the places and faces of his childhood and youth. He is at his best when writing about those things. “Digging” is such a poem. It is also a wonderful poem about writing poetry.

Enjoy!

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pin rest; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

_____

Patrick Kavanaugh

Irish poet Patrick Kavanaugh did not write many poems but what he did write was a great deal of very, very good ones… and a few great ones. He also wrote one of my favorite literary autobiographies, The Green Fool.

When I was in my mid-20s, I spent a few years reading primarily Irish literature. It began with the year and a half where I read almost nothing but W.B. Yeats, all his poetry and prose that I could get my hands on – including his entire collected poems cover to cover numerous times. Kavanaugh was the first poet I found when my “Yeats year” was done. For that reason he holds a special place in my memory and my bookcase.

For a number of years, Kavanaugh’ books were out of print. My old paperback version of his Collected Poems is falling apart, and the the pages so browned with age that my pencil-marked notes seem like I could simply blow them away. I am gratified to see that there is a Kindle version of Patrick Kavanaugh’s Collected Poems now available as well as a new paperback edition. You could get either here.

There are a number of poems I could pick to showcase Kavanaugh. “Peace” seems as good as any. In it we see the essence of Kavanaugh’s best poetry: rural Irish landscape and themes, musicality, ordinary language and things made beautiful and eternal.

Peace

And sometimes I am sorry when the grass
Is growing over the stones in quiet hollows
And the cocksfoot leans across the rutted cart-pass
That I am not the voice of country fellows
Who now are standing by some headland talking
Of turnips and potatoes or young corn
Of turf banks stripped for victory.
Here Peace is still hawking
His coloured combs and scarves and beads of horn.

Upon a headland by a whinny hedge
A hare sits looking down a leaf-lapped furrow
There’s an old plough upside-down on a weedy ridge
And someone is shouldering home a saddle-harrow.
Out of that childhood country what fools climb
To fight with tyrants Love and Life and Time?

_____

Sistine Chapel

Yeats is the one great poet who wrote better at the end of his life than he did at the beginning. In 1923, at the age of 58, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He then went on to write the best poetry of his career, and the best poetry of the 20th Century, including this poem, “Long-Legged Fly.”

Here Caesar, Helen of Troy, and Michelangelo are presented as the embodiments of human genius, beauty, and art – the three things Yeats most admired. What is ultimately at stake for civilization if it ignores art, beauty, and genius is for Yeats’ quite clear. It should also be for us.

Admittedly Yeats can be difficult. But this is not one of his difficult poems. Read it through a few times. Let the images and the language sink in and you will find yourself repeating them to yourself, like the lyrics of a favorite song, like a “a tinker shuffle picked up on the street.”

Enjoy!

Long-Legged Fly

That civilization may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post;
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand under his head.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.

That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.

That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope’s chapel,
Keep those children out.
There on that scaffolding reclines
Michael Angelo.
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.

_____