Some Poems by Kate Dempsey -2012

Verbatim

” i.m Barbara Ennis Price
 
It’s all the fault of the British, she said.
The cursing came in with the troopers,
the other ranks and their wives as bad.
Before that, we Irish never swore.
No curse would pass our tender lips,
no drop of whiskey,
no beatings, no casual cruelty.
Sure, weren’t we a gentle race
until the squaddies boated in?
We were milk and honey,
the soft heads of babes, the pigs at Christmas,
root vegetables and stone walls.
What did we have to swear about
until the British came?”
 
© Kate Dempsey (used with permission of the author-first published in Spot)

I have no technical knowledge of poetry.   Up until recently I had read no post Yeats Irish poetry.  The poets whose work I have read most extensively and whose power has sustained my interest are besides Yeats, Whitman and Hart Crane.  I am now coming to feel, after reading five collections of 21th century Irish poetry, that the most intense deeply felt Irish work may now be found among its poets.  I have begun to read the work of Seamus Heaney, Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague, Michael Longley and others.  I am working my way slowly through the 1000 page anthology Contemporary Irish Poetry edited by Wade Davis.  

I find posting on collections of poetry very challenging, more so than on novels or short stories.  I know the authors have placed their souls in their work and I try to give them the proper respect.  

I am trying to find an approach to new collections.  I do not see myself as reviewing them (and I hate to be called a "reviewer") so I wondered how I should talk about them, how do I see what I am doing?  I am not reading the collections only as discrete works of art, I am placing them in my mind as part of the Irish literary tradition.  I have my own preoccupations of course, just like the poets do.  Irish poets are very self-consciously Irish, they know they are in the shadows of Giants.   Sometimes I think why should I read anyone but the greatest of poets.     I sense Irish poets love their wounds, they have no intentions of letting them heal.  I also think more than in other cultures, Irish poets write for each other.  Irish poets are fixed on death, many poems are about seeking escape from loss and pain.

I am not technically trained in the mechanics of poetry, I am not an academic or a scholar.  I just read stuff and post about it.  I am not aligned with any particular school or group of Irish writers.  

Posting on short stories is harder, for me, than novels, and posting on a collection of poems even harder.  In speaking of short story collections I have used a guiding metaphor of visiting a forest.  I think in posting on a poetry collection I will see myself as exploring a new to me city.  In some cities I will be without guide in a place where I share no common language  with the inhabitants.  In some I will scream out "tourist", in some I will know I am not really welcome.  In some I will fit in very well and feel right at home.   In the best collections I will see things I never saw before, my range of experience will be strongly stretched, in some I will realize I never fully saw what was in my own town.  One of the best impacts of poetry is to increase our perceptivity.  One of the highest goods of deep reading of quality literature is that it allows and sometimes forces us to see the humanity in other people.  I know that Euro Disney is not Nirvana.  I know that the luxury and comfort of the people in the rich part of the city are paid for in tenements and sweat shops.  I know when politicians say all must share austerity they mean they will sell their smaller yacht while  old people who cannot afford their medicine die.   I know there  are monsters lurking in the city, I know that Pol Pat hated cities and the people in them.  I know the imperial foreign policy of England caused massive famines  not just Ireland but in India and Africa.  I know ideologies are dangerous.  I need poets to help me move beyond reading facts to feeling, to seeing the skull mask behind the smiles.  I need them to move beyond a miasma of bitterness and contempt for humanity,  I need them to see the naked face of evil.  A good poet should sometimes see this in the mirror and so should a good reader.  There is a beauty in evil, Thanatos is erotic.   

Dempsey's poems, none in the collection are more than two pages, are miniature gems of acute observation.  Several focus on issues of domestic life.  I have begun to make use of word counts in collections to discern writers deeper concerns.  In the poems of Dempsey, to give one to me interesting example, "potato" appears in about one third of the poems.  I think those without at least a starter knowledge of Irish culture will not see the deep import of the potato.  It is not just a food, I try to imagine Filipino households without rice and I see a people-even if there were an abundance of other foods-at a loss.  It is a symbol of well being.  Dempsey's works often focus on relationship, domestic life.  She also writes about events in a irish history, the inescapable tragic history of Ireland and there is a very intersting reflective work on loving a poet.  I will try to quote enough from her work to give you a feel for it. 

As I have done with the other collections of contemporary poetry I have posted on, I will make some observations on a number of her poems.  I do this to possibly help potential readers get a sense of her work, to increase my understanding and to plant them deeper in my memory. 

"While it Lasts"

After reading the stunning poem of domestic life, "While it Lasts", which opens the collection I was amazed almost stunned by what it seems to say about the role of wife and mother.  It is set in Ireland but it is a universal work.  It has a darkness, it is almost surrealistic.  One day a mother's hand just fall off as she is working in the kitchen.  She tells her husband no need to make a fuss, it is just one of those things that happen.  The husband is glad to see how nicely her bloody stumps heal.  The woman has completely submerged her identity in her role as cook and care giver.  She is not a real person in the eyes of anyone.  It is written in a disturbing kind of deadened style that mirrors the subject matter.  I found myself thinking about my wife and my late mother as I read this.  

"Mash"

"I judged the mashed potato contest giving marks for presentation, flavor, consistency

The winner, a dimpled woman of Amish appearance.

What's your secret?  I asked before I woke

It's all about love, she said, all about love."

"Mash" is about a dream.   That the teller dreams of mashed  potatoes shows the deep importance of the potato.  A well cooked abundance of potatoes symbolizes domestic love and being good at cooking them means a woman is a fine mother and wife.  Dempsey writes very movingly about the small details of the work behind being a mother.  The poems are partially about submersion.  Dempsey is not judging, just showing life.  

"Slow Poison, 1944"

"Carrots and apples, potatoes and beans,

what and oatcakes, turnips and beets,

There were always people knocking".

"Slow Poison, 1944" seems set somewhere in Europe in the darkest days of WWII.  It is the story of a family tring to survive on their farm.  The father was taken to work in a factory.  The mother slowly fades away.  The story beautifully told could be of a family five thousand years ago or one from today's back pages news.  

"Drunk the Poet" 

Every one knows stories about the troubled lives of poets, Crane, Rimbaud, Rilke, Dlyan Thomas and a thousand others.  Raving at a world that does not appreciate their genius, hiding from themselves in drugs or drink, half making a living somehow or other.  "Drunk the Poet" tells brilliantly the story of the life of the woman in the life of such a poet.  She feels on one side an obligation to help him realize his genius but she cannot help but wonder if she is not being fooled by the poet and herself.  She thinks, what if he is not that great?  A wonderful work any ranting poet should ponder.  

"Verbatim",   (quoted at the start of this post) spoken in the persona of Barbara Ennis Price, is a deeply felt poem fully in the tradition of Irish literature as a post colonial cultural area. Of course we knew the Bristish first came in the middle 1500s or so but they had numerous invasions.  Of course we know this is looking back on an idyllic period that probably exists only in legend.  It is the cry if any colonized people.  

A link to my Q and A with Kate Dempsey

http://browse.feedreader.com/c/The_Reading_Life/444881915

I greatly enjoyed and was deeply moved by these very closely observed poems.  They have much to tell us about relationships, domestic life, poetry and above all they are a great pleasure to read.  I recommend with out reservations to all lovers of fine poetry. 

Kate Dempsey

Biography

Kate Dempsey writes fiction and poetry and lives in Ireland. She has been collecting jobs for her author biography since she could read. She has worked as a coffee grinder, a terrible waitress in Woolworths, a Harrods shop assistant, a computer programmer, a technical writer, a writer in schools and a mother. She's lived in England, Scotland, The Netherlands, South West USA and now in Ireland.
These diverse jobs and homes are reflected in her witty, observational writing, which is widely published in Ireland and the UK. Her short stories have been broadcast on RTE Radio and published in the Poolbeg Anthology 'Do The Write Thing.' She was shortlisted for the Hennessey New Irish Writing award three times and her poetry in many magazines and anthologies. She runs the Poetry Divas Collective, a glittering group of women who blur the wobbly boundaries between page and stage at cool events all over Ireland.
Her first novel, The Story of Plan B, was shortlisted for the London Book Fair LitIdol.

Where to find Kate Dempsey online

Website: http://emergingwriter.blogspot.com
Twitter: PoetryDivas

Facebook: Facebook profile
Blog: http://emergingwriter.blogspot.com

 

  

Richard Murphy - "Sailing to an Island" and Other Poems

Richard Murphy

(Ireland, 1927)   
 

 
  

Richard Murphy was born eighty years ago in the West of Ireland into a Protestant Ascendancy family. He spent much of his early childhood in Ceylon where his father worked in the British colonial service. He was educated at a variety of mostly British private schools and at Oxford where he was tutored by CS Lewis. He later studied at the Sorbonne and taught. In the early Fifties he returned to the West of Ireland where he settled in the erstwhile fishing village of Cleggan. 

Murphy bought a couple of boats and started a modest fishing business because he wanted to write about the sea in a realistic way. He was of the opinion that much writing then about the sea, particularly in poetry, was too metaphorical and the best way for him would be to experience the sea at first hand before writing about it. Cleggan was a village where fishing had been abandoned after a famous sailing disaster. Taking the first-hand accounts of survivors he wove the material into a long tour de force poem which closed his first collection Sailing to an Island, published in the early Sixties by Faber & Faber, at a time when other recent acquisitions to the publisher’s list included Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn. 

I am slowly working my way through the magnificent anthology  edited by Wes Davis, An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry.   I love this book but I do have, so far, two issues with it.   Davis has included a lot of selections from longer poems, I can't stand selections from a full work and think most people will see it as a waste of print space.   Also I would really like to see after every poem, the dead of publication.  If you buy an anthology of poetry, you should not have to Google the poems to see when they were written.  

In my Q and A sessions with Irish writers (75 so far) i asked many authors how they felt the proximity to the sea has impacted Irish literature and the Irish psyche.   The answers ranged from very profoundly, to somewhat, to "I don't know".

Richard Murphy is a poet of the Irish Sea, of Galway Bay.   In a way his poems seem to me about a nostalgia for a fading way of life.   The independent fisherman working in his small boat is being replaced in the early 1960s by factory ships, large boats which require a several man crew and big money support.  

"Sailing to an Island" (1962) is his most famous poem.   It is a very beautiful person account of a man a on his small boat sailing out to an an island of the west coast of Ireland.  The structure of the poem lets us feel the movement of the boat in the water.  This is a very detailed observant poem.  Here is a wonderful fragment

"Encased in a mirage, steam on the water, 

Loosely we coast where hideous rocks jag, 
An acropolis of cormorants, an extinct 
Volcano where spiders spin, a purgatory 
Guarded by hags and bristled with breakers. 

The breeze as we plunge slowly stiffens: 
There are hills of sea between us and land, 
Between our hopes and the island harbour. 
A child vomits. The boat veers and bucks. 
There is no refuge on the gannet’s cliff. 
We are far, far out: the hull is rotten, 
The spars are splitting, the rigging is frayed, 
And our helmsman laughs uncautiously. " 

(If you do a Google search, you can read this online)

"The Last Galway Hooker" is about a kind of boat that people employed in Galway Bay for centuries.   (As I Google searched "Galway Hooker" I imagined myself explaining to my wife what I was looking for).  It is a love song to a boat and a fading way of life. As in the prior poem, you can feel the rhythms of Galway Bay in the form and structure of the poem.   You can feel the love for the sea in this work. 

NEWGRANGE

Brought to a brumal standstill, here I lie 
Obliquely floored, mouth curbed by stones that speak 
In pick-dressed spirals, egghead sucked bone dry, 
Waiting for dawn inside my skull to streak. 

Sungod and riverbride died in my bed 
To live as bead and elkshorn under earth. 
One cairn eye stayed open to feed the dead 
A ray of wintry hope, fixed on rebirth. 

Up a dark passage, brightening from far back, 
A sunbeam seeks my carved leakproof abode. 
As pollen dust ignites my pebble stack 
The tomb I’ve made becomes a vivid road. 

Once a year it may strike me, a pure gift 
Making light work, a mound of greywacke lift.

Mel u

    

Chopping Wood with T. S. Eliot by John Walsh (2010, Salmon Poetry)

It takes a good bit of nerve to include a reference to T. S. Eliot in the title to a collection of one's poems.  John Walsh in the sixty poems in Chopping Wood with T. S. Eliot has shown himself fully up to the challenge.  In reading these poems I have an advantage that is also kind of disadvantage as it pre-inclines me to certain understandings of these poems.  In the company of Max u and Lisa Frank, I had the pleasure of having dinner at the home of John Walsh.   It is on a ruggedly beautiful coastal setting a few kilometers outside of Galway.   I cannot help but see a number of these sparsely beautiful highly compressed poems as set in the environs of John's property.  In the title poem, I can or rather of necessity do visualize the poet chopping wood on his land to keep his house warm in the Irish nights.  I have previously posted on his excellent set in mostly Ireland collection of short stories, Border Lines, and in so doing I learned he had spent a number of years living and working in Germany. 

 In a way these poems are part of a very Irish tradition.  A young man leaves Ireland seeking adventure and economic gain and to find himself, only to really truly not find himself until he returns home to Ireland. Some of the poems are about his father, you can see the powerful bond but I sense undercurrents of dissonance.   The poems are about this.  They are also about the day to day material and events that make up our lives. There are poems about problems with your broadband service, a perhaps too talkative but I think very right hairdresser who tells him to be sure and keep his current girl friend.  There are poems relating to the political troubles that not to long ago beset Ireland, about bomb threats in the night, children cut in half by a bomb from a drone, and the ease of contract killing.  Some of the most intriguing poems approximate the form of prose.   They are about making a home, about loving a very good woman, about the changes of the season on his property, about the love of Galway bay knowing on nature's whim it can destroy you.   In a way the poems are to me about the fragility of life, about how easy we can hurt those we love, and it is also about not being intimidated by T. S. Eliot.  

In posting on collections of poetry, something  I find difficult to do in a way I am close to happy with, I don't see myself as reviewing them.  (I hate to be called a reviewer.). I just read them, in this case I read the collection four times, and post stuff (this being a literary method I learned from deconstructionists at the Sorbonne) on them.   I am not technically knowledgeable on the mechanics of poetry.  I don't do structural analysis of the poems I read and I think this is not necessary.  I am a reader of poetry, a consumer, I try to absorb what I read, not tear it apart.  

I will talk about a number of the poems to increase my understanding, place them more firmly in my memory, and help interested parties get a feel for the collection.   My bottom line is I highly recommend this collection to all who love poetry.  These are the mature poems of a very wise man.

"Chopping Wood with T. S. Eliot", the title poem is very interesting.  The speaker in the poem, I know John has recited the poems of Eliot at readings in Galway, is outside chopping wood for the house, He cannot help but struggle to find a way to write poetry have read deeply in Eliot.  I love these lines: 

"You can't let guys like him walk all over you.

damn it!  The language is as much my birthright as his."

As I read this just now again I thought what are the post colonial ways we could see this- an Irish poet is intimidated to write in a language imposed on him by the English by an American writer who wished he was English.  This thought of mine might be very off the wall.  

"Del Pinto" is a fascinating clearly deeply felt look at how the poet feels about his father.  It is an amazing and haunting look at the psyche of his father and at his never realized darker side.  Del Pinto was a friend from his father's youth.  The father sometimes spoke of him but the poet never saw him.  These lines tell it all "Maybe he was my father's Kerouac, the alter ego of a man who never touched a drink, who put his wife and family before everything.."  The father always prayed for Del Pinto, a wanderer who drank the high balls his father never did.  This is also a poem for an older man wondering what his life would have been like had he never married, had children.  He does not want that for himself but he is glad for the existence of those who did not so he can at least dream when he feels his chains a bit to grindingly on a bad day.

 "Reality Check", a near prose work, for sure made me think of the setting of the poem..  Tsunami's have been in the news in the last few years.  They seem more a pacific threat than a northern Atlantic, I know our family propery in the northern Philippines is a sitting duck for one so I can relate to the poet's reflections on the deadly devastation an Irish tsunami would have on John's property.  He imagines the few seconds of TV news times that  would be devoted to the event.

"Incriminating Evidence", a work structured as prose is about one of the great topics of poets ever since Plato's Republic made them the legislators and Shelly tried to impose the idea on the Poets of the world. Why does poetry matter to society?  Are poets who claim they are out to change society strutting fools writing only for each other or for their own Lady Gregory.  The opening lines of this poem are steering.  "Poetry doesn't cut it in the streets.  Fear has been injected into the veins of a people who will never read a poem".  Poetry takes in scenes, but "poetry can not think of anything to say".  This is part of the poet's eternal struggle with himself to ask the question why bother?  Maybe the answer is in the asking.  

""One of Us" is a finely observed poem of a childhood memory of Aunt Florie, who had a tongue that "could cut you to pieces".  It is also a wonderful short story expressing the much spoken of emotional reticence of the Irish that is part of the theme of short story writers such as James Joyce and John McGahern.   Florie married an Englishman and became more English sounding than he was.  You need to read this poem yourself but the close is devastatingly powerful. 

The poems in this collection are very much part of a unified whole, the last poem refers back to the first one.  These are real works about a very real person.  The last poem, presented as what most would call prose, sort of ironically sums up the collection.  He begins by talkigabout trees chopping wood and such, then he moves back to his younger days, talks about his relationships, the turmoil in his life, at the close he thinks of small things and he turns back to what it means to him to be a poet.

I greatly enjoyed this collection, I read it every other day for eight days.  I will read it again I know.  I will quote a bit from the web page of Salmon Poetry to give you an additional overview of Chopping Wood With T. S. Eliot.  

About this Book (from publisher's web page) John Walsh's quizzical observer, in 'pre-Troubles' Derry, backpacking in Bavaria, or coming 'home' to post-Wall Berlin - whether musing on a lake-locked mansion, fulminating at the news' excesses or recalling vanished boyhood heroes - finds much virtue in small things, value in the overlooked, validation in nature's persistence. Engaged, like the Eliot of his title, in salvaging the poetic and the good from society's wastelands, his wry gaze and gentle tone conjure an art, and a world, that are ethically rooted, authentic, and ultimately heartening.  Anne-Marie Fyfe John Walsh's work is brave, vibrant and immensely accessible. At its best, the writing achieves a rare transparency. There are powerful poems here where we, seamlessly, get to see the world through his eyes and are greatly enriched by the experience.   Michael Gorman

Author Biography John Walsh was born in Derry in 1950. After sixteen years teaching English in Germany, in 1989 he returned to live in Connemara. His first collection Johnny tell Them was published by Guildhall Press (Derry) in October 2006. In 2007 he received a Publication Award from Galway County Council to publish his second collection Love's Enterprise Zone (Doire Press, Connemara). His poems have been published in Ireland, the UK and Austria and he has read and performed his poems at events in Ireland, the UK, Germany and Sweden. He is organizer and MC of the successful performance poetry event North Beach Poetry Nights in the Crane Bar, Galway. He has also been known to show up with his guitar and deliver one or two of his own songs. Chopping Wood with T.S. Eliot is a collection of sixty new poems to celebrate his reaching the mature age of sixty. www.johnwalshpoet.com

I completely endorse this collection and am thankful I had the opportunity to read it.  

Mel u

Seven Days of Ashes. Hymns to the Holocaust by Alan Patrick Traynor(2013)

Plum Tree Publisher's Web Page

Seven Days of Ashes:  Hymns to the Holocaust by Alan Patrick Traynor (Dublin) is the forth collection of twenty-first century Irish poetry on which I have posted.   I have no technical knowledge of poetry. Up until very recently I had read no post Yeats Irish Poetry.  I intend now to post on new Irish poetry on a regular basis.  I am also working my way through Wad Davis's magnificent collection, An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry.  

I am trying to find an approach to new collections.  I do not see myself as reviewing them (and I hate to be called a "reviewer") so I wondered how I should talk about them, how do I see what I am doing?  I am not reading the collections only as discrete works of art, I am placing them in my mind as part of the Irish literary tradition.  I have my own preoccupations of course, just like the poets do.  Irish poets are very self-consciously Irish, they know they are in the shadows of Giants.  The only poets I have read extensively are Whitman, Crane, and Yeats.   Sometimes I think why should I read anyone but the greatest of poets.  In the works of writers such as Alan Patrick Traynor I am finding an answer.   I sense Irish poets love their wounds, they have no intentions of letting them heal.  I also think more than in other cultures, Irish poets write for each other.  Irish poets are fixed on death, many poems are about seeking escape from loss and pain.

I am not technically trained in the mechanics of poetry, I am not an academic or a scholar.  I just read stuff and post about it.  I am not aligned with any particular school or group of Irish writers.  

Posting on short stories is harder, for me, than novels, and posting on a collection of poems even harder.  In speaking of short story collections I have used a guiding metaphor of visiting a forest.  I think in posting on a poetry collection I will see myself as exploring a new to me city.  In some cities I will be without guide in a place where I share no common language  with the inhabitants.  In some I will scream out "tourist", in some I will know I am not really welcome.  In some I will fit in very well and feel right at home.   In the best collections I will see things I never saw before, my range of experience will be strongly stretched, in some I will realize I never fully saw what was in my own town.  One of the best impacts of poetry is to increase our perceptivity.  One of the highest goods of deep reading of quality literature is that it allows and sometimes forces us to see the humanity in other people.  I know that Euro Disney is not Nirvana.  I know that the luxury and comfort of the people in the rich part of the city are paid for in tenements and sweat shops.  I know when politicians say all must share austerity they mean they will sell their smaller yacht while  old people who cannot afford their medicine die.   I know there  are monsters lurking in the city, I know that Pol Pat hated cities and the people in them.  I know the imperial foreign policy of England caused massive famines  not just Ireland but in India and Africa.  I know ideologies are dangerous.  I need poets to help me move beyond reading facts to feeling, to seeing the skull mask behind the smiles.  I need them to move beyond a miasma of bitterness and contempt for humanity,  I need them to see the naked face of evil.  A good poet should sometimes see this in the mirror and so should a good reader.  There is a beauty in evil, Thanatos is erotic.   

I will keep saying this until I see I am wrong.  There is a deep fascination with death in the Irish psyche. All of the the poetry collections I have so far read, manifest this.   Traynor's collection is a hymn to the victims of the Holocaust that costs the lives of around six million Jews and one half a million Gypsies. He powerfully mourns lost lives.  These poems scream, they transcend trivial rationality. They are not hand ringing TV documentaries. They force us to see the killer and the victim in ourselves.  They are about huge cultural losses, poems never written, diseases never cured, paintings never realized.  Behind a smiling cleric   you can see a Mayan priest.  The holocaust is not over.  Just open your eyes, Traynor will help you do that.   

There are seven poems in this very intense collection.  All focus on the Holocaust.   I read each poem several times and in different places.   I will just talk about some of them to help me explore his collection, increase my understanding of his poems through writing about them and to give interested parties a bit of a feel for his works.  

"Seven Days of Ashes" is the title work in the collection.   It is told from inside the ovens, from the top of a Central American pyramid six hundred years ago, from a Cambodian work camp, from a luxury resort for leaders of the European Union pondering austerity measures and scanning pics of 1000 Euro an hour hookers on their mobiles, maybe the Irish WW Two era leaders who looked up Hitler as a friend should leave the room while this is read, maybe C. K. Chesterton will explain "I just liked the uniforms".   Day 1 is murder, it was just an order.  This makes me think why do murderous ideologues love order, not just orders.  I want you to read these lines:

"I am the skeleton mother, 

A voice that reads the grave,

The borrowed sharpened flint,

We are the beautiful, the horrific beauty 

And we are dead".

This poem is already so compressed it is near possible and it would be a travesty to paraphrase it.  There is no answers for the questions this poem brings forth.

"Under every soul that slept wept the

Angel of Warsaw"

"Wept the Angel of Warsaw" is a searing eulogy for Irena  Sendler, a Polish nurse who helped 2500 people escape the massacre of the citizens of the Warsaw Ghetto.  It begins with an account of her torture by the Germans.  From this it expands to an umbrella of compassion in a world of mindless brutality. It also brings as part of its meaning the life of one of the rescued children, Elżbieta Ficowska  who lived a long life in America. 

"The Splintering Wind" is the final poem in the collection. I think it may be the the most powerful.  

"They made barbed wire out of children

  Mother stood and watched Father held the pliers  

 A choir of goosebumps rained down humming   

Even Mozart rose up from the grave Like a blameless train   

Oh pull their hands out from not a grave 

From not a grave is Heaven   The bleeding leaves of God Held their snowing heads so white   

But remember this and never forget it! 

  A pen is nothing but a withering tree In the hands of an oven

   Dachau"

I really do not want to "Explain" this poem, from which the above is but a fragment.  I do like to think Mozart wept.

These are powerful  poems, meant to say the truth, or maybe to transcend it.   I feel deep pain, mourning and compassion in these works.  I feel hatred.   Somehow there is joy here also.

Biography:

Alan Patrick Traynor is a Poet from Dublin Ireland.  He is the author of SEVEN DAYS OF ASHES, a poetry book written on the spirit of the Holocaust and published by Plum Tree Books.  

It has been said that his poetry is the mystical galvanic paint that sets the fields of Provence on fire.  It shocks the eyes and the soul at once!

Alan has been featured in Literary Journals worldwide, and is greatly respected amongst his peers.  "Edit not my soul” and "Edit not blood" are two of his own phrases that describe him best.

You can learn more about his work on the web page of his publisher, Plum Tree.

I look forward to reading more of his work.

I anticipate doing a q and a with Traynor so look for that soon.

Mel u

The Reading Life

Patrick Kavanagh "The Great Hunger" and other poems. From An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry edited by Wes Davis

"Irish poets open your eyes" from a poem of the same name 

"I don't care what Chicago thinks;  I am blind

To college lectures and the breed of fakes". From "Yeats"

Patrick Kavanagh (1904 to 1967) is an iconic figure of Irish poetry.   His "The Great Hunger" is one of highest regarded modern Irish poems.  There is a very high prestige annual prize in his name for the best first collection by an Irish poet.  I read eight of his poems, all those included in An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry edited by Wes Davis.  This is a long, near 1000 pages with fifty authors included, book.  I read numerous Amazon reviews and many complained because their favorite writer was left out.  As I read this I thought only a ten thousand page anthology would satisfy these complainers.  To me this is a beautiful book that I expect will be the standard text for a long time.  The biggest complaint is that it includes no Yeats.  I think this is a good practical decision.  I think most buyers of this book will already have Yeats collections and Yeats is in the public domain and can be downloaded for free.  Almost all the rest of the works are under copyright.  There are interesting introductions to each of the writers. I am reading my way through this book and will be posting on some of the poets.  

"The Great Hunger" (1941, 21 pages) was written in only three weeks.   I have read it several times over the last two months.  I find it a deeply moving very complicated work of art.   A lot of Irish literature and history is about the seeming emotional poverty of the lives of ordinary Irishman.  Much of the poem focuses on the feelings of a man who lives as a bachelor with his mother on her farm until she dies at ninety one when he was sixty-five.   He was very devoted to his mother, who never saw him as more than a boy, and too the farm, now his.  Sometimes he dreamed of a wife and he used to have passions but they have long since nearly passed. He is deeply rooted to his land.  It is also a religious meditation.  I found deep conflict in this and I know scholars have written about the theology behind this poem.  I found this one of the post beautiful poems I have ever read.  (If you Google search it you can read it online.). 

Poets from Ireland are Irish poets and this is not a tautology.  By this I mean that Irish poets do seem deeply concerned with what it means to be an Irish poet.  They don't write in Isolation. There are 1000s of Irish poets and I think to some extent they are writing for each other.  I will just talk briefly about two of Kavanagh's short poems that dealing directly with this.  

"Irish Poets Open Your Eyes" speaks directly to other Irish poets. In part he is saying "be ordinary,

Be saving up to marry".  I do not really have a paraphrase for these lines but I love them:

"Learn response on Boredom's bed,

Deep anonymous, unread,

And the god of Literature,

Will touch a moment to endure".

Kavanagh, as I naively perhaps see it, is in partially revolt against Yeats but he knows he cannot escape his shadow.  In a way he seems to be faulting Yeats for not being ordinary as he means it.

"Yeats" is a near direct attack on the master.  He says of him "Ah, cautious man whom no sin depraves".   Here are the last four lines of the poem:

"yes, Yeats, it was damn easy for you, protected 

By the middle classes and the Big Houses,

To talk about the sixty-year old public protected

man sheltered by the dim Victorian Muses".

OK of course one can see jealousy and envy in this from  a man who struggled at times just to live but it is much more and deeper than that.

From The Poetry Foundation:

Patrick Kavanagh was an Irish poet who also wrote fiction, autobiography, and numerous articles for Irish periodicals. Many critics and Irish literary figures have called him the nation's best poet since William Butler Yeats, and one of his long poems, "The Great Hunger," is widely regarded as a work of major importance. Even Kavanagh's admirers, however, find his writing difficult to characterize. "There is a sense in which Kavanagh may be said to defy criticism," Anthony Cronin wrote inHeritage Now. "You can look in vain in his poems for elaborate metaphors, correspondences, symbols and symbolic extensions of meaning . . . neither is there in his poems really anything that turns out to be a coherent life-view in the philosophical sense." As biographer John Nemo observed: "Kavanagh's point of view evolved primarily from his response to life, which was emotional rather than intellectual. . . . In place of the logic that directs the creative vision of poets like T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats, Kavanagh's creative faculties rely on inspiration and intuition. Artistically, he reacts rather than acts. Unlike many modern poets, his poems are not assembled piecemeal like contemporary sculptures but are delivered whole from the creative womb." Louise Bogan said in New Yorker that the poet had "an astonishing talent" that "kept on renewing itself not so much by a process of orderly growth as by a continual breaching of boundaries." 

I think the next Irish poet from this anthology on whom I post will be John Hewitt.  I need help to begin to understand Irish poetry.  If I am wrong, please tell me.  

Mel u

In the Library of Lost Objects by Noel Duffy (2012, 79 pages, 40 poems)

"Where does the pain begin?  If there was an archeology of self, a stripping back strata by strata until you could find the root of your sorrow; but there is only the flawed cinema of memory.."

I have no technical knowledge of poetry.  Up until very recently I had read no post Yeats Irish poetry.  My poets are Yeats, Crane, and Whitman.  I am now beginning to think the most intense of contemporary Irish literature may be in the works of the five thousand or so active Irish poets.  I have said I find posting on collections of short stories significantly more of a challenge, in most cases, than posting on a novel.  A collection of twelve short stories is normally condensed into two or three metaphor laden sentences by most reviewers and they are all seen as expressing an underlying meaning.  In the case of a collection of poems, especially one assembled from works published separately without perhaps initially a thought of a collection, the challenge is much greater, for me anyway.  In the Library of Lost Objects by Noel Duffy is a collection of forty stand alone works before it is a discrete object.  The challenge in posting on it is to look at the individual poems while seeking unifying themes and preoccupations. 

I like to read the works of poets whose thought processes can expand the range of my consciousness, who can help me understand myself through their words,  Deep poetry seems to arise from a sense of the paradoxes built into the human condition.   I like to read works that compress a large amount of meaning in a sparse space.  I like to think that an Irish poet should understand why Joyce read Dante and relished the cheapest brothels in Night-town.  I enjoy seeing sheer verbal cleverness.  I like to sense multifarious  high intelligence and an ability to see the mote in one's own eye.  I am accepting of darkness and pain as sometimes all we can see.  When I walk the streets of a new city, I look at the monuments, the cathedrals, look in the window of fancy shops but I also converse with alley cats, look in the gutters and garbage dumps for rats as a saner person might look for swans.  I know Ireland is a place of secrets and I want to penetrate beyond the Leprechaun trail.  In a previous collection of poetry i read there were references to women giving blow jobs in dark alleys for heroin.  The decent refined sensible part of me thinks, "how terrible", but there is also the urge to ask where?  If a writer gets indignant with me and says "I have no idea" I will probably move on to one of the other five thousand Irish poets.  I  see a deep love in Irish writers of their heritage.  It is not easy to live in the shadows of the giants of Mount Parnassus. 

A lot of the short stories, novels and the previous two collections of  Twenty First century Irish poetry I posted on focused on the "dark streets of Dublin" and are in many ways poems and stories of rage at injustice, partially fueled by the fall of the Irish economy.  I am glad to see Noel Duffy has risen above these preoccupations.  Most of the other Irish works I have read can be seen as working out the consequences of hundreds of years of colonial rule.  Duffy has also transcended this.  He does have significant elements of continuity with my reading of Irish literature.  Following the lead of Declan Kiberd who takes his clues from Edward Said I did see a preoccupation with the missing Irish father in his poems.  He is also very Dublin based, but not obsessively so to the point where outsiders cannot understand his references without a Google search.  He is a man of a city.  It is Dublin but it could be Paris, Rome, or New York City.  He has moved beyond the fetishing of Irish history.   I see a literary application of Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty, an understanding of the meaning of Salvador Dali's fluidity of memory, I see someone who is used to not being understood, who knows more than he can explain, who withdraws when he senses he is not understood. He is used to that.  There are preoccupations in his poems with bees, other insects, death scenes, partings, decaying cultures, old books and childhood memories.   I feel deep aloneness.  Deep sadness but I do not feel the anger and bitterness of many Irish writers.  I see someone who seeks refuge in absurdity, in beehives (I will talk this more latter), in old books,in people who can talk through the night.  I feel a deep treasuring of the poetic tradition of Ireland.  There are open wounds in these poems,wounds much loved.  I feel the poet cherishes his pain as proof he is still alive.  

I read all of the poems in this collection five times, the ones I will talk about individually more.   The longest one is three pages.  Of course I bring my own preoccupations to the poems.  Obviously if i read through The  Library of Lost Objects Five times I a greatly enjoyed it, respected the power and felt it over paid back my time.   I will talk briefly about some of the poems, partially to help me clarify my understanding of them and also to try to convey a sense of what they are about.  In reading  a poem, I do not see it as a puzzle to figure out, I try to create in my own sensibility (I know this may sound arrogant) an ability to directly understand what a writer means.  Reading poetry is an art, though a private one.  Sometimes I just let the waves roll over me.  If I get it great, if not, there will be another greater one soon.

"Daisy Chain", the second work in the collection, is the first of the sixteen poems  that focus on death.  It is about the poets memories of his walks through Dublin with his late father.  It is about the nature of memory, one of the deeper themes of the poems.  I think it also lets one see how over time with enough death of those you love and enough knowledge of history, Dublin is transformed into a vast necropolis, every thing reminds you of the dead.  We see the love between father and son while we see they struggle to find things to speak about.  The love of death arises in part from a longing to rejoin those gone and the terrible feeling of incompleteness such reflections can produce.  There is a pervasive feeling in The Library of Lost Objects that our relations with the dead are paramount over the living or maybe it is better to say we can complete them in our memories, as we cannot with the living.  I also see in these poems a feeling our best days are over, a constant looking back, combined with a sense that there is no present. Reality is created by memory or rather reality is what we remember, until death calls in the cards.  

"The Beekeeper to his Assistant" is one of four poems centering on bees, insects feature in almost twenty percent of the poems.  I really like this poem.    I knew bees are a central image in ancient Irish culture.  I see Duffy as partially drawing us into this tradition.  This passage I found on bees in ancient Ireland provides some of the details:

"The ancient Irish  are particularly noted for their relationship with the bee. In Gaelic, the word for bee is bech, and a swarm is saithe. The hive had many names but was most commonly referred to as a corcog. The gift of a hive of bees was the traditional way to show gratitude or loyalty to the ancient Irish Kings and Queens and as such, their realms were often known as centers of Beekeeping. It’s not surprising, with these facts in mind, that Honey was a staple of the diet of the ancient Irish. It’s believed that everyone present at a royal table was given their own dish of honey, and supposedly each bite of food was dipped in it before eating. Honey was used to marinate meats, particularly salmon, and was drunk in hot milk, as well as used as an offering in religious ceremony. Mead was considered a sacred and ceremonial beverage and was consumed at feasts and celebrations to bring blessings to all present and to lend the event it’s magical properties. Tara had a special residence called ‘The House of Mead Circling".

I also see Bee Keeping as a kind of close to the earth professions that requires specialized knowledge of an arcane sort.  Bees are described as "pollen drunk" while functioning with mathematical exactitude.  We will come back to bees!

"Vintage-in Memory of Marty Duffy" deals with the memories of his larger than mundane life uncle Marty.  He had a big house, loved expensive whiskey and vintage cars.  "no room, it seemed, was big enough to hold him".  At its core it is about memories of the dead, selective memories of fragments of experience.  It reminded me of my late very good American Irish friend Marty Boyle who died way too young.

"The Summer I Mapped the World" is one of the longest poems in the collection.  It deals directly with childhood memories.  Inspired by a class room globe, the speaker in the poem decides to map his neighborhood.  I think this is part of an underlying quest to bring order to experience, part of the reason, as I see it, behind the interest in bees.  It also in its reflection causes the speaker to dwell on people from his childhood now deceased.  It also forces Dublin into the poem, mapping Dublin is mapping life, the issue is it it changes as you go so you can never capture it. It is altered by the process of observation, another of Duffy's themes.  

"Captives- after Muchelangelo" is a very compressed, deeply felt work.  I love these lines:

"his mind has become 

Impenetratrable as stone

Each thought a hammering

Chisel blow burrowing 

For the grain in memory".

This takes us into core issues of Duffy.  The creation of reality by art. It also suggests the best days were long ago, we live in shadows of the dead.  We have an image of Christ tortured.  We see Christianity as a death worshiping creed, a longing for the lifting of pain by death.  The central image of Irish faith, not alone in this of course, is a man being executed and achieving ever lasting glory in his death.  The goal of life is to join him.  

"The Bee King" is a strange poem that puzzles me, a good thing it is to be puzzled. It also deals as do numerous other poems, with childhood memories.  The bee king is a boy who placed jam jars on a wall to attract bees so he could capture, kill, and display them.  He tortured them.  Other boys knew they should look away, understood there is a strange evil in this, but were drawn to it.  Bees, death, childhood memories, pathology. 

"The Book Collector" is a really fascinating, multifaceted work.  It is divided into four segments and I will comment briefly on each.  Segment 1, "First Edition" is told from the point of view of a collector of old first editions.  They authenticate books by printers errors, it is the errors and flaws that matter.   Segment 2, which lends its name to the collection, "The Library of Lost Objects" has an intriguinging opening line:

"the words settle on the page

For the first time, like insects"

Tying in with "The Bee King" the words are pins in a dusty museum.  Are they killed by being printed?The words are like a fire fly, holding back the dark for less time than we can articulate.  On a personal side note, I think the attitude of people toward books and literary tradition who grew up seeing magnificent old libraries like that of Trinity  University (full of books read once a decade if they are lucky) and treasuring the Book of Kells has to be far different from those from essentially library less cities like Manila.  The love of books is related to the love of reading but they are not the same thing by any means.  I really liked the description of how books end up on market stalls, discarded, gifts no one wanted in the first place.   Segment 3, "Inscription" is very moving, even for someone like me who fell in love with reading on an IPAD after about sixty seconds.  I have bought old books where someone has given them to another person with an inscription and I did feel a very real connection.  Segment 4, "Books" is about the physicality of books, how one enjoys holding them, feeling their weight. I wonder if one day poets will write about Kindles in the same deeply felt way as Duffy and a thousand others have about books.  

"Caitriona, had she lived" speaks  about a sister, who would now be forty but death took her shortly after she was born.  The speaker wonders what kind of husband she might have found, the children she never had.  We are presented with a beautiful image of her in some imagined place, "spared the world-injury of those who go on, perfected by absence into the perfect confidant for my thoughts".  This relates to closely to my reading of "Daisy Chain".  

"Bella" is told in the voice of Marc Chagall (Belarus, 1887 to 1985).  I think this poem is central understanding The Library of Lost Objects and I found it necessary to Google Marc Chagall (my culture in the visual arts is very limited).

" Born in Belarus in 1887, Marc Chagall was a French painter, print maker and designer associated with several major artistic styles, synthesizing elements of Cubism, Symbolism and Fauvism. One work in particular, I and the Village (1911), pre-dated Surrealism as an artistic expression of psychic reality. An early modernist, Chagall created works in nearly every artistic medium, including sets for plays and ballets, biblical etchings, and stained-glass windows. Chagall died in France in 1985."  

Chagall lived a long time, wevare at the end of his days. . By now,  everyone that matters to him was dead, including the great love of life, his fiancé Bella.  He speaks of being cursed with long life.  Bella has been dead forty years. Here we see the full marriage of Eros and Thanatos. 

"I count the silent hours til I give up the ghost.  You stand before me,

Again my fiancée in Black Gloves.

My Soul is vivid blue.  It will know you."

I am very glad had the opportunity to read The Library of Lost Objects by Noel Duffy.  I think Duffy has written poems I will return to over and over.  Some of the poems are clearly deeply personal.  He helps us understand the nature of memory, of history, of the craving for knowledge for the pleasure of having it.   In order to begin to penetrate the meaning of these poems  I had to expand my knowledge of the role of bees in Irish and Celtic culture and I learned a bit about a very interesting artist.   Duffy has transcended the limiting rage of much of Irish literature.   There is a profound preoccupation with death in these poems.  I am still puzzled by the insect references.  

Noel Duffy was born in Dublin in 1971 and studied Experimental Physics at Trinity College, Dublin. After a brief period in research he turned his hand to writing and went on to co-edit (with Theo Dorgan) the anthology Watching the River Flow: A Century in Irish Poetry (Poetry Ireland, 1999). He was the winner in 2003 of the START Chapbook Prize for Poetry for his collection, The Silence After and more recently the Firewords Poetry Award. A play,The Rainstorm, was produced for the Dublin Fringe Festival in 2006. His work has appeared widely in IrelandPoetry Ireland Review, Film Ireland and The Dublin Review) as well as in the UK, the US, Belgium and South Africa.  His poetry has also been broadcast on RTE Radio 1’s Sunday Miscellany and Today with Pat Kenny. He has also been a recipient of an Arts Council of Ireland Bursary for Literature in 2003 and 2012.

Noel holds an MA in Writing from the National University of Ireland, Galway, and has taught creative writing there as well as at the Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin, and script writing at the Dublin Business School, Film & Media Department. He remains in Dublin.

My Q and A with Noel Duffy in which we talk about  wide range of issues is here

From the publisher's web page:

In the Library of Lost Objects

Shortlisted for the Strong Award 2012

In the Library of Lost Objects has been selected by the poet and judge Peter Sirr  to go on to the shortlist of 4 for the Strong Award for the best first collection by an Irish poet.

Also Shortlisted for Patrick Kavanagh Prize 2010

In the Library of Lost Objects was shortlisted for the 2010 Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Prize for the best unpublished first collection by an Irish author, receiving a special commendation from the judge, Brian Lynch. It contains a selection of poems which won the START Chapbook Prize and others which won the The Firewords Poetry Award. Between these covers you will find more prize winners and poems that have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies and have been broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1.

On May 2 of this year  I had the pleasure of meeting and conversing with Noel Duffy, in the company of Shauna  Gilligan.  I look forward greatly to reading more of his work.

Mel u