Review of Paul Muldoon - Selected Poems 1968-2014

 

A slightly edited version of this review appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on 25 Sept 2016

The lot of the Irish poet has improved considerably in recent times with Aosdána, writers in residence gigs, and even tenure in universities for the better ones. The grumbling compost heap in the corner of a pub is no longer typical. Paul Muldoon represents the apotheosis of this trend with the kind of career that under-appreciated and impecunious predecessors like Patrick Kavanagh could only have dreamt about. Professor of Humanities at Princeton, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Poetry Editor of the New Yorker, and Pulitzer Prize winner are among his many achievements.

Muldoon also has the street credibility that comes from writing songs with Warren Zevon and having one covered by Bruce Springsteen. He has his own rock band at Princeton and even sports a hair style that channels the later Phil Spector. Commenting on this uncommon conjunction between high art and lower art Muldoon asserts that "coming from an Irish tradition I see no essential distinction between the poem and the song". The use of repetition and the refrain in many of his poems are also the staple diet of rock and pop music.

The new selected poems contains his personal choices from his 12 poetry collections - dating back to 1968. Reading and rereading these poems you are left with the abiding impression of playfulness. The poet is enjoying himself and so are we. He's a poet of many parts. You Can spot traces of his Northern contemporaries: Here the rural authenticity of Heaney, there the desolation of Mahon, everywhere the classical references of Longley, and there's even a soupçon of the sexual swagger of Montague - kissing and telling ("my hand on her breast"). But Muldoon has a distinct flavour all of his own - and it's the ludic spirit that predominates. The son of a farm labourer and a teacher, he brings both sides of his ancestry into his work with learned allusions from Beckett and Greek literature rubbing shoulders with pig castration and hot bricks in socks serving as hot water bottles.

He has a sensibility that can, like his beloved Metaphysical poets, consume any kind of experience. There are difficult poems, and there are obscure references, but the whole collection is leavened with humour and rueful self-awareness. Some of the poems, such as Symposium and The Old Country, are pure play. In the latter he strings together a litany of cliches to amusing effect:

Every slope was a slippery slope

where every shave was a very close shave

and money was money for old rope

where every grave was a watery grave

Another poem, Errata, is merely a list of corrections:

For 'Steinbeck' read 'Steenbeck'

For 'ludic' read 'lucid'.

But these almost throwaway pieces are counterbalanced by long sobering poems redolent with the bitter sweetness of a lost love, the brutalities of the sectarian feud in the North, or memories of growing up in rural Ireland. He is also capable of beautiful lyric moments as in: "The soft flame of a canary."

Many of the poems are built on the kind of conceits favoured by the Metaphysical Poets. Muldoon is an acknowledged admirer of John Donne and has edited his Selected Poems. This debt is made explicit in the poem Brazil where he refers to "the bracelet of shampoo about the bone", echoing Donne's "a bracelet of bright hair about the bone". Donne's The Flea is a good example of this kind of conceit, where the comparison is often more shocking than apt:

It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;

Muldoon plays similar tricks in poems such as The Soap Pig and the Hedgehog but most of all in Long Finish which could be sub-titled Shall I Compare Thee to a Simi Chardonnay. In this poem he use the conceit of a glass of Chardonnay to reflect on his long and rich relationship with his current wife interspersed with gory images of Northern atrocities:

that we've somehow

managed to withstand an almond-blossomy

five years of bitter rapture, five of blissful rows

Love and lost love are recurring themes. Incantata, his moving and self-deprecating tribute to the artist Mary Farl Powers is one of the most powerful pieces in the collection:

I thought of you again tonight, thin as a rake, as you bent

over the copper plate of 'Emblements',



He even throws in a reference to Dublin art politics here: "the Black Church clique and the Graphic Studio claque". There's also a more recent tribute to Seamus Heaney: Cuthbert and the Otters - a more dense and difficult work.

I cannot thole the thought of Seamus Heaney dead.

Muldoon has been accused of gratuitous esotericism. John Banville described himself as utterly baffled by his collection Madoc: A Mystery - feeling it to be wilfully obscure. While most of the poems are accessible there are certainly difficult areas where we are free to allow our imaginations roam - one of the pleasures of poetry surely. He also sprinkles his poems with unfamiliar terms such as thole, thurified, bris, quag and quoof that send us, sometimes in vain, to the dictionary.

These days it seems that even the banal effusions of a Rose of Tralee are considered too demanding and "olden days" for our intellectually flighty populace. Muldoon's playful, intelligent, and accessible demonstration of the poet's art is a bracing antidote to all such patronising twaddle.

Faber & Faber

pp 228

€??

 

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After the Titanic - A Life of Derek Mahon by Stephen Enniss

An edited verion of this review was published in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 2 November 2014

Derek Mahon belongs to a gifted generation of Northern poets that includes Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley - all three born between 1939 and 1941. Unlike his compatriots, Mahon has not enjoyed a smooth ride through life and letters. Heaney moved south in 1972 and went on to enjoy a life padded with tenure and festooned with awards. Longley, a Belfast Protestant like Mahon, stayed put despite the fraught political landscape of the time and made his career in Northern Ireland, working for the Arts Council while writing his verse. After leaving Trinity, Mahon, arguably the most talented of the three, wandered the world for decades, changing jobs, changing homes and occasionally changing women - but all the time producing his sublime verse.

Stephen Enniss in his new biography charts this propensity for flight in such relentless detail that it becomes the leit-motif of the book. It supports his thesis that "the origins of Mahon's art lie in suffering". The book's strength lies in its linking of the various dramas in the poet's life with the resultant poetry. You may not agree with all the assumptions but it makes for an interesting read. The book stops short in 2003 so it doesn't encompass the later settled phase in the poet's life. Since moving to Kinsale permanently in that year Mahon has enjoyed one of his most creative periods. He has produced four collections Harbour Lights (2006), Somewhere the Wave (2007), Life on Earth (2008), and Autumn Wind (2010). Gallery Press published a New Collected Poems in 2011 and Red Sails new prose collection in October. When queried about his premature ending Enniss responded: "I ... felt it would be unnecessarily intrusive to bring Mahon’s life story up to the very present. I chose not to tell the story of his most recent years in the town where he still lives." This is a noble sentiment but it means we don't get any insight into the life of the poet at rest in his Ithaca, or the circumstances surrounding his latest work.

Enniss sees Mahon's personal problems beginning when he went to Trinity. Mahon probably wouldn't disagree describing himself during that period as: "a surly étranger in a donkey jacket, with literary pretensions ... careless of the academic demands". This nod to Camus suggested an early recognition of the absurdity of life and an indifference to worldly matters. During his second year, according to Enniss, he attempted suicide by jumping into the Liffey at Butt Bridge following a "personal crisis". Mahon remembers it differently and in one of the essays in Red Sails makes the comment: "Jump in the river for fun and someone will say you tried to commit suicide". The truth of the matter may be contained in Michael Longley's pithy summing up of the event: "partly theatrical, partly suicidal". Whatever about a personal crisis his studies were suffering and he was suspended from Trinity for a year for "unsatisfactory attendance". He eventually returned, after a spell working on the Isle of Man, and got a modest degree but not one that would have opened up the academic route enjoyed by many of his peers. Trinity did however give him the confidence to follow his star as a poet. Through all his existential struggles he was writing verse and contributing regularly to, and on one occasion editing, the Trinity poetry magazine Icarus.

After leaving Trinity he had an abortive spell at graduate school in London, Ontario. He then drifted for a while as an "undocumented" in the USA taking jobs in a photo shop, a book depository, and boy's boarding school. He returned to Belfast in 1967 and then moved to London in 1970. In the following years he tried a variety of careers. In no particular order he worked for the BBC, was features editor at Vogue, reviewed theatre for the Listener, and had a brief stint as a copy writer (including an involvement in a Pampers nappies campaign). In 1977 he was appointed Writer in Residence at the New University of Ulster and the following year was hospitalised in Derry for his alcoholism. This became a recurring problem over the next 15 years. He finally quit in 1993 with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous and some supportive friends. The years between 1985 and 1995 were a fallow period for the poet as he fought and conquered his demon. His empathy for a fellow sufferer Malcolm Lowry is captured in his poem Homage to Malcolm Lowry: "sweating on a hotel bed in Veracruz". The only publication during that period was the 1992 chapbook The Yaddo Letter.

In the Afterword Enniss tells us how his subject moved from cooperation to disengagement as the book approached completion. Mahon wrote to him saying that "for some time now the prospect of our Book has been disturbing my peace of mind". Peter Fallon, Mahon's publisher and friend for 25 years, deplores "all the invasions of privacy" that the biography contains and believes the book to be "a betrayal of trust". Fallon was not interviewed for the book. Enniss has denied suggestions that Mahon's withdrawal may have been due to his belief that the venture was to be a critical study of the poetry rather than a life. In a recent email he stated that "Mahon has always known I was writing a biography".

Betrayal may be too strong a word. The personal life gets coverage of course but Enniss rarely digs too deep. The scale of intrusion is mild when one looks at what Larkin is enduring from biographers (a recent offering by James Booth describes in detail the kind of pornography he favoured). Mahon's alleged suicide attempt is covered as are the various spells he spent in hospitals drying out. We are also told of the comings and goings of various women but little about what went on in these relationships. Jill Schlesinger appears to be the only one of the women in his life who talked to Enniss. A disastrous sojourn in New York is alluded to and we hear of his fondness for West Village bars such as the Lion's Head, the White Horse, and McKenna's. We rarely get very close to Mahon. The "debonair Derek" that many speak of is nowhere to be found and the heroic and ultimately successful battle with alcohol is underplayed. There are some amusing anecdotes. Mahon has always been an art lover and on a trip to New York he tries to get in to a sold-out Vermeer exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Frantic dashes to the Irish Embassy and the British Embassy prove fruitless and our frustrated poet only makes it as far as the gift shop. A whiskey-fuelled row with John Montague over his Northern Ireland affiliations is less amusing - it caused a lasting rift.

The overall tone of the book suggests that the writer loves the poetry but vaguely disapproves of the poet. It's clear early on that Enniss is a bit sniffy about Mahon's academic history. There is the reproving statement that it "took him five years to gain a degree" from Trinity. He also chides Mahon about some myth making in relation his time at the Sorbonne. Apparently the year that Mahon claims to have spent there actually entailed hanging around Parisian cafes and bookshops for a few months. Mahon admits as much unashamedly in Red Sails: "I skived off and hung out at the Cinematheque, at George Whitman's Mistral bookshop, and in obvious pit-stops like the Cafe de la Sorbonne and Au Depart." The life of a flaneur around Paris was surely more apt for the sentimental education of the poet than any series of lectures. It gave him, for example, the leisure to read his beloved Montaigne properly for the first time.

Anyone reading this life will be encouraged to discover or revisit his poetry, and for this Enniss deserves credit. Mahon has been under appreciated by the general public. He is particularly astute on sources and has made good use of the early drafts to which he had access and the many archives he visited. Who would have known, for example, that one of Mahon's best known poems, A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford, dedicated to J.G. Farrell, took its inspiration not alone from The Troubles but also from a passage in one of Farrell's earlier novels The Lung. This, incidentally, is the poem that Michael Longley judged "the best poem any of us has written". Praise indeed when that "us" embraces Heaney.

A poet with a few peccadilloes is hardly a bad thing. Many of us prefer our artists to be free range, "swaggering the nut-strewn road" on our behalf. And in the end the poetry forgives all. Look at a masterpiece like The Sea in Winter, in which he casts a cold eye on his blighted province. Mahon's life as a poet has been a triumph - his legacy is assured. The substantial body of work he has produced has been described by the critic Philip Hobsbaum as "an oeuvre fit to stand beside theirs (Auden and McNeice) in literary history". The man himself is at peace in his safe haven down south. In the final essay in Red Sails, Mahon sums up his current state of contentment:

"As airports grow intolerable and seaplanes remain elusive, there's much to be said for staying put".

If suffering is the key to his poetry, as Enniss asserts, these days it is suffering recollected in tranquility.

Gill & Macmillan

pp 329

€29.99

 

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The Sheepman of Loughcrew

An edited version of this piece appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 2 February 2014.

Review of: 

Peter Fallon, Poet, Publisher, Editor and Translator - Edited by Richard Rankin Russell

Few Irish poets get as close to the muck and manure of rural life as Peter Fallon - not perhaps since Patrick Kavanagh manned his plough in Inniskeen.  Heaney's digging was a metaphor, Fallon experiences the rural actuality in his daily round.  And, unlike Kavanagh, who abandoned Monaghan for the badlands of Baggot Street, Fallon has persisted in combining his sheep farming in Loughcrew with the writing and publishing of poetry.  He has also produced a well-received translation of Virgil's Georgics - empathising no doubt with its concern for man's struggle against a hostile natural world.  This curious confection, edited by American academic Richard Rankin Russell, is essentially a celebration of his life and work.  No reasonable person would quibble with the worthiness of the project.

Fallon's declared aim in life is "to keep the art of poetry alive and in good health" so that we can "improve our chances of fulfilling ourselves individually and collectively as a human, decent, kind society".  He has certainly succeeded in achieving the first part of this.  Without his Gallery Press it's doubtful that we'd have a poetry scene worth talking about.  Irish poets seeking publication would largely be left either to the tender mercies of the UK publishing houses or to a few small underpowered local imprints.  Seamus Heaney declared that "The poets on the Gallery list are indispensable to the art of poetry as an ongoing endeavour in Ireland.".  The importance of the Gallery Press for Irish poetry became even more marked following the demise of Liam Miller and the Dolmen Press in 1987.  Derek Mahon describes it as "a cottage industry with a global reach."  The Gallery Press is renowned both for the quality of its poetry and for its attention to production values.  The finished article is always worth looking at as well as reading.  Fallon has long been an enthusiastic supporter of Irish art.  In the early days he used Jim Fitzpatrick and Michael Kane and these days he features the work of contemporary artists such as Mary Lohan, John Shinnors and Martin Gale.

Fallon's earliest literary incarnation was as a member of Tara Telephone, a poetry and music ensemble that occasionally veered into Edith Sitwell territory.  A certain twee earnestness may have prevailed but in time it proved to be a hot house for a host of creative types and its alumni went on to adorn the Irish rock and poetry scenes for many years.  These included Fallon, Eamon Carr from the Horslips, Declan Sinnott, and the youthful Phil Lynnot - apparently a very nervous performer in those days.

The book is part critical study, part Festschrift - a kind of selection box for poetry lovers.  You can dip in and enjoy your favoured flavour.  It could be a poem, a critical essay or a biographical segment.  It's divided into five parts, each focusing on a different aspect of Fallon's life.  The first part deals with his work at the Gallery Press.  Parts two and three, the heart of the book, contain a series of critical essays on his poetry.  Part four establishes, tenuously, a US connection and the concluding part consists of 17 poems written in Fallon's honour by such luminaries as Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney.  A couple of the contributors are no longer with us.  There is an affectionate account of Fallon's life and work by his departed friend Denis O'Driscoll.  His perceptive essay is fulsome in its praise:  "Such is the extent of Peter's contribution that he is ensured a permanent place in the country's literature and literary history."  Heaney, in addition to his poem, contributes a short tribute written for the Gallery Press's 40th anniversary celebration at the Abbey.

Derek Mahon suggests of Fallon that "perhaps the publishing obscures the poetry a little, but I doubt this bothers him".  I'd be surprised if this piece of presumption were true.  All poets aspire to Parnassus.  A number of the critical essays in the book promote his cause.  The best of these is Maurice Harmon's Profane Rituals, a sure-footed stroll through Fallon's poetic output.   Harmon notes the varied settings:  the town of Deerfield, Massachusetts, Ballynahinch, Co. Galway, and principally his home in the townland of Loughcrew.  Most of the poetry comes from his engagement with his local community.  His daily rituals are reflected in his poetry: badgers and hares, sheep and goats.  He notes that Fallon's "ear is true to local speech".   This is not Arcadia.  Farm work is hard and dirty, not for the faint-hearted, or the dung shy.  A poem about the death of his new born son John sounds a chilling and tragic note amidst his poems of rural life:

We pray at best for the open wound
to grow a scar.
We welcome him his deliverance.

There are things worse than death.

Both editor Richard Rankin Russell and Bryan Giemza trace American poet Wendell Berry's influence on Fallon's work.  The poet farmer from Kentucky also contributes a handsome review of Fallon's work:   "ordinary events made extraordinary by the amplitude of his care and the precision of his notice".

The book concludes with the 17 poems written in Fallon's honour.  A fine legacy in itself considering some of the names.  The one that snagged my attention was Northern Lights by Nuala Ni Dhomnaill (translated by Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith).  It has little to do with Fallon or Loughcrew but all to do with the eternal concerns of the poet:

"the whisper of the solar wind
above the black abyss"


Irish Academic Press
268 pp

John P. O'Sullivan
January 2014