WHATEVER IS WELL MADE

To say that Irish are very good at writing poetry is to make a politically incorrect statement, at least it is if you take a recent spate of letters in The Independent  as a guide: Asians running businesses and West Indians running railways being two of the examples quoted of racial stereotyping at its most heinous. The subtext seemed to be that anyone can excel at anything given the opportunity. I don’t doubt the truth of this nor the possibility of its realization in an ideal state but for the present we have to take what we find and the poetry we have comes out of the bloody flux of history, pain and loss. Irish history is particularly bloody and Irish poetry is astoundingly rich. The population of Ireland is tiny compared to other European nation states but from Yeats onwards there has been an Irish poetry of sumptuous richness. The Princeton University Library Chronicle for spring 1998 kindly sent to me by the late James Simmons contains 400 pages of Irish poems and articles on Irish Poetry.

     Irish poets can turn to Celtic legends, a history of oppression and the Gaelic language to enrich their work and this is what they have done from Yeats to Heaney and with what magnificent results we know so well. The first Irish poets I read when I was a student forty years ago were Yeats, Austin Clarke and Patrick Kavanagh and it is interesting to know that their work remains as firmly in the Irish canon now as it did then. I came across Heaney together with James Simmons and Michael Longley in the Liverpool- Belfast magazine Phoenix, which was published in the late sixties. I copied Blackberry Picking  straight from the page of the magazine onto the blackboard of 3A classroom at Wyther Park Primary School in Leeds where I was teaching. After I’d gone through it line by line, image by image, I made the children copy it into their books. “This” I said, “is what poetry is about. You know the work of Ted Hughes, Peter Redgrove and James Kirkup. Add Heaney to your list and do it now!”

     They also knew Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Graves, MacDiarmid, Auden, Roethke, Spender, Berryman, Dylan Thomas, Lowell, Ginsberg, Snodgrass, Gunn, Hill, Plath and Thomas Blackburn, to name those that most immediately come to mind. That’s what teaching was about in the sixties, as far as poetry was concerned. I taught how Yeats was one of the originators of Modernism, together with Pound, Eliot and possibly MacDiarmid. I still believe this, in spite of opposition to this fundamental  thesis coming from all quarters over the past couple of decades. “Pound’s unsound” - I don’t think I’ve read that exactly but the idea’s been very much in the air. The main contender for his place was William Carlos Williams then Charles Olson, neither of whom seems to me more than second-rate. Williams wrote a couple of short sweet lyrics of note; Olson went in for pretentious and portentous mish-marshes of this kind:

    We are born not of the buried but these unburied dead

    Crossed stick, wire-led, Blake underground

    The Babe and howling babe.

    (Last lines of Le Préface from  Archaeologist of Morning. Cape Goliard, London,

     1970)

Olson’s followers are myriad, as are Ed Dorn’s, who died recently. Dorn’s work was slight, however a rugged and honest persona he projected.

Perhaps Williams’ most fervent UK disciple was Jon Silkin, who died last year. I remember when Silkin’s work was highly rated but by the time of his death he was almost forgotten.

     Nobody-nobody sane that is – likes Pound’s politics or Eliot’s and Yeats’ brief flirtation with Irish fascism – if it existed at all – has provided some small tar with which to stain his reputation.

     Irish poets seem to have been able to continue writing poetry that does not strain when meaning slips away. Let me provide a concrete example from Patrick Kavanagh’s Shancoduff:

    My black hills have never seen the sun rising,

    Eternally they look north towards Amagh.

    Lot’s wife would not be salt if she had been

    Incurious as my black hills that are happy

    When dawn whitens Glassdrummond chapel.

    I first came across Kavanagh in David Wright’s The Mid-Century: English Poetry 1940-60 (Penguin 1965). This is the kind of lyric poetry that needs exposure rather than exposition. The anthology was the best thing Wright ever did. Eight poems by Kavanagh, eleven pages of MacDiarmid, twenty eight pages of Barker and Sydney Graham’s The Ballad of Baldy Bane. Very Celtic, very un-English, very good.

     The major quarrel I have with current views on Irish writing is in the over-estimation of McNeice. The leading protagonist of this view is Professor Edna Longley. (the unshuttupable poet’s wife, as Anthony Thwaite referred to her in his most recent Longmann/British Council survey of contemporary poetry.) She has co-ordinated countless conferences and authored endless articles on this subject but nothing said loudly is still nothing. Longley’s subtext seems to be that McNiece was a greater poet than Auden – just how daft can you get?

     Musée des Beaux Arts is more important than the whole MacNeice oeuvre and I defy Mrs Longley to prove otherwise! I’ve yet to meet one person who agrees with her views, incidentally.

     A much better poet than MacNeice is James Simmons. Simmons is one of Ireland’s most neglected poets. His poems on Tony Harrison, Thomas Blackburn and Geoffrey Hill left me gob-smacked. Why has no one noticed them before?

     Like Faust he’s sold on magid and great whores,

     and for his satisfaction many doors

     swing open into nothingness. My life

     is limited and actual like man and wife.

Guess Who?

I’ll end with a verse of marvellous Flight of the Earls Now Leaving. Now this does bear comparison with Auden, full of wit, knowledge, humour and compassion. I wish I’d written it. (“You will, Barry you will!” Whispers Whistler’s ghost…)

I hear that Ormsby will be leaving soon.

That only leaves me, Longley and Muldoon.

Such pillars of establishment, we three:

New University, Arts Council, BBC.

The famous nest of singing birds has flown

across the border or across the foam.

Mahon was too fastidious for Belfast,

he fled to Dublin, but that didn't last,

onward and upward, the ambitious rogue

rests now in London, on the staff of Vogue.

And Heaney's skulking in some quaint retreat

in Wicklow or at large in Baggot Street,

drinking with editors in Dublin, bars

far from his students and his seminars.

And Leitcli, who all things but himself did know?

Across the water, on the radio,

he works his way from crisis into crisis

confounding my attacks by winning prizes.

Hard-biting Michael Foley, the RC

who edited the HU after me

teaches in London Convent schools. The fear

of God still cows the pupils, teaching's easier.

John Montague has been away so long

we hardly miss him. Did he once belong?

America, then Paris, and now Cork,

Where the tired muse is hen-pecked by the stork.

Barry Tebb

(Published in ‘Poetry Now Newsletter’ 1999 updated 2004)

CHOOSING TO SING: JAMES SIMMONS’ LAST COLLECTION

James Simmons’ The Company of Children Salmon Press

ISBN: 1-897648-63-4 £7.99

     On the flyleaf of my copy of Lowell’s For The Union Dead I find I have written the word integrity and this is the term that springs to mind as most apt for this new collection by James Simmons. Compared with the attention given to other contemporary Irish poets of late, Simmons has not had his due but to me, especially in this book, I was continually startled and delighted by his range and sensitivity. Out of the flux of life Simmons writes in a series of personae, father, husband, friend and singer but most of all, like Whitman, as the man suffering and there. He paints richly textured domestic scenes and joins disparate elements into a flawless fusion, as in Night Song From a Previous Life. The tone is even but the words glow like the dying embers in Coleridge’s definition of Imagination.

     The self-questioning seems casual – what any man might do in a moment of contentment – but there’s not a gram of self-congratulation but instead a poised and poignant fragility:

     a contended island of concentration

     where the muse might visit with inspiration.

     Feelings inform facts, the subjective and objective worlds are mutually illuminating. The reader is invited into the poet’s world and stays to share the exhilaration at the end. The images are water from a living-stream, clear, sweet to taste, translucent and iconographic. Simmons’ work is very much out of the contemporary fashion – which I know only too well.

     The Rat Under the Rose is a gentle, eloquent gesture, asserting the need to say no even to those we love most. Anyone who has lived and suffered knows that the heart of hard-won knowledge lie paradoxes that cannot be resolved: Kierkegaard showed us how in the 19^th Century theology and Winnicott in 20^th Century psycho-analysis. This is a poem that hinges on the paradox that in parenthood we must somehow give ourselves to our children and yet remain whole.

     In Winter Wedding Simmons bares his own life, his ‘last chance wife and family.’ No doubt it’s this confessional tone that keeps him from getting his due. (The attack on confessional poetry-spearheaded by Bloom in the States and by Fenton here – has been an enormous disaster for poetry, which has by and large returned to movement gentility. When Penguin choose anthology editors they could do a great deal better than Armitage and Crawford. From the last hundred pages of their so-called Poetry from Britain and Ireland from 1945 they might have done a better job if they’d omitted Stainer, Hugo Williams, Vicki Feaver, Craig Raine, Jeffrey Wainwright, David Constantine, Tom Leonard, Carol Rumens, Selima Hill, Wendy Cope, Peter Didsbury, Peter Reading, Penelope Shuttle, Liz Lochead, John Ash, Denise Riley, Gillian Allnutt, Christopher Read, James Fenton, John Agard, Grace Nicholas, Blake Morrison, John Cooper Clarke, Helen Dunmore and another twenty-odd. Why did they omit Simmons, Thomas Blackburn and James Kirkup – to name only the most obvious? Do they – and Penguin – really believe anyone will do anything with this monstrosity but groan and sigh and drop it in the book-dump and hope it never re-surafaces?)

Excuse the diversion!

Love Leads Me into Danger is a beautiful poem of chance and circumstance, underpinned by a powerful rhythm but one that is relaxed enough to convey the pace of life in rural Ireland. The mood of the poem becomes gently elegiac, the scattered alliterations exquisitely mimicking the random pattern of the fallen chestnuts. The final stanza sounds a note of warning, bringing the poem full-circle like a boomerang’s arc returning the implement to the thrower’s hand. Innocence is never wholly clear, guilt never entirely meant.

     The Road to Clonbarra is a poem most poets would wish they had written. There are some marvellous images and breath-taking juxtapositions – perhaps moonlight smoulder is best of all. A poem every anthologist should take and probably none at all.

     The External Examiner is a wry reflection on the poet’s lot. The point of reference is Coleridge’s This Lime Tree Bower My Prison – a poet’s poem if ever there was one! (I can remember my first reading of it, the room, the season, forty years ago…)

     When he writes at his best Simmons is as good as Roethke when he was dying. Truly the song of an old, white-haired singer, free to fragment experience, juxtapose it and expose it.

Barry Tebb

(Published in ‘Poetry Now’ Newsletter 2000 updated 2004)              

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