Victoria Kennefick: 'Cork Schoolgirl Considers the GPO, Dublin 2016'

 

I recall first reading Victoria Kennefick's poem 'Cork Schoolgirl Considers the GPO, Dublin 2016' at least a couple of years ago. The poet is from County Cork, Ireland, and the poem was first published in Poetry Ireland Review in 2016, around the 100th anniversary of the Easter 1916 Rising. (The GPO, or General Post Office, is one of the most famous buildings not only in Dublin but in all of Ireland, because it was the headquarters of the Easter Rising.) Now, you can both read and listen to a reading of the poem here, on the iamb website: https://www.iambapoet.com/victoria-kennefick 

This is absolutely one of my favourite poems of the past several years. In 20 lines, Kennefick captures humour, pathos, history, and the total insanity of being a teenager - the latter being possibly the most difficult accomplishment of all. 

The poem pays tribute to "those boys in uniform" but it also captures the problematic ways in which our countries teach us history: "all the men of history sacrificing/themselves for Ireland, for me, these rebel Jesuses." This obviously isn't a particularly healthy perspective, but what brings me close to tears in these lines is also how true it is to how teenage girls think, or at least some teenage girls. Falling in love with dead heroes is just the kind of thing a lot of us did at 16. At the end of the poem, when the speaker says "I put my lips/to the pillar...I kiss all those boys goodbye", we understand that some day she'll look back at this as a crazy, sentimental, teenage moment. And yet, we also kiss those boys goodbye along with her and we feel the poet's empathy for those in history who were lost to war, and her equal empathy for the wild emotions of the teenage years. 

Image: The shell of the GPO on Sackville Street (later O'Connell Street), Dublin in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising. Date: May ? 1916 NLI Ref: KE 121

Seamus Heaney Reminds Me of Everything

A month ago I went to a Seamus Heaney tribute event at Kings Place which featured discussions and readings by Glenn Patterson (director of the Seamus Heaney Centre), Irish historian Roy Foster, poet Vona Groarke and actor Bríd Brennan.

The poems read included 'Two Lorries', among others, and there were discussions about Heaney's views on Britain and Ireland, how these contextualised his work and assured his importance - as well as his detailed and intimate observations about family life, rural living and so forth. To be honest, I wish I had taken notes, because I don't remember a lot of detail from the evening. I arrived a little late, and had in any case been feeling very stressed for several days. The most noteworthy thing of all was that the moment I started listening to Heaney's words, my stomach unknotted and my stress seemed to evaporate. It was this, more than anything else, that made me think about the place of Heaney's poetry in my life.

During the evening, photos of Heaney at different ages appeared on the large screen over the stage. His face filled me with affection and sadness, but sometimes the backgrounds were even more evocative; for example, the poet standing on a beach that was likely Dublin, bleak and beautiful with the shallow pools and flotsam of low tide. U2, one of my most important bands, admired and even referred to Heaney in their work, and that particular photo reminded me a little humorously of some of their more awkward photo shoots from their younger years. And then I started to think of the heady cocktail of Yeats and U2 that fuelled my earliest obsession with Ireland and, in part, led me to live there for three years.

As much as I love Heaney, I'm not sure I've ever obsessed over him the way I did over Yeats and U2. They're more responsible for my few years in Ireland, before London. But he's been around in my life for a long, long time. The shock and amazement of reading poems like 'The Tollund Man' and 'Punishment', at a young age (probably junior high), was considerable and has never quite left me. I had not known that poetry could be like that, especially the way he doubled past and present and folded them over each other. His collection District and Circle was released in 2006, shortly after I moved from Dublin to London, and it is entwined with that early time in London; my (then) romantic obsession with the Underground, the possible echoes of the 7/7 terrorist attack (only a couple of weeks before I moved to the city) in "blasted weeping rock-walls. Flicker-lit." 'Out of Shot' and 'Höfn' appeared in the Guardian back when we still all bought papers: I cut them out and stuck them up on my bedroom door. I actually saw Heaney read a few times in the few years before he died, one of those occasions being at Poetry Parnassus in 2012, which was a particularly significant event for me in terms of learning about international poetry. And it goes on.

There's art that we recall as, or that calls up, moments in time. Other authors, bands, books, poems seem to remind us of everything. Some can do both, and perhaps they are the most special of all. Seamus Heaney is in that category, for me.


Photo: Seamus Heaney by Burns Library, Boston College.  Photo used under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license

New Poem Published in The Level Crossing

B738 by Bernal Saborio. Used under Creative Commons license


Dedalus Press, the well-known Dublin publishers specialising in Irish and international poetry, recently published the first issue of a new journal, The Level Crossing. I was honoured to have my poem 'The air outside American airports' published in the journal's Poetry of Place feature. It was one of 14 poems published in this feature, out of more than 900 submissions.

In another life, which is also this life, I lived in Dublin for a few years and worked in the United Airlines call centre. I felt as though I were living a double life, where I worked an unglamorous job and then flew off regularly on holiday, mostly in business class, to destinations including New York, Chicago, Sydney and Tokyo. I also commuted through the US a lot, especially travelling back to see my family on the West Coast of Canada.

'The air outside American airports' arose out of that part of my life. I wrote it when I was still living in Dublin and working at that job - probably about eleven years ago. The way in which it was chosen out of the poems I submitted, to come home to Dublin, is mysterious and beautiful to me.

Dublin and Yeats: 'The Municipal Gallery Revisited'

Sarah Purser, WB Yeats, c. 1904. Hugh Lane gallery, Dublin


I was in Dublin for a few days last week. I used to live there - ten years ago and more - as readers of this blog may already know, but I hadn't even been back for a visit for several years.

This felt like my most successful visit back to Dublin so far. I had an informal to-do list - seeing friends, catching up with family, the seaside, galleries, the theatre (Brian Friel's version of Turgenev's A Month in the Country, at the lovely Gate Theatre), the pub. And I got through everything on that list. Notably, my relationship with Dublin felt happier than for a long time. Dublin still lives in me, in the way that a city where you spent some of your formative years (my early twenties) will do that. I stared at the dank Liffey and the springy Ha'penny Bridge, thought about history in front of the General Post Office, sheltered from the rain in the Winding Stair bookshop, and on Grafton Street I realised that someone there is always playing Hallelujah. I also remembered the time a bus driver flirted with me by paraphrasing Yeats's 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven'. (Quoting poetry will always get you points for effort, boys.)

On my last day I went to the Hugh Lane gallery. They were featuring an exhibition based on the Yeats poem 'The Municipal Gallery Revisited', where Yeats revisited friends - Synge, Lady Gregory and others - and great figures of the time, by gazing on their paintings at the gallery. They had pulled out those very paintings he gazed upon and put them together, with the full poem reproduced on the wall and then the specific lines next to each painting. It was extremely moving. Yeats had a way of transfiguring people - of course, he knew some of the strongest and most influential personalities of his time, but through his eyes they became sort of super-cinematic, in the most profound way. So many things inspire me about Yeats's poetry, but perhaps more than anything, no one else can retain and glorify the personal, the public and the symbolic so powerfully. The people in his poems are living breathing friends, enemies and lovers, but they are also archetypes.


THE MUNICIPAL GALLERY REVISITED (WB Yeats)

I

Around me the images of thirty years:
An ambush; pilgrims at the water-side;
Casement upon trial, half hidden by the bars,
Guarded; Griffith staring in hysterical pride;
Kevin O'Higgins' countenance that wears
A gentle questioning look that cannot hide
A soul incapable of remorse or rest;
A revolutionary soldier kneeling to be blessed;

II

An Abbot or Archbishop with an upraised hand
Blessing the Tricolour. 'This is not,' I say,
'The dead Ireland of my youth, but an Ireland
The poets have imagined, terrible and gay.'
Before a woman's portrait suddenly I stand,
Beautiful and gentle in her Venetian way.
I met her all but fifty years ago
For twenty minutes in some studio.

III

Heart-smitten with emotion I sink down,
My heart recovering with covered eyes;
Wherever I had looked I had looked upon
My permanent or impermanent images:
Augusta Gregory's son; her sister's son,
Hugh Lane, 'onlie begetter' of all these;
Hazel Lavery living and dying, that tale
As though some ballad-singer had sung it all;

IV

Mancini's portrait of Augusta Gregory,
'Greatest since Rembrandt,' according to John Synge;
A great ebullient portrait certainly;
But where is the brush that could show anything
Of all that pride and that humility?
And I am in despair that time may bring
Approved patterns of women or of men
But not that selfsame excellence again.

V

My mediaeval knees lack health until they bend,
But in that woman, in that household where
Honour had lived so long, all lacking found.
Childless I thought, 'My children may find here
Deep-rooted things,' but never foresaw its end,
And now that end has come I have not wept;
No fox can foul the lair the badger swept --

VI

(An image out of Spenser and the common tongue).
John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought
All that we did, all that we said or sang
Must come from contact with the soil, from that
Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.
We three alone in modern times had brought
Everything down to that sole test again,
Dream of the noble and the beggar-man.

VII

And here's John Synge himself, that rooted man,
'Forgetting human words,' a grave deep face.
You that would judge me, do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland's history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man's glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.

Lost People: Derek Mahon's 'A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford'

We are closed (and do not open tomorrow) by Sten Dueland. Used under Creative Commons license.


The 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, which took place in July 1995 during the Bosnian war, has made me think of the poem 'A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford' by Derek Mahon.


A DISUSED SHED IN CO. WEXFORD (Derek Mahon)


'A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford' has always seemed to me to be a totally unique work of art, and one of the greatest poems of the last century. Recently it was on the shortlist for the RTE-sponsored A Poem for Ireland competition, and although it lost out to Seamus Heaney's 'When All the Others Were Away at Mass', I think it would have been a worthy winner.

This is the ultimate microcosm poem; millenia of hardworking, suffering and lost human beings are drawn down to a sad little colony of mushrooms in a quiet corner of a small Irish county. The construction of the poem is extremely subtle, I think. It opens with a broader view - "Even now there are places where a thought might grow" and glimpses of a "Peruvian mine" and "Indian compounds". But then the view narrows to such an extent that it's as though you are in the shed with the mushrooms.

A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.
This is the one star in their firmament
Or frames a star within a star.

Ominously, the shed is actually part of a "burnt-out hotel". Is this a glimpse of some post-apocalyptic near future, or at least some local catastrophe?

As I read the poem there is a sense of advancing down a path, increasing clues as to the true nature of the poem. Words such as 'civil war', 'deaths', 'nightmares', 'regime' and 'firing-squad' multiply. The poignancy of the scene is immense, even before the last stanza, when the nature of its message becomes plain.

'A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford' is not just about genocide or man's inhumanity to man; it is more generally about the sadness of human loss and the fact that most human accomplishments, and most individuals, are utterly forgotten. I thought of the poem today, though, because of the line in the last stanza: "Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!" This is a terrible cry, wrenched painfully from the speaker, and seeming to sum up so much of the pain of Europe and the world. It's what echoes in my mind as this extraordinary poem draws to a close.

In Print: Pre-Raphaelite Poetry and The Gathering Poem

Edward Burne-Jones, The Beguiling of Merlin, 1874.



I've recently had a couple of poems (or lines, as you'll see) published in print, which is a special thrill undiminished by all the amazing things poetry is doing on the Internet these days.

Some time ago I entered the second Pre-Raphaelite Society Poetry Contest, and while I didn't win anything, my poem was selected as one of a number of entries to appear in a collection, Pre-Raphaelite Poetry II. It is a poem called 'Merlin' which I wrote when I was about 21 and which was based on The Beguiling of Merlin by Edward Burne-Jones - which also happens to be the painting which I chose as the logo for this blog. My Arthurian obsession, which has since receded somewhat, was still at its peak then. I feel as though things have come full circle with the publication of this poem. You can read more about the collection and buy it here.

The other publication, though my contribution was small, is quite exciting. In 2013, Irish tourism institutions organised The Gathering, a year-long celebration of Irish culture in Ireland which also encouraged those with Irish roots, or a love of Ireland, to visit the country. I am not doing particularly well in that respect these days because although I have a partly Irish background and used to live there, I haven't visited for several years. However, I was interested to learn of The Gathering Poem, an initiative to create a poem "about Ireland and by the people of Ireland" by collecting contributions of lines of poetry and then editing them into a single poem. I submitted a few lines and to my delight, two lines were among those chosen. While there were thousands of submissions, the final poem was only fifty lines long and there were fewer than forty contributors, so it was quite an honour to be chosen. It has now been published in a beautiful little book, which also includes other selected lines, comments about the project and so on, and you can buy it on the website. Only a few months before his death, Seamus Heaney called the idea of The Gathering Poem "a vision with vision". It's nice to have given something back to Ireland, especially in poetry form.

Yeats's 'Stream and Sun at Glendalough' and MacNeice's Autumn Journal: Optimistic Sunlight

Glendalough photo by Sean MacEntee. Used under Creative Commons license



STREAM AND SUN AT GLENDALOUGH (W B Yeats)


Through intricate motions ran
Stream and gliding sun
And all my heart seemed gay:
Some stupid thing that I had done
Made my attention stray.

Repentance keeps my heart impure;
But what am I that dare
Fancy that I can
Better conduct myself or have more
Sense than a common man?

What motion of the sun or stream
Or eyelid shot the gleam
That pierced my body through?
What made me live like these that seem
Self-born, born anew?


Glendalough is one of Ireland's most famous sites, a glacial valley in the Wicklow Mountains south of Dublin, featuring beautiful lakes and the remains of an early medieval monastic settlement. I went there on my first visit to Ireland fifteen years ago, but didn't return in the three years I actually lived in Ireland, although I did visit the Wicklow Mountains again a couple of times and once swam in an almost equally beautiful mountain lake.

When I visited Glendalough with my parents, brother and cousins, it was a misty day and while this added a good deal to the Irish atmosphere, it wasn't very reminiscent of the "stream and sun" of this Yeats poem. My memories of it are fairly vague, but I remember mist and characteristic round towers, and our cousin driving rather fast along the narrow country roads.

This is a deceptively simple-looking poem which isn't simply about a quiet moment in nature. Unsurprisingly for Yeats, he is asking himself questions about the relationship between his inner self and the outer world, and about the conflict between self-development and self-forgiveness. Yeats was also very preoccupied by the relationship between creator and created thing, and "self-born" seems to raise some spiritual question which hangs in the air unanswered.

I admit, though, that I don't love this poem for the details - more for the overall impression that it leaves. It is a poem that often goes through my head, at least certain lines, like a strain of music and leaves something beautiful and optimistic behind. The poem itself is "the gleam/That pierced my body through".

I have been reading Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal, which only gets better and better the more time I spend with it. Its pre-World War II setting seems remarkably familiar in 2012. The final lines reminded me of 'Stream and Sun at Glendalough'. They seem to come from the same impulse of optimism breaking through doubts, difficulties and questions.


To-night we sleep
On the banks of Rubicon - the die is cast;
There will be time to audit
The accounts later, there will be sunlight later
And the equation will come out at last.

(from Autumn Journal, Louis MacNeice)

'Perdita' and Louis MacNeice's Incorrigible Plurality

I have just ordered Incorrigibly Plural, a collection of essays and reminiscences about Louis MacNeice - along with two or three other poetry books; how incorrigibly plural of me. I am not sure I really need to plunge into any other poets, given that there are too many with whom I'm still skating around on the surface, but I'm quite eager to look at all of these books.

One of the things that amazes me about MacNeice is the sheer variety of his work. I think that 'Bagpipe Music' was probably one of the first of his poems that I read, and though I know for a fact that around age 18-19 it wasn't really my cup of tea, it's impossible not to get swept up:


The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather.

(from 'Bagpipe Music')


I have a feeling that MacNeice started to mean a lot to me at some point after I read 'Snow', but I am not sure. 'Sunlight on the Garden' and 'Wolves' definitely played a role, too. I have a colleague who loves 'Prayer Before Birth' and it has become one of my favourite poems - it is one of a few which could rank as MacNeice's greatest and I think it is one of the finest poems of the twentieth century. I have now read all of Autumn Journal and it is extraordinary in its evocation of the atmosphere and personal experience at the start of World War II. His bitter and loving poems about Ireland are amazing as well.


If I were a dog of sunlight I would bound
From Phoenix Park to Achill Sound,
Picking up the scent of a hundred fugitives
That have broken the mesh of ordinary lives,
But being ordinary too I must in course discuss
What we mean to Ireland or Ireland to us;

(from 'Valediction')


With a stone on the cairn, with a word on the wind, with a prayer in the flesh let me honour this country.

(from 'Western Landscape')


The range and rush and vitality of his poems are so exciting; funny, moving, resonant and rhythmic, journalistic, so often with that odd streak of practicality which I find so alluring.

I do know that it was a long slow process for MacNeice to become one of my favourite poets. He was more like a valued acquaintance until perhaps a few years ago. Some of my best friendships have been like that - always with respect and liking, but closeness has come very gradually. They are often the friendships that I end up valuing the most.

'Perdita' has become one of my favourite of MacNeice's poems. This short, evocative work is about memories and missed opportunities, things which sometimes (often) cause me a great deal of anxiety.


PERDITA (Louis MacNeice)


The painting is Monet's depiction of Gare Saint-Lazare, which seemed to go well with the train station image in the poem.

"Horsemen for Companions": Me At Royal Ascot, Yeats At Galway Races

Royal Ascot 2012, © Chris Turner

I spent yesterday at Royal Ascot, thanks to a friend's generosity. Lunch, Pimms, fascinators and funny hats, the Queen, people-watching, good company, and horses horses horses...pretty much a perfect day. I loved seeing a microcosm of the English personality in this event.

I think this was the third time I'd been to the races, and it eclipsed my visits to the small racetrack outside my hometown in Canada - the last of which was more than twenty years ago, when I was a horse-obsessed child. I have very mixed feelings about racing, but I couldn't help being caught up in the beauty of the horses. If you want someone gorgeous and neurotic in your life, you could do worse than to go for a Thoroughbred. I'm a non-gambler and some say that takes the fun out of watching racing, but I didn't even care who won. I don't have a gaming mentality in the least, anyway. I felt swept away every time the horses went past me, whether cantering down to the gate, or streaming at high speed to the post. I was too busy capturing and filing away moments - the checkerboards and little stars brushed into gleaming hindquarters, the dilated nostrils and shining eyes, the beautiful angular flow and colours as they ran down the track, like a Raoul Dufy painting - to really care about the outcome. And at least turf racing isn't quite as rough as dirt racing.

I also couldn't help thinking that I was probably enjoying myself a lot more than some of the posh people who come every year. I don't quite know how, but even after years of living in London I've managed to maintain a totally unjaded attitude towards special experiences; perhaps because I do view them very strongly as being special. I'd rather have my starry-eyed moments of wonder than become someone who always compares an experience unfavourably to the last one that vaguely resembled it. It's one thing that I've found very valuable in my life.

I'm not that familiar with poems of the horse racing world, and I invite anyone to make suggestions if you wish. I thought of this poem by W B Yeats, 'At Galway Races'. The Galway Races are still a famous racing meet in Ireland, and one that I thought I might go to when I lived there but never did. A different atmosphere from Ascot, I imagine. This is a mid-period Yeats poem, and I imagine that as well as evoking the sweep and rush of a racecourse, he was also thinking more broadly of the "indomitable Irishry" who he referred to in 'Under Ben Bulben', and their potential for the nascent future of Ireland. I wonder if he ever went to Ascot or what he would have made of it. Yeats was Anglo-Irish - my own ancestry is partly Anglo-Irish, and when I researched and wrote about Jonathan Swift a few years ago, I realised that I related strongly to these men's conflicted view of Ireland, from my few years living there.

Anyway, the poem, which would find a place somewhere among my many Yeats favourites:


AT GALWAY RACES (W B Yeats)

There where the course is,
Delight makes all of the one mind,
The riders upon the galloping horses,
The crowd that closes in behind:
We, too, had good attendance once,

Hearers and hearteners of the work;

Aye, horsemen for companions,

Before the merchant and the clerk

Breathed on the world with timid breath.

Sing on: somewhere at some new moon,

We'll learn that sleeping is not death,

Hearing the whole earth change its tune,

Its flesh being wild, and it again

Crying aloud as the racecourse is,

And we find hearteners among men

That ride upon horses.

ReJoyce! James Is Out of Copyright

from A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN (James Joyce)


April 16. Away! Away!

The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone - come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.

April 26. Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

April 27. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.


James Joyce's work has now been in the public domain for two weeks, as it is 70 years since his death. According to this blog post from the New Yorker, this is one in the eye for Stephen Joyce, the author's grandson, who tried to keep a stranglehold on Joyce's estate and frankly sounds like a terrifying and insecure control freak of the type I have occasionally encountered. *cough cough*

The blog post mentions Stephen Joyce's interference in the 2004 Bloomsday celebrations. I'm pretty sure that 2004 was the year I saw more of Bloomsday than any other, and it seems everyone managed to have fun anyway. I remember O'Connell Street thronging with Dubliners, and some sort of strange and fascinating performance art by the Spike - there was a replacement Nelson's Column with a living Nelson on top, and Stephen Dedalus (or Joyce himself?) hanging precariously from a crane. Or something to that effect. It was a rather dreamlike example of the unfailing Irish habit of lateral thinking (ie. thinking outside the box 24/7). I kind of miss that.

Anyway, I thought that I would celebrate by posting a short excerpt from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It would have to be my favourite Joyce book. I read Ulysses just before I moved to Dublin, which was interesting, but a bit of a mistake - simply because I would have recognised a lot more had I waited to read it after I'd lived in Dublin for a year or two. I'd like to return to it, but even having read it before (now about ten years ago), it's a little daunting. I studied Portrait in university and it was something of a revelation. More abstract than Dubliners, it kept two feet on the ground to a certain extent and offered a fascinating and accessible insight into human consciousness. That is a book I would like to reread, more than the others. I've never read Finnegan's Wake. I mean, have you?

Joyce apparently wrote poetry too. A quick glance suggested to me that it wasn't up to much. But if I'm to stick rigidly to the format of this blog (which wasn't really the idea), you could argue that the above is prose poetry. It is certainly unforgettable. "Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead..."

Louis MacNeice's 'Snow': A Poem About Being Alive

SNOW (Louis MacNeice)


The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

© The Estate of Louis MacNeice. Taken from Collected Poems, published by Faber and Faber. Used by permission.

Louis MacNeice famously described his ideal characteristics for a (male) poet as follows: "I would have a poet able-bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions." I have to admit that these words, along with MacNeice's admirably strong jawline and brooding gaze (see the above picture), sent me off into a reverie about Manly Men who are also poets. The cover of his Collected Poems suggests that he also looked very very fine in a fedora hat. But I digress.

MacNeice certainly was a poet who had a grasp of both the seen and the unseen. Many writers and poets lean strongly in one direction or the other, and write either with a powerful physicality, or an intense vision of the intangible. It is surprisingly rare to really achieve both. MacNeice's poems are vividly sensual, as well as insightful and varied in their emotional landscape.

'Snow' is a poem about the nature of reality, about the way things are, and about the dialogue between the conscious and the subconscious. It is a poem with an intense duality, showing the physical world as marvelous and bizarre, while also invoking what lies beyond the physical world. It is a poem about poetry, because poetry in its fullest sense is also a dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious.

This poem reminds me of the work of James Joyce, another Irishman - particularly A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man and Ulysses. I preferred A Portrait of the Artist, finding it more accessible than Ulysses but still a remarkably effective portrayal of what it is like to be alive - the maze of thoughts and emotions, the waves of sensual impressions. With 'Snow', MacNeice is doing something similar. It is a poem about being alive. There are moments when the beauty and strangeness of what we see or hear catches at the heart and leaves a indelible impression that can last for a lifetime. This is the moment when we realise that "World is suddener than we fancy it."

As I read this poem, I can see the roses inside flaring brilliantly against the snow outside, perhaps caught in a sudden gleam from the firelight. I can taste the sweet-sour tangerine, feel the pips in my mouth, hear the small bursts and ripples from the fire. The physical intensity of this poem is second to none. It reminds me of the brief moments when I have moved out of the seashell interiors of the mind into a realm of pure sensation: at a very loud gig, drinking wine on an empty stomach and drowning in sound and light; watching sunrise over Uluru; riding a camel by moonlight into the Sahara and sensing the moment when the texture of the sand changed under its feet; running across a monumental Munich square at night in a thunderstorm. These moments don't come very often for me, but I never forget them: all part of "the drunkenness of things being various." 

And yet, there is much more to 'Snow' - this is where the dialogue between the conscious and the subconscious comes in. I have read interpretations of this poem which suggest that the snow and the roses are distinctively Irish symbols - after all, James Joyce described the fall of the snow at the end of 'The Dead'. This is all possible, but what really stands out to me is that MacNeice understands how separate and yet how united things which are apparently so very different can be. 

"There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses", he writes. "Between" is a very ambiguous word. A wall can stand between two people, but so can a bridge. A window can separate, but it also joins, because you can see through it. The snow and the roses have come together, but they will never touch. This is a paradox, and it is part of the mystery of poetry. Disparate elements come together and maintain their own separate identities, but also unite to create something entirely new and extraordinary, and images from the unconscious swim to the surface to join with a more tangible reality.

O'Connell Bridge, Louis MacNeice and Poetic Echoes

I'm doing a couple of unusual things in this entry: keeping it (relatively) short, and including one of my own poems. Shock horror!

I've been reading Louis MacNeice, who was Anglo-Irish - or an Irishman who spent much of his life in England, or who turned his back on Ireland - depending who you ask. I came across his poem 'O'Connell Bridge', which you can read on this link:

O'CONNELL BRIDGE (Louis MacNeice)

I had an odd feeling when I read this poem which I could not quite explain. Shortly thereafter I realised that it reminded me of a poem which I had written just after moving to London from Dublin, in 2005. I have been reading MacNeice a little bit since university, but I am nearly certain that I had never read 'O'Connell Bridge' before, and certainly not before 2005.

When I wrote my poem, 'Past', I was still sorting out my last year in Dublin both mentally and emotionally, which explains why the content is not the happiest. In any case - my poem was partly inspired by a wind-tossed glimpse of the Liffey river from O'Connell Bridge one night in Dublin, and it seemed to echo some of the images in MacNeice's poem to a surprising extent. Is it just me? You can make up your mind by reading my poem, below. I apologise in advance for the fact that it is definitely not MacNeice.

I have occasionally noticed that certain places (in particular), when taken as poetic subjects, produce similar images from different poets at different times. I don't know if it is coincidence, or a slight intersection of style from poets whose work may have some things in common; or if it is something deeper than that - innate in the place and in the areas of the brain and heart which handle poetry.


PAST (Clarissa Aykroyd)

And when I am years or more beyond
I will still dream the Liffey rising
to drown me, to drink from my mouth.
Those nights I lie outstretched
on O'Connell Bridge, shadow path through metal light.
My friends, the others, walk over, through me,
earth bulges then like sickness
and I roll to meet the river,
sea-smelling, soft mouth gaping
in a green pelt. I could touch its back.
But without hands, will without flesh,
always the Liffey drinks me dry
and the rain gathers in my throat's hollow.
The struggle to waking, the feeling
of tired old August moonlight on me,
the terrible breath bubbling from me.

© Clarissa Aykroyd, 2011. Not to be reproduced without permission.

"Those Mingled Seas": W B Yeats's 'At Algeciras - A Meditation Upon Death'

AT ALGECIRAS – A MEDITATION UPON DEATH (W B Yeats)

The heron-billed pale cattle-birds

That feed on some foul parasite

Of the Moroccan flocks and herds

Cross the narrow Straits to light

In the rich midnight of the garden trees

Till the dawn break upon those mingled seas.

Often at evening when a boy

Would I carry to a friend—

Hoping more substantial joy

Did an older mind commend—

Not such as are in Newton’s metaphor,

But actual shells of Rosses’ level shore.

Greater glory in the sun,

An evening chill in the air,

Bid imagination run

Much on the Great Questioner;

What He can question, what if questioned I

Can with a fitting confidence reply.

November 1928

Memory suggests that Yeats was my first favourite poet, or at least the first to hit obsession-level with me. When I looked at my bookshelf in my parents’ house this summer on a visit home, I was surprised at just how many Yeatsian books I’d collected (though that collection was still quite a bit smaller than those for Sherlock Holmes and Arthurian legend). Certainly from something like 18 to 23 he would have held the top spot. I’m not sure what the catalyst was, but a slim old paperback of Selected Poems definitely played a role.

Yeats was Anglo-Irish, and so to a certain extent am I. My time in Dublin felt a bit like a quest for my roots, but what I ultimately discovered was that I wasn’t Irish at all. I love the Irish but don’t feel particularly at home in Ireland. When I was writing about Jonathan Swift (another Anglo-Irishman) a few years ago, I was astonished to discover how closely I identified with his love-hate relationship with Ireland. Yeats had some of that too.

Some experiences are unquestionably a chapter of their own with a definite beginning and end, and my Irish experience falls into that category. I wonder if Yeats may be a part of that closed chapter as well, because he was one of the elements which drew me to Ireland. I no longer consider him my favourite poet – though he still ranks high on my list. Reading him has more past than present significance for me these days, and I also find his self-absorption a little harder to take than I used to. All that said, well...it’s Yeats. I can’t imagine him not being a part of my life, and I have never questioned his poetic genius.

Many of my favourite Yeats poems are the obvious: ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and ‘Byzantium’, ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, ‘The Second Coming’, ‘Easter 1916’. Then there are the less obvious choices: ‘High Talk’, ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’, ‘Meru’, and also ‘At Algeciras’.

Yeats’s poems are highly personal and normally demand some knowledge of his life. When Yeats wrote ‘At Algeciras’ he had been very ill and had come close to dying. The first stanza, while describing a beautiful vision of transcendent light and herons in the Spanish gardens, also suggests the ever-present nearness of death. Only the “narrow Straits” lie between life and death. In the second stanza, Yeats remembers the seashore of his childhood. Rosses Point, near Sligo in the west of Ireland, is a very different landscape from Algeciras. However, the seashore is the same all over the world in that it inspires reflection and brings back visceral memories for those who grew up nearby. Every seashore that I’ve visited has been different, but all are familiar. All tend to inspire a sense of my own smallness, but also of freedom.

I particularly love the last stanza. Uniquely, Yeats sees God as the “Great Questioner” and asks himself “what if questioned I/Can with a fitting confidence reply.” The approach of death leads people to meditate on their lives and accomplishments, but Yeats seems to be acknowledging the role of personal responsibility as well, and the concept of answering to someone greater than himself. He had already published a collection titled Responsibilities which opens with the epigraph ”In dreams begin responsilbility”, from an “Old Play”.

It is worth mentioning that today is National Poetry Day in the UK – although, of course, every day should be Poetry Day.