Something I Wrote During the Lockdown

(Apologies once again for my long and continuing absence from blogging. I am hoping to have more time soon, although it will be a gradual return. In the meantime, here is a blog post I wrote during the lockdown. I wrote it as a sample blog post for a work blog I was proposing, in which library staff would write articles drawing on the books and collections in the library. That idea sunk without a trace, so here it is.

As I had no access to any libraries at this point, and very little internet access, I had to rely on the books at home. That is why the selection is so eclectic.) 

Themes in Irish Poetry since 1970: a Very Selective Content Analysis

Poetry is both universal and particular, private and public, timeless and ephemeral. Poetry has been an important part of Irish culture from the days of the Irish filí to the time of Yeats and beyond. The popular readership of poetry may have declined in recent decades, in Ireland as elsewhere, but it remains a prestigious literary form, and one which many people turn to in order to express their deepest feelings, concerns and aspirations. Poetry is also an especially favourable medium for examining the preoccupations of a culture; although a poet might well write about trivial things, it’s generally used to explore the deeper currents of human existence.

This blog post is a very selective examination of some Irish poetry written since 1970. The date of 1970 may be considered fairly arbitrary; however, it seems a convenient starting point for “contemporary Ireland”, coming as it does after the social upheavals of the sixties.

My sample consists of six books and six periodicals published between 1981 and 2019. They are:

The Selected John Hewitt, published by Blackstaff Press in 1981.

The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, published by Oxford University Press in 1986.

Sweet Sweet Memories, self-published by Fran Murphy in 1986.

Poetry Now Anthology 98, published by Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council in 1998.

Poems Through Ireland, a poetry collection self-published by street poet Jamesa Kelly in 2000.

Tallaght Soundings, a collection of prose and poetry by Virginia House Creative Writers, 2007.

Six copies of Comhar, the premier Irish language magazine, which range from 2011 to 2018.

I have only featured poems published after 1970, which amount to 207 poems in all. My sample includes poems in both Irish and English, poems by recognized poets and by “ordinary people”, and poems dating from the whole range of my chosen timespan.

One thing that is immediately obvious from reading these poems is that the Celtic Mist had long evaporated by 1970; even the “ordinary” poets (who might be assumed to be either above or below literary fashion) do not draw on the romantic literary conventions associated with the Celtic Revival. The closest we come to this is “The Hero’s Portion” by John Montague, which takes as its subject the ancient Celtic custom of assigning the best portions of meat to the mightiest warrior. But the vocabulary is far from romantic: “Cracking and splitting down to the marrow stuffed bone where he licked and sucked as clean as a whistle”. Jamesa Kelly’s express a strident Irish republicanism, but one based on a solidarity with ancestral suffering and struggle rather than on an idealized national heritage.

Irish history—the sort of history which fills history books, that is—features in thirty-six of the 207 poems, most prominently in the works of John Hewitt and Jamesa Kelly. Hewitt was an Ulster poet, who was raised in the Methodist tradition. His poetry sought to transcend the ethnic and religious divide of Ulster, and to identity with Irish history as a whole, particularly in solidarity with its suffering:

The careful words of my injunction

Are unrhetorical; as neutral

And unaligned as any I know

They propose no more than a thoughtful response;

They do not pound with drum-beats

Of patriotism, loyalty, martyrdom.

“Neither an Elegy Nor a Manifesto”, 1972

John Hewitt

James Kelly’s volume includes laments for the Irish republican hunger striker Bobby Sands, and many denunciations of Britain’s role in Irish history. However, he has no rosy view of Ireland’s traditions: the poem “Modern Ireland” is an attack on the title subject, but concludes that the present is still better than the past: “Goodness, how pathetic our past”.

Two poems in the selection—an excerpt from “A Farewell to English” by Michel Hartnett, and “Gaeltacht” by Pearse Hutchinson, express a strong sense of loss in the decline of the Irish language, and the culture associated with it. Other than that, the corpus of poems analyzed here come close, at least by implication, to agreeing with the famous words of Stephen Daedalus: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

Michael Hartnett

At least this is true when it comes to history with a capital H. The other sorts of history—family history, social history, personal history—are treated more favourably on the whole.

Memory is a major theme in these poems: in thirty-seven of the 207 poems, it is a primary theme. The memories featured are very often painful, especially in the works of John Hewitt. They are only sometimes nostalgic—most of often in the volume by Fran Murphy, about half of whose poems are fond recollections of her Italian-American childhood. (She moved to Ireland in 1968, but her poems display very little interest in Irish culture per se.)

Occasionally they are ambivalent, as in “Above the Pool” by John Montague, which describes a childhood romantic encounter. What strikes the reader, when reading these “memory” poems, is their intensity, their vividness—that, and how they tend to be more concerned with personal and family life than with the “grand narratives” of history. (John Hewitt, whose “memory poems” are often specific to the conflict in Northern Ireland, is a counter-example.)

Irishness is rather less of a theme in the poems than I had expected. John Hewitt writes eighteen poems on the subject, and Jamesa Kelly writes sixteen, but outside that there are only twelve poems where Irishness is a prominent theme.

Jamesa Kelly’s “For All Who Want to Be Irish” is one of the most explicit meditations on this topic:

It’s not as simple as it seems you see,

Here is a complex sort of treachery.

Is it possible to live here, but really part of it,

Unless you are born in this land

And spend your time in the womb of Mother Ireland?

The tentativeness of this poem is quite representative. Few of the poems in my sample posit any essence of Irishness, or meditate upon the national character per se.

Modernity, also, is less of a major theme than I would have expected. There are few “zeitgeisty” poems, few references to new technologies or social changes. Jamesa Kelly has poems on Viagra and mobile phones, and The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse includes “The Guttural Muse” by Seamus Heaney, in which the poet envies a crowd of young people leaving the disco. The last poem in Tallaght Soundings (“Demographics” by Patrick Sneyd) is a very matter-of-fact acknowledgement of the new multicultural Ireland. Other than that, modernity is more taken for granted than commented upon.

Poetry itself is quite a prominent theme. John Hewitt writes about Walter Savage Landor. Jamesa Kelly writes about Michael Hartnett. Michael Hartnett writes about Yeats. Cathal Ó Searcaigh writes about Ovid, and Marguerite Sneyd writes about a poetry reading given by Paul Durcan. Altogether there are sixteen poems in which poetry is a major theme.

Dirk Benedict meditating on poetry

 

As might be expected, there are many poems about romantic love, although they tend to concentrate on its pains and disappointments, rather than its joys. “Scaradh na Compánach” by Caitríona Ní Chlėirchin describes the Countess of Donegal’s sadness and anxiety as her husband leaves her for battle. “Another Cold Dinner” by Fran Murphy laments a husband constantly late home, and expresses feelings of abandonment. Jamesa Kelly’s volume contains poems addressed to several different women, but the accent in these is upon pain and sorrow. It is significant, perhaps, that the most purely romantic poem in the sample—“Twilight” by Anne McGarth, one of the Tallaght poets—celebrates a private moment of reverie, set against a cityscape with no mention of other human beings.

Virtually all the poems are written in free verse, or using a very loose metre and rhyme scheme. John Hewitt is the poet who draws on traditional verse forms the most, particularly the sonnet. On the whole, however, the forms used occupy a middle ground between traditional verse on one hand, and the kind of dense, cryptic verse favoured by High Modernists such as Pound and Eliot on the other.

The overriding impression I take from these poems is one of melancholy. They seem to evoke a human condition where—as Samuel Johnson put it—much is to be endured and little is to be enjoyed. Personal experience is more real to these contemporary poets than the backdrop of history and current affairs. Memory is insistent, but is painful more often than not. Poetry itself is frequently a theme, which fits well with the general atmosphere of interiority and self-exploration. Ireland is a context rather than a subject matter. Religion is rarely mentioned. There is little sense of broad horizons, new frontiers, or enticing possibilities. The poet is thrown upon his or her own resources, navigating fhe traumas of private and cultural memories, seeking personal meaning in an often hostile or indifferent world.