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and from 10am (GMT), for 24 hours we're offering a
special discount of 42% on online sales.
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Paddy Jolley 1966-2012
We at The Gallery Press
extend heartfelt sympathy to Seán and Kerry Hardie
on the death of Kerry's brother, Paddy Jolley,
in Delhi recently.
Filmmaker Jolley dies filming in India
The sudden death has taken place of the acclaimed artist and filmmaker
Paddy Jolley, 46,
from a heart attack while filming in the Indian capital of New Delhi.
Mr Jolley, who is survived by his partner Lu Thornely and young sons Ned and Thomas, had a growing international reputation. His hypnotic video installations have been shown around the world at such prestigious venues as the Pompidou Centre, Paris, and the Rotterdam Film Festival,
and he had also won awards at the Sundance Film Festival.
Last year Mr Jolley was included in 'Twenty at IMMA', a collection of artists highly regarded in developing Irish art. Mr Jolley also collaborated on physical art, such as Cenotaph -- a sculpture which was exhibited in Dublin's Temple Bar. It comprised four vintage Massey Ferguson tractors mounted on a steel frame.
— The Sunday Independent, 22 January 2012
Pearse Hutchinson 1927 - 2012
We, at The Gallery Press,
lament the death, on 14 January 2012, of
Pearse Hutchinson
whose fierce and gentle poetry we have been proud to publish for forty years.
Since Geneva, published in a limited edition in August 1972, and Watching the Morning Grow
which followed that Autumn we worked together on nine other titles including The Soul that Kissed the Body (Selected Poems in Irish with translations into English),
Collected Poems and Done into English (Collected Translations).
One of the satisfactions of Pearse's life was the warm reception accorded to his
most recent collection, At Least for a While, shortlisted for
The Irish Times Poetry Now Award.
We look forward to publishing a book of new poems and translations.
Pearse Hutchinson
16 February 1927 - 14 January 2012
May he rest in peace.
Books of the Year 2011
'There were some compelling new volumes: John Burnside’s Black Cat Bone and Justin Quinn's Close Quarters are different in style and subject and gravity, but they are both unmistakable works of a master.’
— Bernard O'Donoghue, TLS.
‘The best book of new poetry this year was Justin Quinn's Close Quarters, a collection which has creative places of its own to describe. The book spans Ireland and the Dublin suburbs (where Quinn grew up) and Prague and the Czech Republic (where he and his family live), to compelling and sometimes unsettling effect. Quinn is one of the few contemporary poets whose command of cadence and rhyme issues in forms that go beyond mechanical formalism; the result is memorable poetry of sustained lyrical power.’
— Peter McDonald, TLS
I'd like to receive Derek Mahon's New Collected Poems. Mahon's combinations of savage indignation and ludic delight, of high formality and apparent ease, repay endless revisiting. — Fintan O'Toole, Journalist and author.
John McAuliffe’s Of All Places was one of the most mentioned books in The Irish Times Books of the Year:
Colm Tóibín . . . John McAuliffe’s Of All Places displays an ability to write public poems about Ireland using tones filled with keen wit, and using cadences, forms and rhythms that have a timeless beauty and grace.
David Wheatley . . . showed a fine cosmopolitan wit.
A selection of images from our book launch and reading on Thursday 23rd June, 2011 at O'Connell
House, Merrion Square, Dublin can be viewed below or on our Facebook page. www.facebook.com/thegallerypress
Derek Mahon’s previous translation work includes plays by Sophocles, Euripides, Racine and Rostand; Words in the Air (Gallery Books, 1998), a selection of poems by Philippe Jaccottet; Birds (Gallery, 2002), a version of Oiseaux by Saint-John Perse, and Adaptations (Gallery, 2006), comprising a wide range of European poets ancient and modern. These new adaptations include work based on Propertius, the principal T’ang poets, Rimbaud, Jorge Guillén and the fictitious ‘Gopal Singh’.
Also represented here, in a striking new departure, are the Haitian poet Jean-F. Brière, and an African group translated from French. Some of these versions are quite literal; others try only to ‘recreate the spirit’ of their originals.
Legend of the Walled-Up Wife - Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin/Ileana Malancioiu
Translations from the Romanian
'. . . they took out the mountain stone by stone,
And they looked again inside my freshly shorn head
As into a totally transparent egg
And there appeared even more hidden things.'
Ileana Malancioiu was born in 1940 in a village in Arges, about a hundred miles northwest of Bucharest. She has worked in journalism and films. In 2004 she received the Romanian Writers' Union Prize for Opera Omnia (Complete Poems). She lives in Bucharest.
From her first collection (1967) onward, her poems draw on rural life and folklore, on religious and literary icons, but their true focus has been on the trauma of history . . . Ten more books of poems appeared in the 1970s and '80s, and in 1992 came the full text of Urcarea Muntelui (Climbing the Mountain, 1985) which had been heavily censored by the Ceausescu regime. Newer poems have been included in two recent enlarged collections spanning her whole career, on which this selection draws. Malancioiu's writing is valued in Romania as a moral force, and for the combination of formal language with frequently shocking imagery.
Eileán Ní Chuilleanáin learned Romanian so that she could translate the poems of Ileana Malancioiu. The result is a book of uncommon empathy.
YEVGENIA
Let him enjoy his bit of happiness . . .
Everything we have is thanks to him.
MASHA
I work too. You think I love teaching those teenage brats? And then
I race back to this wilderness to see this house runs, scrubbing, polishing, cooking, weeding, planting, making sure he eats properly. Don’t talk to me about happiness. It’s for other people . . .
‘He’, of course, is Anton Chekhov, the central figure in Marina Carr’s bold new play, an Abbey Theatre Dublin Theatre Festival offering and a portrait of an enigmatic artist recounted in a new plain style.
Her glimpses accumulate into an insight and new perspectives into the Russian author and the host of characters in orbit around him, among them his sister Masha, his parents, the brother who died, his wife and a lover. Tolstoy appears, as does the Black Monk, a supernatural shadowing figure, as Marina Carr shreds the veil of piety that can surround a beloved writer and, in an assembly of brushstrokes and individual chords, constructs a lament for lost and unfulfilled relationships.
With a hint of Auden’s formal patterns, John McAuliffe’s direct, intriguing poems are simultaneously grounded in the twenty-first century and alive to images and voices from the ancient and recent past. From the implicit surprise or exclamation of its title to the literal reach of all locations, Of All Places embraces Roger Casement, Batman, the last Yahi Indian, the cultures of Stonehenge and Tara, and a former taoiseach in the company of someone ‘who might be his daughter’.
It re-enters Yeats’s west of Ireland and visits America’s West Coast. An ‘archive’ broadcast jolts a time lag into focus and conjures connections between historic taproots and contemporary concerns. John McAuliffe’s truncated narratives, their ‘exemplary control
. . . relish for language . . . and his poems’ capacity to retain a sense of their own spontaneity’ (Tim Liardet, Poetry Review) promise their readers
‘The known world and the unseen,
to which you’ll come back:
that is, the point of departure, the destination,
and all points in between.’
— from ‘Old Style’
‘The long hangar of the turf shed
faces the Broad Road where cars whine.
There our winter warmth is stored . . .’
For more than half a century John Montague has brought a lively diversity of voice and experience to Irish poetry. ‘He is,’ as John Carey wrote in The Sunday Times, ‘virtually Ireland’s poet laureate . . . His best poems are all autobiographical, and mostly about his aunts’ farm in County Tyrone . . . Splinter-sharp, they go straight to the heart, and catch in the memory like burrs.’
Speech Lessons, his latest collection, reprises the great themes of his work — his own, his family’s and his province’s histories. From signs of silent affection on that Ulster farm, the stations of a journey towards a fluent voice, re-imaginings of a bicycle trip along the Marne in the late 1940s and reflections on a President’s resignation, he continues his acts of excavation and recreation. ‘In My Grandfather’s Mansion’, a compendium of memories and another of the author’s extended works with a hint of the epic note, is the hub of an uncommonly enterprising and exuberant book.
New Collected Poems is an updated version of Collected Poems (1999). It brings together, in a new form, the poems the author wishes to preserve from the work of half a century. Duly praised at home and abroad, they range in time and space from the early Ulster poems and ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ to two ambitious sequences, ‘New York Time’ and ‘Decadence’. Also included is the great recent flourish of Harbour Lights, Life on Earth and An Autumn Wind, and a group of previously uncollected poems, among them ‘Monochrome’, ‘The One-Thirty’, and ‘Dreams of a Summer Night’.
In Poetry Review Michael Hulse commended Justin Quinn’s ‘polished, urbane manner that owes something to Brodsky . . . its great attraction as poetry lies in the lithe lyric gift . . .’ and remarked on ‘. . . the density Quinn commands even at his seeming simplest . . . light in its touch, engaging in tone, and civilized in stance.’
For the first time since his debut in 1995 Justin Quinn in this, his fifth collection, turns his careful gaze on Ireland, from the 1980s to the present, and especially on Blackrock in County Dublin where he grew up. As the book’s title hints, embraces and battles take place at close quarters. Clashes occur both in relationships and between countries, and the poems ring the change on ‘amour and attack’ as he writes about marriage, being a parent, the cold wars and cultural exchange. A series of pastoral poems refract the months of a year while the collection confirms its author as an adept of the concise idea, a new directness of expression and a singing line.
‘The essence of her marvellous poems lies in the way she sees through a material world that is rendered truthfully, plainly, yet freshly.’ — George Szirtes, The Irish Times
Kerry Hardie’s five collections, published by The Gallery Press, have garnered praise and prizes and have attracted a growing band of devoted readers. Her work is celebrated for its particular way of seeing, a rhapsodic recording of landscape and weather in cherished places — the valleys around her Kilkenny home, ancient monastic settlements and isolated islands. Selected Poems distils almost twenty years’ work, charts adventures in Australia, China, Paris and the Pyrenees and encompasses grief and loss while honouring thirty years of marriage. Above all, her work maps emotional states, ‘the way things are’ . . . ‘all as it is’ . . . ‘Lives. Theirs, ours. Human times are mostly hard.’ A long sequence explores the trials of exile. Yet for all such hardships her parables of experience find and offer consolation.
In Poetry Ireland Review Jaki McCarrick recently commended the poems’ ‘deep slow burn . . . Long after they have been read their profound and simple power persists.’
Three stories, restored to print after almost half a century, proffer insights to another Ireland. ‘Mr Sing My Heart’s Delight’ introduces exotic colour to a Donegal outpost, ‘My Father and the Sergeant’ penetrates the relationship between a father and son, while the title story contains a blueprint of the author’s acclaimed Dancing at Lughnasa. They are enhanced by the subtle art of one of Ireland’s finest painters. This handsome edition features full colour reproductions of paintings by Basil Blackshaw specially created in response to this work. 400 copies are numbered and signed by the author. 350 copies only are for sale. Hardbound in linen with blind-embossed title and in a Pergamenata wraparound. A Man’s World is the fifth title in this greatly admired series. The Riverbank Field by Seamus Heaney (and Martin Gale) and Conversation in the Mountains by John Banville (and Donald Teskey) are out of print. A limited number of copies of Somewhere theWave by Derek Mahon (and Bernadette Kiely) and Wayside Shrines by Paul Muldoon (and Keith Wilson) are still available.A Man’s World is a unique opportunity to secure a signed first edition by one of the world’s great writers. This will be a collectors’ item.
Wayside Shrinesby Paul Muldoon
with paintings and drawings by Keith Wilson
Two new extended poems by one of the most exciting writers at work, enhanced by the understated and evocative art of one of Ireland’s finest young painters. This handsome edition features pencil drawings and full colour reproductions of paintings by Keith Wilson specially created in response to this work.400 copies are numbered and signed by the author. 350 copies only are for sale. Printed on Rives Artist and hardbound in linen with blind embossed title and in a Pergamenata wraparound. Wayside Shrines is the fourth title in this greatly admired series. The Riverbank Field by Seamus Heaney (and Martin Gale) and Conversation in the Mountains by John Banville (and Donald Teskey) are out of print. A limited number of copies of Somewhere the Wave by Derek Mahon (and Bernadette Kiely) are still available.
Somewhere the Wave - new poems by Derek Mahon
with drawings and watercolours by Bernadette Kiely.
Ten new poems – one of Derek Mahon’s ‘interim’ collections – conjure the world of Coleridge’s life, Brian Moore’s Belfast and the plays of Ibsen and Chekhov. They range from Italy to Goa to the American South. With the formal art of a master, they are sure to delight the author’s admirers.This handsome edition features pencil drawings and full colour reproductions of watercolours by Bernadette Kiely specially created in response to this new work.500 copies are numbered and signed by the author. 450 copies only are for sale. Printed on Rives Artist and hardbound in linen with blind embossed title and in a Pergamenata wraparound. Somewhere the Wave is the second title in a new series. The first, The Riverbank Field by Seamus Heaney (and Martin Gale), was oversubscribed on publication. An instant collectors' item.
‘Of all contemporary authors, there is no one I admire more highly than Brian Friel . . . Molly Sweeney is magnificent and I read it with great joy.’
— Peter Brook
‘The speeches are rich with rapturous poetry and the music of rising and falling emotions. Rarely has Mr Friel written with such intoxicating specificity . . .’
— David Richards, New York Times
Molly Sweeney, blind for almost forty years, has made a life for herself in darkness. Now the ‘gift of sight’ may be available. Against her better instinct she is urged to grasp it . . . Fifteen years after he wrote his masterpiece, Faith Healer, Brian Friel boldly returns to the same themes and employs the same dramatic method of soliloquy. The result is a literary chamber-music of deep compassion and compelling tragedy.
Yeats wished to be ‘counted one’ with him. Joyce decreed he was ‘the most distinguished poet of the Celtic world and one of the most inspired poets of any country ever to make use of the lyric form’. His gravestone proclaims him to be ‘Ireland’s National Poet’.
James Mangan (he adopted the ‘Clarence’ later) was born in Dublin in 1803. He worked as a scrivener and journalist, with stints in the Ordnance Survey Office and the library of Trinity College, Dublin. His poetry draws on an extraordinary range of sources, including exotic languages and legends, and features also ‘translations’ for which there were no originals. It continues the lyric flights of Shelley and Byron and the gothic fancies of Coleridge and De Quincey. It anticipates the work of Poe (nearly his exact contemporary) and the more modern notion of the poète maudit, all the while foreshadowing the work of Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Verlaine. Propelled frequently by hypnotic rhythms, enlightened by verbal play and ingenuity, from couplets to long poems, Mangan’s verse gives voice to the starkness of his own predicament (‘Old and hoary at thirty-nine’) and, in a poem like ‘Siberia’, fuses a desolate interior with the great concern of Famine Ireland. His masterpieces, ‘The Nameless One’ and ‘Twenty Golden Years Ago’, are cornerstones of nineteenth-century poetry, while ardent period pieces, such as ‘Dark Rosaleen’, are anthems of a former age. In tune with the intense passions of his time, his work appeared in the first issue of The Nation (1842). By the time of his death –– of cholera –– in Dublin in 1849, his haunted brain had sung, in high-flown reverie, ‘life’s bitter cup and woe’.
David Wheatley, editor of this selection, has returned to original sources to distil, from an enormous and uneven oeuvre and for newgenerations, the essential, enduring glories of the poetry of an inspired soul.
The Astrakhan Cloak - Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill/Paul Muldoon
‘These exuberant poems filter a modern suburban existence through the beguiling miasma of a more ancient Ireland . . . What Muldoon calls in one poem ‘the monsters of the imagination, the demons of the air,’ dart through the book like sly witches on a wild night.’ — Conor Kelly, Sunday Tribune
‘The two poets are at their best, making The Astrakhan Cloak a landmark in Irish literature.’
— Frankie Sewell, Fortnight
‘This is an outstanding volume which with a poignant assurance places its hope in the ‘little boat/of the language’.’ — Tom Paulin, Independent on Sunday Books of the Year
Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was published in 1897 and first produced by Stanislavsky at the newly founded Moscow Art Theatre in 1899.
‘Uncle Vanya is embedded in a distinctive historical and cultural landscape. The translator’s job is to fashion an original repetition of the story that has been shaped by those determinants. This requires a carrying across of that text over a gap of a hundred years and across the divide of language and culture, and then representing the story in a language that keeps faith with the subtleties of the original but whose rhythms and nuances we respond to today. Such an undertaking is audacious and cheeky. But if it reflects even palely Chekhov’s sense and sensibility it is well worth the risk.’ –– Brian Friel
‘Brian Friel’s version shows a great dramatist’s imagination being fired by his admiration for another. The result is thrilling: alchemy at work.’ — John Peter, The Sunday Times
Haunted by the death, fifteen years previously, of her twin brother who keeps calling to her, Portia Coughlan has become in turn a ghostly figure. She lives with her husband, whom she can’t love, and her three children, whom she can’t trust herself to care for.The drama of Portia’s sexually charged relationships and her fierce exertion to sustain her independence grows and grows in Marina Carr’s richly textured dialogue, beautiful lyric soarings and visionary flights.‘Carr’s harrowing play has the scale and anguish of myth, and the immediacy of a contemporary anecdote.’
–– Robert Butler, The Independent on Sunday
Faith Healer is now recognized as one of the masterpieces of Ireland’s greatest living playwright. In the course of four monologues the stories of a travelling healer, his wife, and his manager unfold. Brian Friel weaves their versions of the healer’s ‘performances’ and a terrible event into haunting, magnificent art.
‘Through their evasions, omissions, and confessions, Frank’s speeches chart the trajectory of his self-destruction . . . The story of his struggle to recapture his spiritual powers becomes, instead, the story of the loss of a soul . . . Frank’s wife, Grace, and his manager, Teddy, are the other witnesses to the healings — and to the price they all pay for his occasional miracles. In Friel’s brilliant storytelling, the refracted memories of the characters paint a harrowing picture of recrimination and self-aggrandizement.’
— John Lahr, The New Yorker
‘The tragedy for the characters in Faith Healer is that while connection among them is elusive, the memory of fleeting contact remains and scalds. That the same might be said of the play’s effect upon us is, more than anything, what makes Faith Healer a major work of art.’ — Ben Brantley, The New York Times
On National Poetry Day 2010 the English Association announced the inauguration of a new biennial prize of £500 for a distinctive first volume of poetry in English published in Britain or Ireland – in the first instance between January 2008 and June 2011.
The Prize was established in honour of the Liverpool-born poet Michael Murphy who died of a brain tumour, aged 43, in May 2009.
‘The Sphere of Birds is full of capacious but rigorously controlled poems in which, without strain or undue artifice, Ciaran Berry moves outward from the personal to a breadth of cultural and historical reference, before returning quietly to details of remembered experience. Far from being gratuitous or ostentatious, his literary range is purposefully engaged to cast light on the idiosyncrasies of human behaviour. Although this is a first collection, Berry is already a poised and mature lyric poet with a clear grasp of how a meticulous technique can be used to explore complex subjects.’
— Judges comments
The Award will be presented on National Poetry Day, 6 October 2011.
Of All Places We're delighted to announce that John McAuliffe's third collection, Of All Places, has been selected as an Autumn (July-September) Recommendation by England's Poetry Book Society.
Irish Times Poetry Now 2011 Winner
Congratulations to Seamus Heaney on winning this years' Irish Times Poetry Now Award for his 12th collection, Human Chain (Faber & Faber).
Three of the five titles shortlisted for the award are published by The Gallery Press. They are The View from Here by Sara Berkeley, Until Before After by Ciaran Carson, and A Fool's Errand by Dermot Healy. Also on the shortlist was Maggot by Paul Muldoon (Faber & Faber).
The winner was announced during the DLR International Poetry Festival, which will took place in Dún Laoghaire from March 24th-27th.
Peter Sirr won the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award 2011 with his collection The Thing Is. The winner was announced by Limerick County Arts Office which inaugurated the award in memory of the late Co Limerick poet Michael Hartnett (1941-1999).
In their citation, the judges, Tom McCarthy, Mary O’Malley and James Harpur described “The Thing Is” as a “book of great poetic power, a complex and illuminating work of art”.
“Peter Sirr has created a marvellous narrative in poetry, a work of great technical skill in verse-craft that is lifted beyond mere craft by the power of reflective waiting. Page after page, as the hours spent within poetry go by, a sense of heightened autobiography is achieved and a new level of making poems is arrived at.”
Following the announcement, the Dublin-based Peter Sirr said he was “very pleased and happy” his book had been singled out. “Unlike other kinds of writing, poetry can have a very delayed reaction. A book comes out and it might take months before a review appears. You begin to wonder whether anyone has read it, whether poetry counts for much. But books of poems live their own lives, they make their own slow, hesitant way into the world. When something like this comes along it's an enormously confirming, encouraging thing. It means the book has got through to people, that it hasn't sunk without trace.”
Mr Sirr said the Hartnett Award was especially important for him because Michael Hartnett was a poet “whose work I value highly and to receive an award in his memory is a pretty singular honour.”
2010 Forward Prize Winner Announced
Congratulations to Seamus Heaney for winning this years' Forward Prize for his collection Human Chain (Faber & Faber) Click here for further information.
French Honour for John Montague
The French government's annual Bastille Day honours list includes John Montague who will become a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur, 'one of France's highest decorations'.Gallery will publish a new collection Speech Lessons next year. Work continues on French Leaves, selected French translations. Félicitations
Reviews
Close Quarters - Justin Quinn - TLS
A Multiplicity of Belonging
Justin Quinn’s ‘close quarters’ are various. Quinn is from County Dublin, but has taught American literature in Prague since 1995, arriving ‘in the wreck /of central Europe’, as he puts it in ‘The City Gates’, a few years after the fall of the Iron Curtain. His younger self turned up in Prague speculatively, one feels, knowing ‘ a girl, some words in Czech’, and since then he has raised a family in his adopted homeland; an experience that was initially ‘like being dead’ has transmuted into a fully supported life.
His seems to be an identity refracted, not fractured; many of the poems speak of a conscience that knows where it belongs, and appreciates the multiplicity of that belonging – in literary as well as geographical and familial terms. There are poems here beginning with lines by Edward Thomas, with the Czech food and travel writer Evan Rail, and the American folk-rock band Fleet Foxes; others proudly take inspiration from Horace, Ernest Hilbert, Folgore da San Gimigniano. It is a sense of multiplicity imparted and encouraged in hopeful and spirited poems such as ‘Seminar’, which is rooted in Quinn’s teaching life: ‘I carry America into these young heads, /at least some parts of it that haven’t yet got there.’ They lap it up; he celebrates them for this, and for, at the end of class, readying themselves, ‘for their daily trek /across a continent and ocean home.’
Most of Close Quarters is metrical verse, much of it in rhymed pentameter quatrains. Quinn’s tone and method are sometimes reminiscent of Tony Harrison and, as Harrison did in his early poems, Quinn gets away with the occasional pat rhyme because at his finest he achieves a rare poignancy, as in these lines from ‘Musilkova’:
Named for a local doctor, executed
In 1940 for his work in resistance.
Whether he was recruiter or recruited,
Where he placed bombs or just gave assistance,
Is hard to find out now, or why he joined
When most other people were dragging their feet.
Suddenly no options left. A single point.
Let out into a yard. Became a street.
Quinn’s wide-eyed but intelligent fascination with his environments, coupled with his talent for getting at the universal through the local and personal, has much to do with why this collection is so enjoyable to read. He is a realist, with a strong social conscience and sense of history, but a realist can keep faith too. Even his poem about yelling ‘Fuck’ when his small child punches him in the balls while playing Batman turns to a frank meditation on what love is, and perhaps isn’t, and is at once a startling warning and a tribute:
Your mother
And I embrace you more
Than we do one another.
You are now where we store
Our fun, and like a parable
We’ve lately turned to marble.
The close quarters in Close Quarters, then, are undoubtedly the poet’s. But we might see something of ourselves in even his most personal poems.
— TLS, Rory Waterman
New Collected Poems - Derek Mahon - The Sunday Times
Top of the Form
A selection of Derek Mahon’s work over the past half century triumphantly confirms him as a master of his craft.
New Collected Poems is published to mark the 70th birthday of the Irish poet Derek Mahon, one of the most admired and influential writers of the generation that also produced Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley. Mahon, the great stylist of the three, is swift and restless, like the man in the poem The Last of the Fire Kings, "who drops at night / from a moving train // and strikes out over the fields /where fireflies glow. / not knowing a word of the language", yet who is burdened by obligations to a society that he can barely stand to inhabit.
Mahon's work often emerges at the crossing of utopian Romanticism with a terse wit. He tends not to use irony in the way that often typifies English poetry — to disarm protest with realism — but rather to sustain the contrast between what is necessary to the spirit and the stuff that is generally available. This form of resistance, fruitfully shaped by French poets such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Nerval, often issues in a visionary sense of the great stretches of the globe "far from the sea lanes" and mercifully beyond human reach.
There is a kind of pantheism at work in Mahon's poems, at times a greater kinship with the non-human world than the human, as in The Mute Phenomena, after Nerval. "Your great mistake is to disregard the satire / bandied among the mute phenomena. Be strong if you must, your brisk hegemony / means f***-all to the sunflower or the extinct volcano", Mahon proposes, concluding: "Already in a lost hub-cap is conceived / the ideal society which will replace our own."
One of Mahon's characteristics is his formal brilliance, which like that of Louis MacNeice also seems to grow from contrast — on the one hand improvisation, on the other a poised authoritative elegance, the two often married in the same poem, such as the lapidary Dutch "interior" Courtyards in Delft, and the many examples of his early signature form, the short-lined tercet (Lives, The Last of the Fire Kings and Ovid in Tomis) , as well as the ampler, richly orchestrated stanzas of the later work.
Mahon has been a continuous reviser of his poetry, which sometimes produces anxiety in a naturally possessive readership, and there will be fruitful labour for scholars in this latest instalment of the rolling Collected. Yet the poet's attention to the past should not suggest that he has ceased to develop. Epistolary poems, translations and versions, verse letters and lyrics emerge steadily in recent collections such as Harbour Lights and Life on Earth. Mythological poems such as Calypso, a retelling of Odysseus's homeward voyage, the reimagining of Chekhov's Trigorin, and an elegy for the Irish poet and singer James Simmons, add new dimensions to his best work.
Calypso naturally commends the contemplative (some would say idle) life: "Bemused with his straw hat and driftwood stick, / unmoved by the new wars and the new ships, / he died there, fame and vigour in eclipse, / listening to voices echo, decks and crates / creak in the harbour like tectonic plates." That ready movement between the local and the vast is typical and much imitated.
There is also a group of previously uncollected poems here, of which perhaps the finest is Monochrome, an elegy for the poet's first wife, for "the grey gaze there in the photograph". It is a work of graceful praise and frank regret. The assurance of Mahon's art in balancing the two is perhaps the greatest compliment to its subject: "Don't mind me, for the important facti is this, that you were once uniquely here, / a brief exposure, an exceptional act / performed once only in our slower lives / with your blue gaze and your longer hair / now ash forever in the long sea waves." A lesser poet would have avoided the heartbreaking emphasis of the final line by making consolation too easily achieved. Mahon, though, is not a lesser poet but a master.
— Sean O’Brien, The Sunday Times, 31 July 2011
Speech Lessons - John Montague
Writing as the future whirls past
IN 2009, TO CELEBRATE his 80th birthday, the Gallery Press published a refreshing variation on the standard Selected Poems by way of tribute to John Montague’s long career. Chosen Lights crowd-sourced its selection, asking 30 poets to name and comment on their favourite Montague poems.
The result featured poems from each of Montague’s collections, and a commentary that noted the distinctiveness of Montague’s style: his use of autobiography, the cool carefulness of his diction, the border that dominates his national poems. Now, two years later, Montague has written a book that adds to and inflects our understanding of his work.
Speech Lessons (Gallery, 72pp, €11.95) elaborates on a landscape and society with which his readers will be familiar. The poems dwell on ancestors, but the sequence ostensibly addressed to the memory of his grandfather segues into poems that remember the women of his family: as ever, Montague’s poems swerve away from readerly expectations. Silences begins as a pronouncement on poetry but turns, quickly, into a love poem, “a prayer before an unknown altar”. Montague’s poems may be newly nostalgic about the days of horse and cart, but the old analytic intelligence is evident, defending his choice of subject matter, maybe, when he observes “the future, already whirling past” ('The Long Hangar').
“Remarks are not literature,” said Gertrude Stein, but Montague’s pointed asides on Thomas Hardy and Máire Mhac an tSaoi, and tributes to John Berryman and others, do throw his own aesthetic and political preoccupations into sharp relief. His insistence on mischief is nicely caught in the rhyming lines which remember “that grown-ups of some importance / may still frolic like infants” ('One Bright Sunday'), a sentiment enacted by his ecstatic portrait of Christ:
I saw a tiny Christ
caper on the cross
silent as a salamander
writhing in fire
('Baldung’s Vision')
— John McAuliffe, The Irish Times, 16 July 2011
New Collected Poems - Derek Mahon
So much going on it could make a soul dizzy
ALMOST 40 YEARS AGO, in 1972, Derek Mahon’s second collection of poetry, Lives , was published with a cover photograph of workers leaving the Belfast shipyard in 1911, Titanic in the background. It was a bold decision, ahead of its time, following on from the photographic portrait of the 27-year-old Mahon that heralded his maritime-entitled debut, Night-Crossing (1968). In his writing since, Mahon has imaginatively shuttled back and forth between these twin worlds, between the mighty forces of modernity, focused in Belfast around the easterly shores of a chastening lough and its intimate coastline, within which generations of ordinary men and women lived and worked, and the poetic sense of self withstanding and absorbing the urban tides of industrialism and its accumulated pressures, products and freedoms. No matter where his poems have taken him – from and to London, New York, Goa, Cork – these forces are at play, sometimes up front, other times under the surface of the poem. At times they clash:
Not long from barbarism to decadence, not far
from liberal republic to defoliant empire
and thence to entropy; not long before
the great money scam begins its long decline
to pot-holed roads and unfinished construction sites,
as in the dark ages a few scattered lights –
though it’s only right and proper we set down
that in our time New York was a lot of fun. – American Deserta
History for Mahon is personal, and in this New Collected Poems the delight in sticking to his guns becomes apparent the more one sees this book in its own right, no longer umbilically connected to those cherished early “slim” volumes such as The Snow Party (1975) or The Hunt By Night (1982) and their revered place in the reader’s literary past. New Collected Poems follows on from the impressive success of Collected Poem s (1999), and in the process Mahon has shifted the imaginative fulcrum of his oeuvre towards more recent work — the extraordinary run that began with The Hudson Letter (1995) and The Yellow Book (1997) and continued into the new century with Harbour Lights (2005), Life on Earth (2008) and An Autumn Wind (2010). New Collected Poems maintains this momentum and has all the culminating power and magisterial presence of a world remade in the poet’s own light.
Grand absolutes, though, fall away in the simple pleasures of reading Mahon. If you want “big” Yeatsian stanzas, they are here in abundance; jewels of haiku, go no farther; lyrical languor, sparking irony, wry humour, demotically discursive derring-do, Zen-like epiphany, the art of poetry is displayed in all its teeming variousness on every page. Not as a manual of affectation and demonstrative style but as a craftsman who sees language as the raw material that has to be properly used; as a consequence, the work is phenomenal. If Joyce really did think that Dublin could be reconstructed from Ulysses , Mahon’s New Collected Poems will similarly provide time-capsule proof of late-20th- and early-21st-century transatlantic life.
Although in New Collected Poems the reader discovers the physical and natural landscape alongside a creaturely life, the overwhelming sound is of a voice dramatically portraying the odds on the planet surviving, the aesthetic mismatch between the market and art values, the vacuity of much that is being pushed at us as “popular”, a critical dialogue between past and present, between the western world and the east (like Louis MacNeice, Mahon has found an India of the mind), between Swiftian misanthropy and Wildean playfulness, the freedom of the visual arts and the dedicated antiheroic figures of literature. The cultural wars are zipping like lightning through this poet’s world as never before. There is so much going on in New Collected Poems it could make a soul dizzy.
Some may grumble about poems that have been cut adrift from the mother ship – A Kensington Notebook , for one – but 370 or so pages of Mahon’s poetry contained within this New Collected Poems is a revelation. As a book of convergences, detached from its separate roots in individual volumes, New Collected Poems shows Mahon as sprightly and as engaging as he was at the very beginning of his writing life, in the 1960s. Dreams of a Summer Night , the concluding poem, finishes on
I await the daylight we were born to love:
birds at a window, boats on a rising wave,
light dancing on dawn water, the lives we live.
These last four words of New Collected Poems , “the lives we live”, recall what the great American poet Wallace Stevens said about how poetry “helps us to live our lives”. New Collected Poems helps too; it is a massive poetic achievement, no mistake.
— Gerald Dawe, The Irish Times, 2nd July 2011
Selected Poems - Kerry Hardie
Kerry Hardie's first collection, A Furious Place, was one of the most striking debuts of the 1990s, and it is a pleasure now to reread the astonishing At St Laserian’s Cathedral, Old Loughlin, whose final stanza gives the book its title:
And I think what a furious place is the heart: so raw and so pure and so shameless. We both drink the water. I drink with defiance and you drink without it. No one is watching, but God, and He doesn’t care, except for the heart’s intention.
That poem’s big organ music, its clear tones and phrasing are present throughout Hardie’s new book, Selected Poems (Gallery Press, 96pp, €20/€12.50). The poems speak to us from gardens as well as graveyards, from private homes as much as churches, and, most often, from the borders and boundaries that the poems speak so often and beautifully of breaching or attempting to breach.
Hardie’s poems admit disappointment alongside achievement (“After the urgent work, I have sat with this piece / trying to understand; failing,” she writes in the long sequence Exiles ), and sickness alongside health (“sometimes even sickness is generous,” she writes in She Replies to Carmel’s Letter, “and takes you by the hand and sits you / beside things you would otherwise have passed over”). Our trust reposes in such clear, open writing, what she describes herself as the “strange thin moment that’s see-through to somewhere else”.
Hardie’s later poems are barer, more strongly narrative, and sometimes read like parables and portraits at once. She has two recent poems about phone calls. One is called Communication and begins, wonderfully, “My father wouldn’t talk on the phone”, and later admits, “Alone in the house, I let the phone ring for days.” The second poem is called Solitude, which describes its speaker, having “hardly seen anyone for days”, spending a day out of the house. It ends:
When I got home the phone was ringing, I had the key in the door but it wouldn’t turn. I heard the phone cease in the empty house. And the dogs milled about. And the pumpkin stared out at the moon.
— John McAuliffe, The Irish Times, 14 May 2011
Poem of the Month
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