Thinking about questions posed by poems, from Seamus Heaney to Eavan Boland – The Irish Times

Perhaps since Wordsworth’s preface to the Lyrical Ballads, poets have been using prose to understand how poems and poetry work. Something about the procedures of prose, its politeness and firmness, makes it a useful means of unmasking the more exciting qualities of poetry and the purposes they might serve.

Some poets use prose as a rhetorical crowbar with which to pry open their closed boxes of poems; others take a more volatile approach, creatively fizzing and sparkling on the more complicated matters of sentences and paragraphs. For both, prose can be a serious way to try to think about (and possibly answer) questions that poems pose.

“We were all once young… and full of religious zeal to save Irish poetry from its own limitations,” writes Thomas McCarthy in an essay on Harry Clifton. What exactly those restrictions might be is not stated in the catalogue, as McCarthy is a critic of unusual generosity. Even the book is generous, with 73 essays spanning almost 50 years, from 1978 to 2022. It is a life’s work, and a good-natured and hospitable one at that: it takes a long time before you see an equally positive take on Irish poetry, or as a warm answer.

Although the book’s title promises a broader perspective, one will search in vain to question Ireland’s contemporary scandals (clerical and institutional sexual abuse, the Magdalene laundries, Tuam babies, etc. – and what dark shadow that casts) etc.”): it is poetry, poets and notable novelists that are the subjects here.

For McCarthy, nothing if not an idealist, the beauty of poetry is its “redemptive nature,” (as he writes in an essay on Annemarie Ní Churreáin). But the best poetry is also “the most purposeful,” and much of that purpose is humanistic, as this most humane of essays proves.

Preferences creep in and if the book sometimes seems less to question Ireland than to affirm Cork, this partisan adherence is perhaps to be expected. An entire section is devoted to The Question of Cork and while some topics may seem on the arcane side, even for so dedicated a librarian, two accompanying pieces on Sean Dunne confirm the value of the commemorative impetus and its recollected praise.

The question of female poetry may not have been so neatly answered and may raise more questions than even this book can answer. One of these may be why women’s poetry should be placed in a separate chapter, while men’s is allowed to roam freely across the Irish poetic plain. The question of men’s poetry is apparently a question that needs neither to be asked nor answered.

As with any anthology covering such a broad time frame, the significance or even relevance of the topics of some of these essays will have diminished in the intervening years. The Party, as a term, may need a footnote now, knowing what to do about it now cash for ashWould anyone argue (as McCarthy did in 2012) that the post-Celtic-Tiger economic catastrophe would have been averted if Ulster had “been in charge”? But this book’s longer look at canonical writers such as Elizabeth Bowen And Eavan Bolandand the close-up essays on younger poets who have yet to be reconfigured by tradition strike a nice balance between research and enthusiasm.

If the occasional exaggeration creeps in (“Here’s all the art of poetry you’ll ever need,” he writes of Ciaran Carson, who would probably have been the first to pop that inflation balloon), there’s also a nice counterbalance to the humor. (in which Rudyard Kipling is portrayed as ‘the Enoch Powell of poetry’, or in which Muriel Spark sets fire to one of McCarthy’s own ‘horrible poems with her long cigarette’). What comes across most strongly is a clear insight into how the best writing succeeds in style, content and effect.

Cheerful, enthusiastic and friendly, McCarthy remains a tireless advocate for Irish poetry. This compendium shows him at his most tireless best.

“I was free to live my life, but was I also free to imagine it? Did the poems I had read, or the poetic tradition I had inherited, encourage me to do so?” This is what Eavan Boland writes in Reading as Intimidation, one of 29 essays in Citizen Poet, edited by leading Boland scholar Jody Allen Randolph. This single volume showcases a lifetime of thinking and writing about poetic tradition, craft and aesthetics, ranging in time from selections from 1995’s Object Lessons to Boland’s editorials for Poetry Ireland Review shortly before her death in 2020.

A fair amount of what it contains may be known, but to have collected such valuable essays in one book is quite a challenge, especially for a younger generation who may not have experienced firsthand the electric charge that Object Lessons has on the Irish poetry world. blessing.

These essays position themselves at the crossroads of Irish poetry, with its various wounds and political urgencies, and the full scope of an English-language poetic tradition, as Boland seeks to represent experiences that have yet to find expression there, namely the lives and life stories of women. In A Journey with Two Maps, a painting that Boland recognizes as by her mother’s hand is signed by her mother’s art instructor: this discovery leads to a penetrating, beautiful essay on ownership and authorship, and the blind spots of canonical representations of the life of women.

The animating force behind many of these essays is an exploration of how Boland read, thought, and felt an evolving poetics, and how that process could be said to provide useful models for other Irish poets in its wake.

In a (somewhat misleading) essay entitled Domestic Violence, Boland examines the domestic poem as a place where unusual vocabulary and images can be employed to bridge the gap between the ‘ordinary world’ – the small universe of the cup, the open door , the room ‘ and ‘the epic world of violence and civil strife’. “I thought wistfully,” she writes, in a sentence that – typical of this book – is both beautiful and rigorously precise, “of a poem in which the inner and outer worlds had a new freedom, a symbiotic negotiation, like shadow and light . ”

These are also penetrating and perceptive essays on craft, paying careful attention to both mechanics and aesthetics, especially in relation to the lyric poem. Daughter, an experimental book project offered here in concept, collects fragmentary poems, letters, and diary entries to illustrate Boland’s increasingly synthetic imagination.

Over time, Boland’s poetic project became one of expansion, community, and diversity. “I began to see that poems are not just an individual fluorescence,” she writes: “they are also a vast root system that grows into ideas and insights.” In her many poems about Irish history, personal interpretations are transformed into historical documents, her lyrical ‘I’ transitioning into a more inclusive ‘we’, while the public responsibilities of the citizen poet become increasingly foregrounded in her poems, a process insightfully explored in this commendable book.

The Frontier of Writing: A Study of Seamus Heaney’s Prose is a collection of ten essays by Irish and American academics on a subject that, as Richard Rankin Russell writes in his essay, “has not always received the acclaim it deserves, especially in contrast with his much better known poetry”. That this essay is about the Wordsworthian influences on Heaney’s prose on the work of Brian Friel indicates a certain matryoshka-like quality in the discourse here, not atypical of the academic genre.

As the price suggests, this is not a book intended for a general audience, although the user-friendly prose suggests that you are unlikely to turn one down: it is scholarly in intent, reference and methodology.

Heaney wrote prose of remarkable elegance and verve. Preoccupations, The Government of the Tongue, and The Redress of Poetry are all among the best books of our time on the mechanics, history, and art of poetry.

Few can turn a prose sentence as deftly as Heaney, or be as learned, intellectually sharp or stylistically nimble. For obvious reasons, most academic responses to Heaney’s poems are written in prose – it is a brave academic who would write a monograph in verse. These essays on Heaney’s essays, all written in utterly serious and meticulous prose, nevertheless do not match Heaney’s talent for the form. The contrast is striking, with the energy and temperature of the writing rising with each quotation from Heaney’s prose.

What these essays do very well is provide solid, authoritative studies on topics ranging from musicality in Heaney’s work, to the ethics of the prose poem, to the application of Freud’s notions of the uncanny to Heaney’s prose. Most striking is their appreciation of the way Heaney elaborated in prose how other writers (Hughes, Hopkins, Lowell, Kavanagh, Friel) influenced his poems.

If the essays cannot limit themselves entirely to the prose and often fall back on poetry studies (there is a nice comparison by Gary Wade of the Heaney poem Sunlight with Vermeer’s The Milkmaid), who can blame them? Just as Heaney’s prose was all about poetry, so too must the critics circle around it, like moths lighting candles.

Vona Groarke won the 2024 Michel Déon Prize for Nonfiction for Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara (New York University Press)

The poem: text, sign, meter (Faber & Faber, 2018) by Don Paterson

This book seems like a cross between manifesto and textbook, but is saved from both by Paterson’s humor and charisma. Poets will cherish the technical advice up close, while non-poets will enjoy the anecdotal bulletins (i.e. gossip) from the poetry world, often contained in footnotes that both enhance and diminish the poetic lessons overhead.

Madness, stretch and honey (Wave Books, 2012) by Mary Ruefle

Ruefle’s synthetic imagination is wonderfully surprising. In Mine Emily Dickinson she interweaves the lives (and deaths) of Dickinson, Emily Brontë and Anne Frank to explore the language of loneliness, intimacy and confinement. Her advice is more illustration than instruction, as in her Short Lecture on Lying, which reads in its entirety: ‘In this lecture I lie only three times. This is one of them’.

My poets (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012) by Maureen McLane

These prose pieces – balanced between aphorism, essay and diary entries – are less an autobiography than an account, in Wordsworth’s terms, of the growth of a poet’s mind. They combine sparkling insight with lots of fun. “Wordsworth is very boring,” she writes, “until you suddenly feel that his way of being boring is the most essential way of being.”