Social Realism Thwarted
By Patrick Cotter
The Boys of Bluehill Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, The Gallery Press, 2015, €11.95pbk €18.50hbk; Wake Forest University Press $13.95pbk
There Now Eamon Grennan, The Gallery Press, 2015, €11.95pbk €18.50hbk; Graywolf Press in the USA
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has enjoyed a dedicated readership in Ireland and abroad since the 1980s but she became known to a wider audience when she won the 2010 International Griffin Prize for Poetry for her collection The Sun-fish. The judge’s citation mentioned “The Sun-fish contains approaches to family and political history, thwarted pilgrimages in which Ní Chuilleanáin poses many questions – not always directly – and often chooses to leave the questions themselves unresolved, allowing them to resonate meaningfully past the actual poem’s end.” In her latest book these characteristics are still in evidence but are now dominated by constant reflection that one has arrived at the last quarter of life allowed by a human span and the vista such a point presents onto the past.
“Age darkening my skin.
Even as I struggle
Age grabs and likes its meal.”
(Song of the Woman of Beare)
More of that anon. The dead who have gone before, Ní Chuilleanáin’s late sister and forebears, are mentioned in many of the poems here, reprising what was described as ‘an excavation of Irish family secrets and strategies’ in the blurb to her 1994 volume The Brazen Serpent.
In ‘The Skirt’ a young girl descends a long staircase witnessed by her grandfather who puts away his graveclothes (what these are, we don’t exactly know, whether clothes of graveside mourning or garb to be worn in a coffin). Everything is black, her skirt, the risers “all flower in shiny blackness”.
“And when she reaches the floor it opens.
She treads on down, the stairwell plunges away,
her feet still find the trail, she still holds the fiddle
upright, the white flash of her bow fading.”
We could read the poem as being about Ní Chuilleanáin’s sister’s descent towards death. Nowhere does the poem mention the girl is the poet’s sister, but elsewhere we learn that Ní Chuilleanáin’s late sister was an accomplished musician and the sister features in other poems here. It is a conceit to portray the sister who died an adult as a young girl, as it is to mention her grandparents who would have died before her. In Ní Chuilleanáin’s work we commonly find a folkloric distancing of narrative from social realist reportage, but often also, a Celanish bottled message amounting to mystery for the reader. These Irish family secrets are only ever half-excavated. Robert Frost said: “I’ve written to keep the over-curious out of the secret places of my mind, both in my verse and in my letters.” One could believe this too of Ní Chuilleanáin. Sometimes it is difficult to determine if her mysteries are deliberately presented as an aesthetic choice or if Ní Chuilleanáin is ultimately content to be writing for an intimate coterie cognisant of all the facts.
In ‘Direction’ a poem about the poet’s father, mention is made of the internment camp he served time in without elaboration or explanation. There have been many internments in Irish history. Time and geography exclude those in Boer War South Africa and 1970’s Northern Ireland. But that still leaves one questioning was it a British War of Independence internment or a Civil War Treaty-side internment? It raises the question who is Ní Chuilleanáin’s intended readership? How far could a foreigner or a young Irish person, deprived of an education in Irish history get with this poem? In one way, it hardly matters, because the main point the poem makes does not concern history at all. One could speculate that the mountains in the poem to which her father is compared may be Welsh mountains with their illusive declined names, but the main concern, as stated plainly enough at the close of the poem, is how memories of the beloved dead alter and become illusive themselves and how they can bequeath the lesson that worries and concerns never last.
“so many troubles he shed, he leaves
me what I would leave behind for you:
they need not last forever;
they need not lay you forever low.”
The statement on its own would be trite, Hallmarky. It is the detail which precedes it which makes the poem, the detail which is incomplete. One reading here is that Ní Chuilleanáin’s parsimoniousness with the facts is dual purpose: first, not to weigh down a lyric poem with encyclopaedic verbiage; secondly to rebuff the enemies of poetry (as defined by W.B. Stanford) who would view it as a useful repository for such facts. Not that that will stop some academic somewhere delving as deeply as she possibly can into Ní Chuilleanáin’s family history to reveal the facts which the poet chose to conceal, possibly for artistic reasons.
Still, it all works to mark out Ní Chuilleanáin as, one of the not so many Irish poets, given licence to not always make sense. Speaking of her, Peter Sirr in a recent Poetry Ireland Review said: “She creates these artefacts that are strange and surprising, and puzzling sometimes – each poem is a kind of enclosed system, a self-sustaining system. You’re never quite sure: there are these voices coming and you’re never quite sure where they’re coming from, or quite what’s being said.” Each poem isn’t like that of course. I find many of the poems here make perfectly plain sense. Others open themselves up after repeated readings, as Paul Celan advised his own illusive poems would do for a dedicated reader. One could speculate that every one of Ní Chuilleanáin’s poems has its reader who understands it perfectly – just not every poem by the same reader. And the reputation Ní Chuilleanáin has for producing poems lacking in obvious clarity may be encouraging lazy, uncommitted readings of her work by some. And others may just be reading too exclusively from the Anglo-Saxon canon ever to have developed the skill to read poems evidently informed by the conventions of the mittel-European tradition.
In an interview in Irish University Review Ní Chuilleanáin has defended the collection of unrelated lyrics – that is a book of poems not connected as in a sequence or written according to a paradigm. Today poets are under tremendous pressure to not produce books of unrelated lyrics. In the United States, more often than not, a manuscript which follows a paradigm is demanded as an MFA thesis. Many critics and reviewers find it easier to write about collections of poems which work as a whole and avoid books presenting a series of individual lyric poems which proclaim their individuality and sovereign independence. And, increasingly, award juries also prefer such volumes, a situation which leads many publishers to adopt the same prejudice. But such expectations are spurious because the collection of individual poems by an authentic poet almost always coheres, in any case, in spite of any absence of intention.
Ní Chuilleanáin is too knowing a writer to be blind to the motifs and personal fetishes which emerge again and again throughout her oeuvre (cats, architecture, nuns, language to name but a few), let alone in one of her books, but I suspect she is also knowing and sophisticated enough to allow these motifs to arise organically from her own subconscious.; any ordering can happen at the layout stage rather than at the step of composition.
The page following ‘The Skirt’ (which, as already related, is funereal and about a girl descending a staircase) contains the poem, ‘Passing Palmer’s Green Station’ about the poet climbing a long stairway leading from a railway platform to the road.
“where my mother lost one shoe in the gap, coming back
from the hospital where she’d left her younger daughter
among the dying”
The poem is sonnet shaped, one stanza, fourteen lines and totally different in shape, vision and tone from ‘The Skirt’ but deals once again with the death of a sister in the context of a staircase. Such intended unities, though subtle enough, are hard to miss.
But the book’s greatest unity comes from its awareness of finding oneself near the end of life, time sweeping by and the world changing from how it used to be.
“I noted the new door
since last I’d been there, began to count the years,”
(An Information)
“”what has happened to time,”
(The Skelligs)
“but how
to cope at all with the past, since to my own mind
I appear to have been born in 1870
and schooled in 1689.”
(Somewhere called Goose Bay)
More than one poem calls attention to the passing of twenty years or more and all these hints and allusions are tied together in the ‘Song of the Woman of Beare’ which closes the book.
“And now my body craves
Homing to where it’s known;
Let the son of God choose
The time to claim me back.”
But so much for content. How does Ní Chuilleanáin assert through form her poetry? Varyingly is the answer. It must surely be an intended irony that the poem which begins:
“The world is beauty and order,
beauty that springs from order,”
(Juliette Ryan and the Cement Mixer)
spreads over the page in a disarray of lineation. Ní Chuilleanáin isn’t one of those poets who feels she must have every line in a poem the same length and every stanza evenly spaced and constituted. Often a line appears as if it is as long as it, itself, needs to be; independent in its assertion from the rest of the poem. I applaud Ní Chuilleanáin’s disregard for the fashion for a priori verbal topiary affecting much poetry and editorial preference, but again it calls into question licence. Ní Chuilleanáin can do this, because she is allowed, where a younger, less known poet might not. But it isn’t caprice which grants such licence. It is the collective consciousness of readers that in Ní Chuilleanáin’s work we are dealing with a mind of high seriousness and sincere intent. Much is made by other commentators of her grasp of cadence, but she isn’t the most cadenced of poets, even within the Irish school. The blurb on the back of the book picks out a jewel-like image.
“looking at the map….I can see/ how countries are nibbled out of continents.” But these are few and far between compared with other poets. Ní Chuilleanáin is no Martian or Grennan.
Her writings work as poetry through the authenticity of her phrasing, its cohesion of expression; Mahonesque cadence and striking imagery might be sparse but the voice is like no one else’s and does possess ‘arresting authority’. I hope the vision, permeating this volume, of little time left is unreliable and that many more books from Ní Chuilleanáin are yet to come.
Eamon Grennan is a near contemporary of Eilean Ní Chuilleanáin and unusually for an Irish poet who has attracted honours and admiration he was a late starter. His first book Wildly for Days was published in his 42nd year. He has been making up for the late start ever since, There Now is his tenth collection. As a long-term resident and immigrant in America he has taken advantage of the convenience of cheap air travel to regularly commute back and forth to his motherland. The two disparate worlds register strongly in his poems redolent of place and outdoors. He frequently juxtaposes poems set in his different homelands so that it is a common experience, reading through his oeuvre, to jump from badgers to racoons or from curlews to cardinals. Grennan’s most consistent subject matter is the individual’s engagement with nature, with its light, its plants and trees, its birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians. The Grennan genius rests on the spurring of his language by his observations of nature and the philosophical conclusions about the individual’s place and consciousness in the universe which are prompted by these encounters. So successful and wonderful and popular with readers is Grennan at doing this that he has for decades placed many poems from each book in the New Yorker. Grennan does what he does very well and he does it again and again and again, to the extent that one is reminded of the exchange in Nabokov’s Paris Review interview when his inquisitor puts it:
‘Clarence Brown of Princeton has pointed out striking similarities in your work. He refers to you as “extremely repetitious” and that in wildly different ways you are in essence saying the same thing.’
Nabokov’s response was totally in character:
‘Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only its own self to copy.’
In Grennan’s case I would contend that he is extremely repetitious in wildly similar ways, but also that artistic originality, albeit ready to nod to its precursors, is also present. He titled an early volume What Light There Is and I imagine Grennan himself would consider it an appropriate title for every poetry collection he has written or will write. Most of the poems here mention light, the colour white is mentioned more often than any other; gleam and glimmer recur so often one might think Grennan’s word processor has a macro to spurt them out. Grennan himself appears to anticipate such a critical observation with the closing lines of the poem ‘While’ (of which more anon)
“while the ever-changing light is up
again as always to its old unspeakable unstoppable tricks.”
Beckett in Murphy put it more succinctly: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
But I don’t mean to be curmudgeonly in this review. There Now contains a surfeit of accomplished, provocative, dazzling poems – but ‘surfeit’ takes on a different connotation depending on whether this is the first Grennan book you are approaching or the tenth. I would like to spend most of the rest of the review looking at the book with the eyes of someone who has never read Grennan before.
One does not need to notice the two quotations from Celan in the book to take note of a Germanophone cast of mind throughout the poems. Every poem in the book consists of a single sentence whether the poem is a four-liner or one consisting of twenty lines or more; displaying Grennan’s facility with complex (sometimes complicated) syntax. Compound words abound in the book in both their hyphenated and fully-melded forms and most of the poems amount to a philosophical reflection, reminding one how most of the most-thrilling philosophers of the last century worked in that language in which long sentences are so at home. This is the first book of Grennan’s where all the poems are built on one sentence, but Grennan has done one sentence poems before and written many poems with a proliferation of clauses and subclauses.
I think one needs to be on more than nodding terms with German to feel as comfortable and at ease with producing as many word compounds in English as Grennan does.
Grennan compounds words differently and for different reasons. Some have the flavour of neologisms about them such as ‘noonsky’ or ‘windlight’. Other times a compound is devised to avoid using an adverb as with ‘wide-spread’ (as a verb, not adjective) instead of spread widely. Sometimes a compound (as in ‘deep-buried distresses’) is used to conveniently alliterate, maintain the beat of the line and/or cut down on the extra syllables involved in using a more homely and natural-sounding English locution. The standard rule in English for compound words is that the newly coined are always hyphenated, losing their hyphenations after long usage and acceptance. Grennan’s compounds are hyphenated or not according to whim, possibly, sometimes, to break-up the unsightliness on the page of hyphenation after hyphenation. Ultimately they are about Grennan making the language new. Cadence is important to Grennan; compounds are integral to his toolbox for engineering a line and he is more consistent and less various in his music than Ní Chuilleanáin. He can’t quite carry-off the musicality of Derek Mahon with Mahon’s nonchalance, but it is obvious that he has learnt from Mahon (even echoing the ‘brick and tile’ of Mahon’s ‘Courtyards in Delft’ in an early poem of his own about a Dutch renaissance painter). His gift for musicality has been remarked upon by American commentators as a particularly Irish characteristic. But Irish readers notice many American characteristics in Grennan. English as it is spoken in North America is more verb-based than the more noun-based, Celtic-influenced insular English of Europe. To an Irish eye and ear Grennan speeds up the flow of his lines by making verbs out of nouns to a greater degree than is done in Britain and Ireland. And Grennan’s relaxed attitude, most of the time, to stanzaic décor would be recognised in Ireland as something more widely accepted in the American poetry tradition.
Every poem in this book has an indented second line. The indentation contributes nothing to how the poems sound or are syntactically/semantically digested by the reader. I can only surmise they have been indented to create the illusion of stanzaic décor, the way other people centre the lines of every poem they write. The indentations don’t hurt the poems: they are a harmless eccentricity. Another eccentricity to this book is that the only commas present are inverted commas – what Joyce referred to as perverted commas. I imagine the absence of commas is for two reasons, one is to speed up the line and the other is to present a technical challenge – not quite the technical challenge Georges Perec set himself in composing an entire novel without the letter ‘e’, but enough of one to force second thoughts during the making of a line. It probably creates the effects Grennan wanted most of the time but does not work in every instance. Sometimes when he lists several nouns together without commas, I found myself stopping and going over it to make sure one of the nouns was not being deployed as a verb. Also dispensing with commas cuts down your options when you are writing long, single sentence poems. The sense has to be carried along and pauses suggested with the insertion of many conjoiners and ‘while’ features far too frequently, sometimes awkwardly, twice close together. I was left wondering if Grennan’s titling one of the poems as ‘While’ was an ironic acknowledgement of this problem.
Grennan’s willingness to take risks with language is one of the things which makes him so compelling to read, but occasionally he can come across as chairman of the Pro-Life Society for Poets’ Darlings, for instance:
“mouth-
music of morning as mourning music”
hurts my aural synapses like claws on a blackboard and should have been drowned at birth. But the mind that manufactured that moiling monstrosity is the kind of mind needed to come up with a gem such as:
“and ready to spring off the canvas
as are his two cats striped and white
chested: one cupped in its own circle
of doze…”
Perhaps the biggest sign of American influence on Grennan is his compulsion to philosophise. In Britain and Ireland we also have the poetry of argument (as distinct from narrative or parabolic poetry) but our arguments are generally left open-ended. In America the push for philosophical conclusion appears far more prevalent. It’s fascinating to watch the philosophiser battle for supremacy with the narrator in a book by Paisley Rekdal but in a Grennan book the philosophiser wins hands down every time. Perhaps it is the assertion of such confident certainties which makes Grennan so popular to his New Yorker readership?
In the opening poem cows call to each other and Grennan’s verbal innovations (with the exception of the ghastly ‘wide-opens’) delight the reader, as his verbs and adjectives describe the musicality and complexity of their calling, but it isn’t long before this entertaining descriptive narrative is interrupted by:
“and then it’s night and only the small sky-high cry of one
nightbird over lake-glimmer breaks the silence with its
little lamenting whistle-cry repeating and repeating itself
into vacancy and the mute eyelessness of space and there’s nothing
beyond that naked nachtmusik in the dead silent wide-shining fields”
That certainty of a nihilistic nothing answering the nightbird’s lamenting cry is echt un-Irish. And in the same way that his use of the word ‘intercede’ in a previous volume signalled a consciousness of his Irish Catholic upbringing, his use of the word ‘nothing’ here is explicitly evocative of the mental world of the author of Die Niemandsrose.
A frequent Grennan tactic, to use the creatures he observes as vessels for his own feelings and beliefs is deployed in ‘Oystercatchers’.
then away with them (shrill-pitched as frighted
plovers only harsher more excited)
and riding the stiff wind like eager lovers straining
into its every last whim:
I’m sure the oystercatchers do not reflect on the unconscious wind having whims or that it is not the erotically-charged energy of lovers which propels them. This poem isn’t about oystercatchers. Here as everywhere in a Grennan book, birds, animals, trees, light, the heard and seen observations of the natural world act as the canvas upon which Grennan daubs his philosophical musings and structured thought. It is his way of dealing with ideas in a concrete manner. And he does it best when alone with nature. Occasionally other humans have walk-on parts in a Grennan poem but mostly it is the poet persona alone with animals or the forest or moor. If Ní Chuilleanáin frequently defies the realism in Social Realism, it is the social part which Grennan disavows. His celebration of the solitary soul is what appeals to us all in our solitary act of reading. I could give example after example like those above to show what he does, but they would all be alike, each as beautiful and similar as one cut diamond is in relation to another. Grennan tries to instil variety in his work by playing around with formal constraints, whether in one book limiting himself to a set number of lines, or in another attempting the lanky line of C.K. Williams or here by limiting himself to one sentence in every poem, but whatever he does, everything ends up sounding wildly similar, for this day and every day. Every poet and serious reader should have at least one Grennan book on their shelves. It might as well be There Now.
By Patrick Cotter
The Boys of Bluehill Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, The Gallery Press, 2015, €11.95pbk €18.50hbk; Wake Forest University Press $13.95pbk
There Now Eamon Grennan, The Gallery Press, 2015, €11.95pbk €18.50hbk; Graywolf Press in the USA
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has enjoyed a dedicated readership in Ireland and abroad since the 1980s but she became known to a wider audience when she won the 2010 International Griffin Prize for Poetry for her collection The Sun-fish. The judge’s citation mentioned “The Sun-fish contains approaches to family and political history, thwarted pilgrimages in which Ní Chuilleanáin poses many questions – not always directly – and often chooses to leave the questions themselves unresolved, allowing them to resonate meaningfully past the actual poem’s end.” In her latest book these characteristics are still in evidence but are now dominated by constant reflection that one has arrived at the last quarter of life allowed by a human span and the vista such a point presents onto the past.
“Age darkening my skin.
Even as I struggle
Age grabs and likes its meal.”
(Song of the Woman of Beare)
More of that anon. The dead who have gone before, Ní Chuilleanáin’s late sister and forebears, are mentioned in many of the poems here, reprising what was described as ‘an excavation of Irish family secrets and strategies’ in the blurb to her 1994 volume The Brazen Serpent.
In ‘The Skirt’ a young girl descends a long staircase witnessed by her grandfather who puts away his graveclothes (what these are, we don’t exactly know, whether clothes of graveside mourning or garb to be worn in a coffin). Everything is black, her skirt, the risers “all flower in shiny blackness”.
“And when she reaches the floor it opens.
She treads on down, the stairwell plunges away,
her feet still find the trail, she still holds the fiddle
upright, the white flash of her bow fading.”
We could read the poem as being about Ní Chuilleanáin’s sister’s descent towards death. Nowhere does the poem mention the girl is the poet’s sister, but elsewhere we learn that Ní Chuilleanáin’s late sister was an accomplished musician and the sister features in other poems here. It is a conceit to portray the sister who died an adult as a young girl, as it is to mention her grandparents who would have died before her. In Ní Chuilleanáin’s work we commonly find a folkloric distancing of narrative from social realist reportage, but often also, a Celanish bottled message amounting to mystery for the reader. These Irish family secrets are only ever half-excavated. Robert Frost said: “I’ve written to keep the over-curious out of the secret places of my mind, both in my verse and in my letters.” One could believe this too of Ní Chuilleanáin. Sometimes it is difficult to determine if her mysteries are deliberately presented as an aesthetic choice or if Ní Chuilleanáin is ultimately content to be writing for an intimate coterie cognisant of all the facts.
In ‘Direction’ a poem about the poet’s father, mention is made of the internment camp he served time in without elaboration or explanation. There have been many internments in Irish history. Time and geography exclude those in Boer War South Africa and 1970’s Northern Ireland. But that still leaves one questioning was it a British War of Independence internment or a Civil War Treaty-side internment? It raises the question who is Ní Chuilleanáin’s intended readership? How far could a foreigner or a young Irish person, deprived of an education in Irish history get with this poem? In one way, it hardly matters, because the main point the poem makes does not concern history at all. One could speculate that the mountains in the poem to which her father is compared may be Welsh mountains with their illusive declined names, but the main concern, as stated plainly enough at the close of the poem, is how memories of the beloved dead alter and become illusive themselves and how they can bequeath the lesson that worries and concerns never last.
“so many troubles he shed, he leaves
me what I would leave behind for you:
they need not last forever;
they need not lay you forever low.”
The statement on its own would be trite, Hallmarky. It is the detail which precedes it which makes the poem, the detail which is incomplete. One reading here is that Ní Chuilleanáin’s parsimoniousness with the facts is dual purpose: first, not to weigh down a lyric poem with encyclopaedic verbiage; secondly to rebuff the enemies of poetry (as defined by W.B. Stanford) who would view it as a useful repository for such facts. Not that that will stop some academic somewhere delving as deeply as she possibly can into Ní Chuilleanáin’s family history to reveal the facts which the poet chose to conceal, possibly for artistic reasons.
Still, it all works to mark out Ní Chuilleanáin as, one of the not so many Irish poets, given licence to not always make sense. Speaking of her, Peter Sirr in a recent Poetry Ireland Review said: “She creates these artefacts that are strange and surprising, and puzzling sometimes – each poem is a kind of enclosed system, a self-sustaining system. You’re never quite sure: there are these voices coming and you’re never quite sure where they’re coming from, or quite what’s being said.” Each poem isn’t like that of course. I find many of the poems here make perfectly plain sense. Others open themselves up after repeated readings, as Paul Celan advised his own illusive poems would do for a dedicated reader. One could speculate that every one of Ní Chuilleanáin’s poems has its reader who understands it perfectly – just not every poem by the same reader. And the reputation Ní Chuilleanáin has for producing poems lacking in obvious clarity may be encouraging lazy, uncommitted readings of her work by some. And others may just be reading too exclusively from the Anglo-Saxon canon ever to have developed the skill to read poems evidently informed by the conventions of the mittel-European tradition.
In an interview in Irish University Review Ní Chuilleanáin has defended the collection of unrelated lyrics – that is a book of poems not connected as in a sequence or written according to a paradigm. Today poets are under tremendous pressure to not produce books of unrelated lyrics. In the United States, more often than not, a manuscript which follows a paradigm is demanded as an MFA thesis. Many critics and reviewers find it easier to write about collections of poems which work as a whole and avoid books presenting a series of individual lyric poems which proclaim their individuality and sovereign independence. And, increasingly, award juries also prefer such volumes, a situation which leads many publishers to adopt the same prejudice. But such expectations are spurious because the collection of individual poems by an authentic poet almost always coheres, in any case, in spite of any absence of intention.
Ní Chuilleanáin is too knowing a writer to be blind to the motifs and personal fetishes which emerge again and again throughout her oeuvre (cats, architecture, nuns, language to name but a few), let alone in one of her books, but I suspect she is also knowing and sophisticated enough to allow these motifs to arise organically from her own subconscious.; any ordering can happen at the layout stage rather than at the step of composition.
The page following ‘The Skirt’ (which, as already related, is funereal and about a girl descending a staircase) contains the poem, ‘Passing Palmer’s Green Station’ about the poet climbing a long stairway leading from a railway platform to the road.
“where my mother lost one shoe in the gap, coming back
from the hospital where she’d left her younger daughter
among the dying”
The poem is sonnet shaped, one stanza, fourteen lines and totally different in shape, vision and tone from ‘The Skirt’ but deals once again with the death of a sister in the context of a staircase. Such intended unities, though subtle enough, are hard to miss.
But the book’s greatest unity comes from its awareness of finding oneself near the end of life, time sweeping by and the world changing from how it used to be.
“I noted the new door
since last I’d been there, began to count the years,”
(An Information)
“”what has happened to time,”
(The Skelligs)
“but how
to cope at all with the past, since to my own mind
I appear to have been born in 1870
and schooled in 1689.”
(Somewhere called Goose Bay)
More than one poem calls attention to the passing of twenty years or more and all these hints and allusions are tied together in the ‘Song of the Woman of Beare’ which closes the book.
“And now my body craves
Homing to where it’s known;
Let the son of God choose
The time to claim me back.”
But so much for content. How does Ní Chuilleanáin assert through form her poetry? Varyingly is the answer. It must surely be an intended irony that the poem which begins:
“The world is beauty and order,
beauty that springs from order,”
(Juliette Ryan and the Cement Mixer)
spreads over the page in a disarray of lineation. Ní Chuilleanáin isn’t one of those poets who feels she must have every line in a poem the same length and every stanza evenly spaced and constituted. Often a line appears as if it is as long as it, itself, needs to be; independent in its assertion from the rest of the poem. I applaud Ní Chuilleanáin’s disregard for the fashion for a priori verbal topiary affecting much poetry and editorial preference, but again it calls into question licence. Ní Chuilleanáin can do this, because she is allowed, where a younger, less known poet might not. But it isn’t caprice which grants such licence. It is the collective consciousness of readers that in Ní Chuilleanáin’s work we are dealing with a mind of high seriousness and sincere intent. Much is made by other commentators of her grasp of cadence, but she isn’t the most cadenced of poets, even within the Irish school. The blurb on the back of the book picks out a jewel-like image.
“looking at the map….I can see/ how countries are nibbled out of continents.” But these are few and far between compared with other poets. Ní Chuilleanáin is no Martian or Grennan.
Her writings work as poetry through the authenticity of her phrasing, its cohesion of expression; Mahonesque cadence and striking imagery might be sparse but the voice is like no one else’s and does possess ‘arresting authority’. I hope the vision, permeating this volume, of little time left is unreliable and that many more books from Ní Chuilleanáin are yet to come.
Eamon Grennan is a near contemporary of Eilean Ní Chuilleanáin and unusually for an Irish poet who has attracted honours and admiration he was a late starter. His first book Wildly for Days was published in his 42nd year. He has been making up for the late start ever since, There Now is his tenth collection. As a long-term resident and immigrant in America he has taken advantage of the convenience of cheap air travel to regularly commute back and forth to his motherland. The two disparate worlds register strongly in his poems redolent of place and outdoors. He frequently juxtaposes poems set in his different homelands so that it is a common experience, reading through his oeuvre, to jump from badgers to racoons or from curlews to cardinals. Grennan’s most consistent subject matter is the individual’s engagement with nature, with its light, its plants and trees, its birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians. The Grennan genius rests on the spurring of his language by his observations of nature and the philosophical conclusions about the individual’s place and consciousness in the universe which are prompted by these encounters. So successful and wonderful and popular with readers is Grennan at doing this that he has for decades placed many poems from each book in the New Yorker. Grennan does what he does very well and he does it again and again and again, to the extent that one is reminded of the exchange in Nabokov’s Paris Review interview when his inquisitor puts it:
‘Clarence Brown of Princeton has pointed out striking similarities in your work. He refers to you as “extremely repetitious” and that in wildly different ways you are in essence saying the same thing.’
Nabokov’s response was totally in character:
‘Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only its own self to copy.’
In Grennan’s case I would contend that he is extremely repetitious in wildly similar ways, but also that artistic originality, albeit ready to nod to its precursors, is also present. He titled an early volume What Light There Is and I imagine Grennan himself would consider it an appropriate title for every poetry collection he has written or will write. Most of the poems here mention light, the colour white is mentioned more often than any other; gleam and glimmer recur so often one might think Grennan’s word processor has a macro to spurt them out. Grennan himself appears to anticipate such a critical observation with the closing lines of the poem ‘While’ (of which more anon)
“while the ever-changing light is up
again as always to its old unspeakable unstoppable tricks.”
Beckett in Murphy put it more succinctly: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
But I don’t mean to be curmudgeonly in this review. There Now contains a surfeit of accomplished, provocative, dazzling poems – but ‘surfeit’ takes on a different connotation depending on whether this is the first Grennan book you are approaching or the tenth. I would like to spend most of the rest of the review looking at the book with the eyes of someone who has never read Grennan before.
One does not need to notice the two quotations from Celan in the book to take note of a Germanophone cast of mind throughout the poems. Every poem in the book consists of a single sentence whether the poem is a four-liner or one consisting of twenty lines or more; displaying Grennan’s facility with complex (sometimes complicated) syntax. Compound words abound in the book in both their hyphenated and fully-melded forms and most of the poems amount to a philosophical reflection, reminding one how most of the most-thrilling philosophers of the last century worked in that language in which long sentences are so at home. This is the first book of Grennan’s where all the poems are built on one sentence, but Grennan has done one sentence poems before and written many poems with a proliferation of clauses and subclauses.
I think one needs to be on more than nodding terms with German to feel as comfortable and at ease with producing as many word compounds in English as Grennan does.
Grennan compounds words differently and for different reasons. Some have the flavour of neologisms about them such as ‘noonsky’ or ‘windlight’. Other times a compound is devised to avoid using an adverb as with ‘wide-spread’ (as a verb, not adjective) instead of spread widely. Sometimes a compound (as in ‘deep-buried distresses’) is used to conveniently alliterate, maintain the beat of the line and/or cut down on the extra syllables involved in using a more homely and natural-sounding English locution. The standard rule in English for compound words is that the newly coined are always hyphenated, losing their hyphenations after long usage and acceptance. Grennan’s compounds are hyphenated or not according to whim, possibly, sometimes, to break-up the unsightliness on the page of hyphenation after hyphenation. Ultimately they are about Grennan making the language new. Cadence is important to Grennan; compounds are integral to his toolbox for engineering a line and he is more consistent and less various in his music than Ní Chuilleanáin. He can’t quite carry-off the musicality of Derek Mahon with Mahon’s nonchalance, but it is obvious that he has learnt from Mahon (even echoing the ‘brick and tile’ of Mahon’s ‘Courtyards in Delft’ in an early poem of his own about a Dutch renaissance painter). His gift for musicality has been remarked upon by American commentators as a particularly Irish characteristic. But Irish readers notice many American characteristics in Grennan. English as it is spoken in North America is more verb-based than the more noun-based, Celtic-influenced insular English of Europe. To an Irish eye and ear Grennan speeds up the flow of his lines by making verbs out of nouns to a greater degree than is done in Britain and Ireland. And Grennan’s relaxed attitude, most of the time, to stanzaic décor would be recognised in Ireland as something more widely accepted in the American poetry tradition.
Every poem in this book has an indented second line. The indentation contributes nothing to how the poems sound or are syntactically/semantically digested by the reader. I can only surmise they have been indented to create the illusion of stanzaic décor, the way other people centre the lines of every poem they write. The indentations don’t hurt the poems: they are a harmless eccentricity. Another eccentricity to this book is that the only commas present are inverted commas – what Joyce referred to as perverted commas. I imagine the absence of commas is for two reasons, one is to speed up the line and the other is to present a technical challenge – not quite the technical challenge Georges Perec set himself in composing an entire novel without the letter ‘e’, but enough of one to force second thoughts during the making of a line. It probably creates the effects Grennan wanted most of the time but does not work in every instance. Sometimes when he lists several nouns together without commas, I found myself stopping and going over it to make sure one of the nouns was not being deployed as a verb. Also dispensing with commas cuts down your options when you are writing long, single sentence poems. The sense has to be carried along and pauses suggested with the insertion of many conjoiners and ‘while’ features far too frequently, sometimes awkwardly, twice close together. I was left wondering if Grennan’s titling one of the poems as ‘While’ was an ironic acknowledgement of this problem.
Grennan’s willingness to take risks with language is one of the things which makes him so compelling to read, but occasionally he can come across as chairman of the Pro-Life Society for Poets’ Darlings, for instance:
“mouth-
music of morning as mourning music”
hurts my aural synapses like claws on a blackboard and should have been drowned at birth. But the mind that manufactured that moiling monstrosity is the kind of mind needed to come up with a gem such as:
“and ready to spring off the canvas
as are his two cats striped and white
chested: one cupped in its own circle
of doze…”
Perhaps the biggest sign of American influence on Grennan is his compulsion to philosophise. In Britain and Ireland we also have the poetry of argument (as distinct from narrative or parabolic poetry) but our arguments are generally left open-ended. In America the push for philosophical conclusion appears far more prevalent. It’s fascinating to watch the philosophiser battle for supremacy with the narrator in a book by Paisley Rekdal but in a Grennan book the philosophiser wins hands down every time. Perhaps it is the assertion of such confident certainties which makes Grennan so popular to his New Yorker readership?
In the opening poem cows call to each other and Grennan’s verbal innovations (with the exception of the ghastly ‘wide-opens’) delight the reader, as his verbs and adjectives describe the musicality and complexity of their calling, but it isn’t long before this entertaining descriptive narrative is interrupted by:
“and then it’s night and only the small sky-high cry of one
nightbird over lake-glimmer breaks the silence with its
little lamenting whistle-cry repeating and repeating itself
into vacancy and the mute eyelessness of space and there’s nothing
beyond that naked nachtmusik in the dead silent wide-shining fields”
That certainty of a nihilistic nothing answering the nightbird’s lamenting cry is echt un-Irish. And in the same way that his use of the word ‘intercede’ in a previous volume signalled a consciousness of his Irish Catholic upbringing, his use of the word ‘nothing’ here is explicitly evocative of the mental world of the author of Die Niemandsrose.
A frequent Grennan tactic, to use the creatures he observes as vessels for his own feelings and beliefs is deployed in ‘Oystercatchers’.
then away with them (shrill-pitched as frighted
plovers only harsher more excited)
and riding the stiff wind like eager lovers straining
into its every last whim:
I’m sure the oystercatchers do not reflect on the unconscious wind having whims or that it is not the erotically-charged energy of lovers which propels them. This poem isn’t about oystercatchers. Here as everywhere in a Grennan book, birds, animals, trees, light, the heard and seen observations of the natural world act as the canvas upon which Grennan daubs his philosophical musings and structured thought. It is his way of dealing with ideas in a concrete manner. And he does it best when alone with nature. Occasionally other humans have walk-on parts in a Grennan poem but mostly it is the poet persona alone with animals or the forest or moor. If Ní Chuilleanáin frequently defies the realism in Social Realism, it is the social part which Grennan disavows. His celebration of the solitary soul is what appeals to us all in our solitary act of reading. I could give example after example like those above to show what he does, but they would all be alike, each as beautiful and similar as one cut diamond is in relation to another. Grennan tries to instil variety in his work by playing around with formal constraints, whether in one book limiting himself to a set number of lines, or in another attempting the lanky line of C.K. Williams or here by limiting himself to one sentence in every poem, but whatever he does, everything ends up sounding wildly similar, for this day and every day. Every poet and serious reader should have at least one Grennan book on their shelves. It might as well be There Now.
