Hunting for clothes
In jumble sales
And second hand stalls
Clothes for her children
And clothes for home
Good clothes
Laundered and pressed
That looked shop bought
Packaged in brown paper
Secured with knotted twine
Her letter peppered ‘PG’
Slipped between the folds
The parcel weighed
Customs declared and stamped
Posted on her way to char in Golders Green
Waved off on the journey
She could not afford to make
An offering received
Opened with a sense of delight
Tinged with resentment
These leavings of a wealthy relative
Over the sea
THE JUNCTION TAVERN
Embossed, tobacco stained
Magnolia paper
Peeling of the walls.
Red cracked lino,
Scattered tables with bentwood chairs,
Newspapers, betting slips and pencil stubs.
A conspiracy of Caribbeans and Celts
Playing dominoes and cards
In a edgy stillness.
The silence and muttered words
Occasionally rocked by shouts,
Bricks slammed on tables,
A flurry of abuse
For misplayed trumps or dots,
Choreographed aggression
And occasionally a fist,
Until stillness settled once again
To the sucking of teeth and clearing of phlegm
Out there the 60s was happening
In the Junction nothing changed.
They re-emerge in my memory
Through a fog of smoke, beer and piss.
Scully, O’Gorman, O’ Driscoll
Jamaican George and Welsh John
In a collar and tie
On Sunday morning their Sunday best:
For protocol had to be observed
To honour the utilitarian pleasures of the working man.
RETREAT
Days come and go
Waking, I stretch into loneliness
Out into the frost
The morning, thick with mist
Teems with concerns
Some important, some trivial
Most are forgotten
In the bleak landscape
Thorns, bare and gnarled
Cling to a few desiccated fruits
Red leathery allegories
The trees in the distance, bare and dissipated
Etched in an icy haze
A thicket in a barren field
Offers a different perspective
A robin foraging
The odour of leaf mould
White fungus fruiting on fallen wood
The renewal in decay
Gifts from kind ghosts
Brown earth
My breath on the air
I emerge into solitude
CAVEAT
LECTOR!
In many ways I
was gifted poetry by my father. Not as an intentional gift but a happy accident.
My father was a taciturn unapproachable man who read avidly across genres, fact and fiction. I know this as I
was regularly sent to the library to collect or return books for him. I never
remember his commenting or discussing any books with us other than to say ‘Read
it’ contemptuously if you returned with any titles he had already read. I knew
my father was a reader but knew nothing of what he read. Neither did he
encourage any of us to read, outside of the contribution he made in teaching us the mechanics of
reading. Reading seemed to be a
dark sometimes sinister activity that went on in the brooding darkness of my
father’s chair. Poetry was the one exception, he would, on occasion, recite poetry and expect me to learn it to
recite it to him. This poetry ranged from ditties relating to horse racing to lengthier, rather dense formal poetry usually relating to Ireland and often containing many stanzas. Poetry and the poet are held in very high
regard
in the Irish cultural lexicon and there was never any question that it was a worthy craft to
pursue. Poetry, however, suggested itself to me for reasons beyond a
boy's desire to engage with his father.
Stephen Burt, an
American academic, argues that poetry “ creates a presence that is so socially, emotionally
and intellectually charged that we encounter ourselves in response to it. An encounter with
something more than our learning, our understandings, the nuts a bolts of our
lives but our essence something that requires the poem “to provoke in us a feeling
of self-forgetfulness” (Longenbach, 2002: 51). The encounter which occurs, in poetry, “preserves and enlarges
our solitudes and points out our connections ( Ibid).”
The American poet Gwendolyn Brooks described poetry as “ life distilled” (Brooks, 2005) and for me
it is this process of distillation which gives poetry its potency, its
anthropological dynamism. The ‘distillation’ referred to by Brooks is an attempt to make the
vastness of human experience manageable, it offers a way of making the
unmanageable manageable and graspable by those living outside the intensity of
feeling being experienced. In short it is a vehicle for empathy.
There is also a
sense in which it allows human beings to create an object of beauty out of the
ugliest moments of their lives. This expression of experience may not always be
readily accessible to the reader it may be encoded in the desire to ‘distil’,
to make manageable. James Longenbach in his series of essays The Resistance To Poetry
observes that poetry gives us “..pleasure because it gives us work to do, work
that can never be completed no matter how fully explained the poem might be” ( 2004, 97). That work is the business
of being human. Additionally, Longenbach argues that we read poetry to embrace the challenges
and complexities of life and not to find a distraction from it (Ibid).
I was born into a family
of Irish immigrants. My
father
never felt entirely at home with living in England but knew that he could not live in
Ireland, which during the period they migrated and for the entirety of my
childhood was deeply socially conservative and impoverished. I sense that
this reality caused my father immense conflict and shame, a patriotic Irishman
living in and on the ‘belly of the beast,’ in his terms a contradictory and
cowardly existence that constantly gnawed at his sense of self and family
tradition. A dissolution made more evident by the way his children and
his wife easily straddled their joint identity The poems, 'The Parcel Home' and 'The Junction Tavern' offer motifs from my
early life.
The house I was
brought up in Kentish Town, north London,
was,
for very large stretches of time, steeped in a brooding silence. I consequently spent a
very great deal of time in my own head, viewing my immediate surroundings, members of my own
family and even the physical surroundings we lived in with a level of detachment, not as a member of the
family, but rather as an outsider looking in on their lives. To borrow a phrase from Seamus Heaney’s poem, Exposure, I am an ’inner emigré’ ( Heaney, 1980), not an inhabitant of my own life so much as an intrigued
observer,
not an actor but an onlooker, not a confessional poet but a dramatist and story-teller.
My family
background provided me with an opportunity to ‘cast a cold eye’ and develop an independence of
thought offering me the space to create my own imaginings and develop my voice. In addition it strikes
me that themes were laid down which I have been driven to explore, over and over again.
Namely: Silence, Solitude and the archaeology of the self. Silence and solitude are
two elements that I require to write and both return often as unified themes in my work.
The poem, 'Retreat', is emblematic of my
search for the scarce commodity of silence and solitude. Silence for me is a perfect archetype and
a terrible tormentor. As the American/Yugoslavian poet, Charles Simic asserted “Silence, solitude, what is more essential to the human condition?
‘Maternal silence’ is what I like to call it. Life before the coming of language. That place where we
begin to hear the voice of the inanimate. Poetry is an orphan of silence. The
words never quite equal the experience behind them” ( Mijuk, 2002: 12).
Woven through my
desire for silence is a propensity towards melancholy, a word I have quite
deliberately deployed here, archaic as it is, it denotes a brooding
sentimental pessimism, not as acute or profound as depression but more deeply
engrained and pervasive than sadness alone. Melancholia it seems to me is hard
wired in my familial culture, drawn from the culture of Ireland, a DNA deep
bleakness, that pervades nearly every aspect of existence and a feature deeply imbedded in Irish music
(White 2008) and literature (Schirmer, 1998. Coughlan, 2008). Melancholy has influenced my reading, world
outlook and poetry.
I am a poet of the lost and found, a gatherer of the detritus of the lived life of the day to day world. The themes I peruse in my work reflect my current interests, or should I say, obsessions and the ghosts and echoes of my journey to this point. I spend my days observing and eavesdropping, mining the everyday for source material. I research my writing from my own life and the lives of others I am a totter, a voyeur. As Yeats observed in his, Circus Animal’s Desertion, I find my material “In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart” (Yeats, 1996. Pg 346).
Just as I cannot
know what subject matter I will alight on next, I cannot know if my reasons for
writing poetry will alter. Therefore if I conducted this exercise again that I may end up with a completely different poetics. As the Nobel Prize
winning Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska
observed “The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain
just one person” (Szymborska, 2000.
Xiii). I am, as all human beings are, a mishmash of confused, indeed mutually
exclusive, thoughts, desires, feelings and beliefs. The rhythms that drive me
are varied and carry their own tensions and my influences are eclectic all of which manifest itself in my work. I do however discern a
unifying theme, a focus to this journey, my quest if you like: to move from
that state of uneasy groping towards a future that F.Scott Fitzgerald termed “the unquiet
darkness” (2013: 21) towards what Frances Horovitz,
articulated in her poem, Evening, written close to the end of her life, as ‘the good dark of this room’ ( Horovitz,
2011, pg 112). I seek an acceptance of life’s and my own
unpredictability and contradictions. It is my attempt to make sense of my world
and my place in it. My work is simply a platform to untangle and move-on from one concern to
the next without ever reaching journey’s end.
I
have no greater scheme other than to continue writing poetry about those things
that exercise me, things that change on a day to day basis. Poetry itself is the only
thing I feel any certainty about, although what shape and what form it takes, is like the
things I focus on; unknowable. Therefore, I will take Wittgenstein’s advice on
any further speculation and remain silent on that which I cannot meaningfully speculate (Kenny,
2005).
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