18/2/2007 - Poetry - 'Father-in-law' by Derek Mahon

Father-in-Law

While your widow clatters water into a kettle

You lie at peace in your southern grave -

A sea captain who died at sea, almost.

Lost voyager, what would you think of me,

Husband of your fair daughter but impractical?

You stare from the mantelpiece, a curious ghost

In your peaked cap, as we sit down to tea.

The bungalows still signal to the sea,

Rain wanders the golf course as in your day,

The river flows past the distillery

And a watery sun shines on Portballintrae.

I think we would have had a lot in common -

Alcohol and the love of one woman

Certainly; but I failed the eyesight test

When I tried for the Merchant Navy,

And lapsed into this lyric lunacy.

When you lost your balance like Li Po

They found unfinished poems in your sea-chest.

Portballintrae: Small fishing town in the north of Northern Ireland

A few years ago I bought The Faber book of contemporary Irish poetry. In this volume, poet Paul Muldoon (a very interesting contemporary poet himself) has collected some of the best poetry of ten 20th century Irish poets. In the two years that I have had this book, it has grown to become one of my favourite volumes of poetry and I often pick one of the ten poets represented here and read a few of their poems just before I go to sleep. Patrick Kavanagh, Louis MacNeice and Seamus Heaney (see entry 15 December 2006) are just a few of the names represented in this volume.

Derek Mahon (born 1941) is one of my other favourites. In a survey conducted by the Irish Times in 1999 he was among the ten most popular writers (living and dead) in Ireland and the above illustration of his poetic craftsmanship may explain why.

When I read this poem last week, the images presented stuck in my head and for several nights I had to read it before I went to sleep. This is the sort of poetry I love best; (seemingly) simple and straightforward language creating a very poetic image.

I especially like the main theme of the poem; the idea that we can feel (for whichever reason) a connection with a mind we have never known in life, a mind that is no longer amongst the living. I avoid the word 'dead', as it is exactly the non-dead state this person has gone through that establishes this bond and that will continue to do so.

The opening lines are beautiful and captivating. The noise of the clattering water is set against the peacefulness of the grave, thus creating an atmosphere of peace and tranquillity from the start of the poem.

The poet is looking for analogies with his father in law, the fourth line is a strong indication that he has never known him in life. He almost tries to apologise for the fact he has become a poet and dedicates his time to this 'lyric lunacy' but at the end the father in law appears to have had poetic aspirations as well, but they were safely hidden in his sea-chest, only to be found after his death. The introspective mind that lies behind all this will only enhance the connection the poet feels with his father in law.

The poet Li Po who is being mentioned near the end, is one of the most famous representatives of the classical Chinse poetry from the T'ang dynasty (618-907). More about these poets in a future entry. I do not know anything about the incident Mahon refers to in this poem and that has apparently led to the death of Li Po, nor do I know anything about the way his father in law died. But I rather let the poem speak for itself. 

Portballintrae is a small fishing town in the north of Northern Ireland. The tranquillity on some photos I found through the net seems to be the right background for this beautiful and introspective string of thoughts.

15/12/2006 - Poetry - 'Mid-Term Break' by Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney (born in rural Northern Island in 1939) published his first volume of poetry in 1966. Death of a Naturalist was an instant success. This may be thanks to the fact that Heaney manages to reach a very high poetic level in a language that seems deceptively simple at first sight. But like all deceptively easy language, his poems involve a lot of work and craftsmanship.

Being the oldest of nine children of a family from simple, rural people, Heaney almost felt guilty about the fact that he was the first one who had the chance to go to university, afraid that his bookishness might drive a wedge between him and his family. This resulted not only in this (deceptively) simple and straightforward language; the content of the poems was also inspired by his family and his rural background. In the famous first poem Digging he draws a comparison between the craftsmanship of his father and grandfather, ploughing the fields, and his own craftsmanship as a writer, with a pen in his hand as his only tool.

Mid-Term break is one of the best-known poems of Death of a Naturalist. It tells us about his younger brother, who was killed when a car hit him. The atmosphere of death is announced by the bells in the first stanza, but the reader is only informed little by little about what has happened. The final blow is left for the last line, which forms a stanza by itself and as such is given extra power. We can feel the embarrassment of the young boy when the old men tell him they are sorry for his trouble. The baby is the embodiment of innocence, unaware of the miseries of life. One of the strongest elements of this poem is the portrayal of his mother, whose subdued grief, bitterness and anger is very well phrased in the lines as my mother held my hand/ In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.

Death of a Naturalist was the first volume of Heaney's poetry I bought, and it is still my favourite, even though he has made many great poems afterwards. Heaney, who very deservedly won the Nobel Prize in 1995, has been one of my favourite poets ever since. Faber and Faber has published a beautiful separate edition of Heaney's debut. Of course most poems are also included in several editions of his Collected Poems, also published by Faber and Faber.

KC

1/12/2006 - Poetry - 'Hulshorst' by Gerrit Achterberg

(1937 - translation: Michael O'Loughlin)

Gerrit Achterberg (1905-1962) is generally considered one of the best Dutch poets ever. His poetry is often seen as the link between pre-war traditional poetry and some of the more modern and ‘experimental’ poets of the post-war period. Achterberg is the poet who introduced words from mathematics and geology into poetry. We can see this in some of the titles of his poems like Oxyacetylene and Cellophane.

Still, Achterberg is most famous for one biographical fact. Maybe it's better to use the word 'notorious', because in 1937 the mentally instable young man shot his landlady after a heated argument. During this incident he also wounded her daughter. Many of his poems, especially in his early volumes, focus on one theme: the attempt to try to resuscitate the death lover through the force of words. This usually happens at night, the death lover comes back in a dream and when the poet wakes up, he is brought back to reality.

The 'central theme' was born, even though it was already the theme of many poems in his first volume of poetry that appeared in 1931. Besides, Achterberg and his landlady never were lovers (although he seems to have proposed to her once).

Of course this 'central theme' is very important in his poetry, but it has become somewhat of a stereotype that clouds the body of his work as a whole. When you leaf through the thousand pages of his Collected Poems (or through the little volume of English translations by Michael O'Loughlin, title Hidden Weddings)*, you notice that this 'central theme' is part of a more all-embracing theme. In practically all his poems, Achterberg tries to take the world out of the flow of time, to present the reader with a still image that transcends the time-framed boundaries.

[Hulshorst Station in 1913]

This can defintely be said about the poem Hulshorst. It is one of his most famous poems and it is very special to me, as I grew up in a small town that is close to the village of Hulshorst. I know the little station in the middle of nowhere, I clearly remember the time-tables at the station in my home town, mentioning for every second northbound train: 'Does not stop in Hulshorst'. And if it did stop, the train usually would 'let no one off, let no one on'.

In 1987 the Hulshorst Station was shut down. Thanks to this poem, the building is heritage listed and these days it is a popular restaurant.

KC

* Hidden Weddings, Selected poems by Gerrit Achterberg. Translated by Michael O’Loughlin, Raven Arts Press 1987. - I found my copy in the large 2nd hand book hall at the beginning of Newtown, Sydney. For those who are interested: there still are some copies left.

24/11/2006 - Poetry - 'Where they'd lived' by Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver (1986)

Raymond Carver (1938-1988) is best known as the writer who revitalized the American short story. His at times ultra-short stories are written in a bare and sober language. Whenever he thought he had trimmed down his story as much as possible, he made sure to reduce it another 50%. This resulted in a language in which the things that are being said are almost overshadowed by the things that are not mentioned. The real tragedy breathes in between the lines.

The same can be said of Carver's poems. The language is just as sober and bare as in his stories, making his suburban drama's even more condensed, as in the above poem Where they'd lived, which tells of the end of a relationship. In a motel room (a typical Carver-scene), a man is hunted by his past, by the days when he still 'Loved you well', with that simple but oh so beautiful ending: 'Before loving you no longer'.

All of Us, The Collected Poems by Raymond Carver, is available in Vintage paperbacks.

17/11/2006 - Poetry - 'Once upon a time' by Giuseppe Belli

10/11/2006 - Poetry -'The Kaleidoscope' by Douglas Dunn

From Elegies (1985)

For me, Douglas Dunn (born 1942) is one of the best modern British poets. I must have read his first volume of poetry, Terry Street (1969), dozens of times. In Terry Street, Dunn describes the life in the now disappeared working-class area of the same name in Hull, an area where he lived when he was a student. The difference between his own life, a student and son of a well to do family, and the world of working class Hull he saw every day in Terry Street, would be very influential in his political views that would shine through his poetry for the next decades. The very down-to-earth and straightforward poetry of Terry Street, portrayed in everyday language, might give some the impression that you can hardly speak of poetry in a more traditional sense, but for me Terry Street still stands as one of the finest volumes of modern British poetry.

This highlight in Dunn's poetical career was surpassed by his best-known work, Elegies, published in 1985. Elegies is dedicated to his wife Lesley, who died of cancer in 1981, 37 years old.

All poems in Elegies are about Lesley, about death, about how to deal with life when the person you love more than anything else in the world is no longer there. The straightforward language is still there, but a touch of lyricism has been added. The result is a series of intensely moving poems, each so heartbreaking in its imagery that I can hardly read more than one or two at the time. The Kaleidoscope stands out as one of the great poems among this volume of great poetry.

A good collection of Douglas Dunn's poetry can be found in New Selected Poems 1964-1999, Faber and Faber, 2002

3/11/2006 - Poetry - 'Xenia 1, 13' by Eugenio Montale

Eugenio Montale - Xenia I, 13 (1971)

[Translation: G. Singh]

I am not exaggerating when I say that Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) was one of the greatest and most important Italian poets of the 20th century. I would even like to go a step further and say that Eugenio Montale is one of the greatest poets the 20th century produced world wide. That judgement is not based on his, very deserved, Nobel Prize for literature in 1975, but on reading his poetry, time and time again, to discover its depth, its beauty, its unending string of images that never stop to fascinate and move me and that offer me the peace of mind that all great poetry should offer.

Montale received instant literary acclaim for his first book of poetry Ossi di Sepia (Cuttlefish Bones) upon its publication in 1925. Ossi di Sepia is intensely lyrical, rich in imagery but therefore also more inaccessible than Montale's later poetry. His second volume of poems, Le occasioni, appeared in 1939 and contained La casa dei doganieri (The shore-watchers' house), one of Montale's best poems. (I would love to quote it here, but I only have the original and a Dutch translation). In this poem, we see the manifestation of what was turning into one of Montale's central themes: the passing of time and with it, the importance of memory. The older we get, the more important the role memory plays in our lives.

This aspect of Montale's poetry became essential after his wife Drusilla Tanzi died in 1963. She was generally known by her nick name Mosca (fly), and it is as Mosca that Montale addresses her in the two cycles of poems called Xenia I and II, published in the volume Satura in 1971. Over the years Montale's poetry had become much more straightforward. The intense lyricism of Ossi di Sepia had made way for a very direct, almost 'parlando' usage of language.

The 28 small poems that make up Xenia are for me amongst the most moving poetry I know, together with some other poems in Satura that are dedicated to Mosca. Xenia I, 13 stands quite apart from the rest, this poem can be read by itself. It is the only poem that is dedicated to the memory of Mosca's brother. The poet didn't even know him personally, only through a photo and some things his wife had told him. The only thing remaining of his life, are this photograph and those scarce anecdotes. Fortunately for him, the poet in his brother-in-law saved him from eternal oblivion.

27/10/2006 - Poetry - 'Field Manoeuvres' by Richard Aldington

Earlier this week, I presented a poem by Siegfried Sassoon, one of the most famous names amongst the War Poets. In the comments, I spoke about a string of lesser known War Poets that could hardly be called 'minor poets'. The above poem by Richard Aldington shows why; it is simply too good to be given that qualification.

In pre-war Britain, Richard Aldington was part of the group of Imagist poets, who followed the example of American poet Ezra Pound. Especially through the book Cathay (1913), his translation of Classical Chinese poetry, Pound had found the images he wanted for his poetry. In Field Manoeuvres, we find the same imagist elements, like the inclusion of nature and the mentioning of seasons. The contrast between these still images of natural elements and the madness of war that is being hinted at in the last verse, makes this poem extra beautiful.

The Imagists were the pre-war opponents of the Georgian Poets to whom Sassoon belonged. But in the madness of WW I, their poetry reached the same high level. Richard Aldington may not be as famous as some of the other War Poets, but all of his poems I've come across so far, show a quality that matches the best WWI poetry.