Not many contemporary Irish poets have attempted to return poetry to its birthright in linguistic magic and obedience to a sense of spiritual awe. There is much to lose, it would appear, by removing one's poetry from the great public platform of the confirmed ordinary on to the smaller, but arguably more suitable podium of the ordinary lifted out of itself, given a sense of transcendence.
If a poet uses words merely to record or describe things, then, in a real sense, he has missed the point. Journalism describes things; poetry endows them. Or should, at any rate. Micheal Fanning endeavours in his collection to get back, as it were, to basics. Here are poems in which language is only part of the point; what the language does, and consequently, what it makes us see, is the rest of it.
Not surprising, therefore, that Fanning remarks in his acknowledgements that venerable tomes such as the Book of Kells in various editions and the Annals of Ireland have been hauled to his aid, along with essays on early Christianity by Tomas Cardinal O Fiaich. The real stuff, one might argue, not the New Age gift shop trivia beloved of so many seekers after truth and wisdom.
In the old days, poetry and prayer were linked, often inextricably. The rhythms of one mirrored the spiritual intent of the other. Seven sections, significantly, divide the book. Fanning's poem, "Lasting Light", is concise, marvellously worked and, above all, magically, deceptively simple: "A kingfisher dips low/and swift, blue flash/down the turn of stream.//Cahir river's/pools and ponds/suffuse with lasting light." Fanning is not unaware of the world we live in, nor does he invite us to be. In "Sceilg", he contrasts the stone-solid divine and old with the hi-tech Heaven-scraping modern: "Two jets powerline/ overhead to America.//Mist lifts. Lights of God/shine with atonement."
Nor does the poetry attempt to wander air-headedly among the clouds of some imagined Parnassus: commonly familiar ideas are trotted out along with the complex ones, though imbued with poetic significance. A poem such as "The Meeting" combines the predictable and ordinary with the omenic and prophetic, opening with: "So I met you, our fingers touched . . ." and ending: "I shall depart from you/as the presageful dream said/I may do." The poet as lover and prophet. At a time when the Irish poetry scene comes closer with each public reading to resembling a minor business corporation, Fanning's poems here go some way to restoring a basic vital faith.
Flann O'Connor died in 1996. Born in Limerick, he was a graduate of Trinity and for a time acted with the Abbey and the Oxford and Cambridge Shakespeare Company. He taught at the Sorbonne for a time and published three previous collections. Oddly, he is little mentioned in talk about our thriving Irish poetry community. Reviewing Poems in Books Ireland some time ago I remarked on the intelligence and directness of the work; I'm impressed with the presence of these attributes still, and the feeling that O'Connor used accessible language in order not merely to be understood, but to enhance the view which each poem presents to the reader. Thus, a poem such as "The Bailiff" paints a simple but vibrantly colourful poetic picture: "We threw out their chattels/ ragbundles tied to sticks/pots, pans, broken stools,/pulled down the thatch of/stalks . . ."
Poignant and, at first reading, simplistic as the images may combine to be, the energy is also present, as is the sense of muscular investment, a notion of eviction brutality, the "we" taking the observer uncomfortably close to the whole affair. There has grown up a sort of Famine industry, of course, and there are pitfalls, as the introduction admits, in trying to write about the event and remain outside the hubbub and notions of victim art. Several poems deal the with year 1847 and appear to be reworkings of articles from the Times of the day; the elements of journalism alchemicised into poetry, the newsy rendered bleakly lyrical. The result, perhaps unintentionally, also comments on the narrow furrow ploughed between prose and poetry.
The book is divided into four parts, ending with a section entitled "Diaspora", with its moving basic poem, "Monuments": "Roads that go from nowhere/to nowhere;/piers where no boats moor . . ."
A new sort of famine is ripping through rural Ireland these days, blighting the land with gaudy bungalows and B&B signs. This particular cultural tragedy has yet to find its poet.
Fred Johnston is a poet and critic and founded Galway's Cuirt International Poetry (now Literature) Festival; a collection of stories will be published this year
