Although John McAuliffe's new book is founded in what the back cover describes as "the domestic spaces and routines" of a contemporary life, subjects of which he is such a master, its general drift is out from the domestic centre and back. At the book's heart is a sequence called Home, Again, which is in active dialogue with Edmund Spenser's pastoral Colin Clout's Come Home Again, from the 1590s, from which it takes its epigraph. The book as a whole draws on Spenser's poem for its epigraph as well: But if that Land be there, quoth he, as here, / And is their Heaven likewise there all one?
At first glance this poem by an Elizabethan settler poet in north Cork is a strange stimulus for a modern Listowel-bred poet based in south Manchester (to which there is a great deal of reference here.)
It is a daring recourse too: Spenser took a poor view of Ireland, set out in his infamous View of the Present State of Ireland, but the evidence of "Colin Clout" is that, for all that country's natural advantages, it is the state of the court in England that is most deplorable.
By contrast to it, Spenser’s account of the Munster Blackwater and its tributaries has a lyrical charm: the River Mulla (the Awbeg) rises in the Ballyhoura mountains (old Mole) before running down “To Buttevant, where, spreading forth at large, / It giveth name unto that auncient Cittie, / Which Kilnemullah cleped is of old”. Cill na Mullach was never so grandly described.
So McAuliffe's interplay with Spenser is a subtle and enriching way of launching his subject. His Manchester references – Barton Moss, Longford Park, Moss Side – culminate in The Wake and show a settler in a different sense and age with a new kind of dinnseanchas: left at Oak Road, / up Circular, then Palatine, Lapwing Lane, / slow across Wilmslow . . ."
Notion of home
The key to it all is in the Spenser lines quoted as the book’s epigraph: most critical discussion of Spenser’s poem has centred on its paradoxical notion of home. Spenser was a deeply patriotic Londoner, but the home to which Colin Clout returns is Kilcolman, near Doneraile, the settler poet’s castle.
But of course such uncertainties of domicile are not confined to decisions between Ireland and England. McAuliffe’s point is that migration and relocation are complex matters, and he casts his net wide.
This book is full of rather veiled bidirectional references: The Valley of the Black Pig gives an Irish mythological title to a poem about the Maori hangi, or cooking pit, in New Zealand.
A few poems later in the Home, Again sequence we return to the plantation of Munster by the River Deel in Co Limerick, where the medieval Franciscan friary and the Knights Templar tower encounter the figure of Aubrey de Vere, who brings together the Anglo-Norman, Spenser's century and a 19th-century Irish poet.
As he moves from place to place and from time to time, maps are an indispensable theme in this highly topographical book: maps of the geology of England and Wales in The Mud Pump or of the N24 in DMZ.
The first poem in Home, Again (with its cunning, questioning medial comma) is set among his creative-writing teaching friends in the Red Lion in his new home in Manchester. The topic is the point – or lack of it – of the activities of "this shower, this avalanche / of poet-critics, pol corrs, stand-ups, lecturers and journalists in verse". It is not clear who the "you" is here: it could be the speaker in the impersonal voice (the Briathar Saor, which is the title of another poem here): "Then you drop your bombshell. You're returning. It's not / what it was, when the 'crew that used to be' brought the reader / and the critics flocking."
The way into where?
But, like Spenser, returning where? It is the question raised throughout the book from its title on: the way into where? Back to Ireland, the source of “the ancient art”?
For all the friendliness and good humour of his manner, McAuliffe (who writes a monthly poetry column in these pages) doesn’t give much away, and he is not going to settle for a simple definition of home and away. An early poem in the book ends with “someone shouting from the kitchen, / ‘Your problem is you don’t listen’.” More to the point, he doesn’t volunteer opinions.
There are two poems here called On Earth. The first starts with a powerful description of a thunderstorm , which suddenly and unexpectedly raises a big question: "Is this what it means to be someone? I'm not saying anything . . ."
The second poem, 46 pages later, starts with drops of rain that take us back to the earlier poem’s “petrichor” – the sweet smell of rain on the dry ground. But the context is different now: the later poems in the book have turned without notice towards the wistful and the autumnal. We should have taken more interest in the flowers since “Summer we’re about again to give up for lost”.
The danger for the everyday is its vulnerability. The book does end, after all, with a group of beautiful poems about the reliable domestic virtues of "the household of continuance" (a phrase from another 16th-century poet, Surrey). One unforgettable poem, The Rebuild, has caught perfectly the movement from familiarity to anxiety. A woman is moving into an old house "and tipped a little, as though she'd taken a drink, / or lost a heel, or aged overnight by years". She hears birdsong and branches moving, "familiar, quiet, unpredictable music", "but also, farther off, a bus's creaking brakes / at the stop a street away, hearing even, / the torch in her hand, the doors clatter open and the driver / name the price, there and back".
Bernard O'Donoghue's latest collection is Farmers Cross
