With its series The Poet's Chair, UCD Press has set the bar high in terms of book design and production. In Ireland and Its Elsewheres, which collects the three public lectures from his term as Ireland Chair of Poetry, Harry Clifton also sets a high standard in terms of seriousness and willingness to raise some complex issues surrounding contemporary Irish poetry, often discussed superficially.
The first lecture is an insightful and entertaining account of Clifton’s own years in London in the 1980s and the then British poetry scene. He quotes Don Paterson as saying that the only things needed for a genuine poetic movement are “a kettle, a room somewhere, and a packet of digestives”.
The movement discussed here is what Clifton calls the “rustbelt poets”, the likes of Ian Duhig and Sean O’Brien, mainly from Scotland and the north of England, who gave voice to that post-industrial culture of the post-Thatcher years. Their anger, black irony and apocalyptic subject matter put them at an angle to the London establishment, but “tough social origins and intellectual sophistication, if properly mixed in a poem, are a positive essence”.
Clifton remarks that Ireland approached a rustbelt experience only in Dundalk and Belfast, which I think is not entirely accurate. Dublin, with its docks and breweries and tradition of organised labour, shared many of the concerns of Dundee and Liverpool. Certainly, in the 1980s some of the poets associated with Raven Arts Press were pursuing a similar programme to our friends in the North.
Another curious aspect of this poetic movement is its Irishness. Many of its proponents, including Duhig, O’Brien and Michael Donaghy, were the offspring of Irish emigrants, a demographic also making its presence felt in popular music at the time. The British rustbelt is undoubtedly one of the great Irish elsewheres.
The second lecture deals with the more complex elsewhere of Europe, which Clifton introduces with the oft-quoted line by Kavanagh: “All Ireland that Froze for want of Europe.” He says those Irish poets who left for Europe in the last century, such as Francis Stuart and Charlie Donnelly, left behind “small, often overlooked but crucial documents in the moral history of an Ireland ‘coming to consciousness’’’.
In other words, the European elsewhere is there to provide the psychic space in which the Irish conscience is worked out.
Clifton argues this persuasively, giving the examples of German, Polish, Russian and Hispanic writers who came to Paris in exile from their homelands but eventually returned to the peripheries, so that, for them, Paris remained an elsewhere, “a desert of detachment and anonymity” in which the poet could do his work.
I find this argument hard to accept completely, as great cities have an existence independent of their role as an elsewhere. The very definition of a great city is that it provides a psychic space in which the imagination can flourish – that, in short, it gives you something you didn’t bring to it.
However, Clifton then points out that the above line by Kavanagh occurs in his poem Lough Derg, and that there is another Europe which is not an elsewhere for us. That is the Europe of pilgrimage, of Dante and a great spiritual tradition.
From this viewpoint, Irish poetry is an arena where a European conflict is being acted out, between classicism and Christianity, and Clifton acutely characterises much recent Irish poetry, in its awkward compromises with temporal power, as Horatian.
This stimulating insight opens the way to a much broader debate about the nature of recent Irish poetry, and the verities about it we have come to take for granted.
Clifton belongs to that generation of southern Irish poets who turned to “the deserts of old European cities” rather than the enticing prairies of the US (perhaps to the detriment of their “artistic posterity”). In the third lecture, he looks scathingly at the relationship of Irish poetry to the US, that glittering elsewhere, that Irish otherworld.
The US, he writes, is a kind of “afterlife” for Irish poets, as it is for other refugees, be they Polish, African or Cambodian. What distinguishes the Irish poet from these others is the history of misunderstandings in the same language, the long tradition of stereotyping and appetite for paddywhackery, which seems to renew itself with each generation. Clifton gives the example of Padraic and Mary Colum, whose stay in the US expanded into a lifetime but who remained stuck in time in the Ireland they left, as Padraic Colum recycled the folklore and general Irishness that his American audience expected of him.
Very few of the many Irish poets drawn to the US by the lure of lucre seem to have actually engaged with the matter of the US, what Czeslaw Milosz called “a great republic, moderately corrupt”. It’s as if they left their poetry in mid-Atlantic.
Both the tragic and comic aspects of this trajectory are crystallised for Clifton “when an Irish president and her aides examined texts in a glass case at Emory University . . . an Irish birthright, perhaps the last remaining birthright of a small nation in a globalised age, sold into a lucrative afterworld”.
These three lectures, crammed with ideas and insights, explore three of Irish poetry’s elsewheres, but they all point to a fourth, which many of us regard as the greatest elsewhere of all: Ireland itself.
Michael O'Loughlin's most recent poetry collection is In This Life, published by New Island
