It seems, by now, that almost everyone has encountered some new or commissioned artwork that responds to the Easter Rising. Investment in the work of artists has generated an impressive range, and prompted many kinds of experience, and conversations and debates, about who we were and who we want to be.
For poets, the example of the 1916 writers has for a century shaped questions about the relationship between art and its political consequences. Unsurprisingly, that example has been more pronounced than ever this year.
Paul Muldoon has been involved in a number of the official projects and his new book, Rising to the Rising (Gallery, €10pb; €17.50hb), collects poems he has written for the Irish Writers' Centre, RTÉ, the Arts Council, Writers' Centre Norwich and New York University. The most high-profile of these, One Hundred Years a Nation – a collaboration with composer Shaun Davey – was performed by a 1,100-strong choir in Collins Barracks.
In his author’s note, Muldoon admits that he was set a task “most sane souls would pass on”: in the poem’s nine pages, he riffs across 5,000 years of the island’s history and namechecks Newgrange, Kilcash, Kilcolman, Glenmalure, Knowth and Dowth, the great stag and the wolfhound, and the harp and the shamrock. It does not give much room or licence to the mischief and imaginative wit we expect from him.
He coaxes some material out of Mother Ireland as her “great breastworks and booby traps” give way to “the augmented breast / and broader wi-fi bands”, but the closing lines are more strictly self-referential as they imagine the impact of their own occasion: “a cheer never raised / now given grounds / to sound at last through Ireland loud and clear, / one hundred years, / one hundred years, / one hundred years a nation.”
Muldoon is more relaxed and virtuosic in the book's other poems, whose long views also counterpoint natural and human history: The Eoghan Rua Variations plays nine variations on a quatrain by Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin, including this typical snapshot: "The English pound / the GPO while we ourselves meet brute / strength with brute / determination. The pipit interweaves wondrous blue / and that workaday sandbag jute."
And July 1st, 1916: With the Ulster Division is both limber and agonised as it imagines its speaker thinking of home as he goes over the top:
At least we’ll be spared the back-
breaking work of late August in a flax dam, the stink unfurled
like a banner across the moor
where great-coated bodies rest.
Tom French's fourth book, The Way to Work (Gallery €12.50pb; €18.50hb), is a rapid, weighty follow-up to 2014's Midnightstown and shows all his customary skill with line and sentence, sound and tone. French is a librarian as well as a poet, and it is easy to see why these roles so often fit together as his poems collect objects as memorials to a person or place or way of life.
The contemporary elegiac mode is marked by fealty to local people and places, rather than heroic deeds, but a poem lives when, additionally, it snags a reader's memory. French's craft generates air and lift-off as he arranges and sets his material: unexpected music emerges as The Sixth of March observes
snowdrops melting; clay opened, loosened, let
breathe; moss peat bearing the marks of the rake,
and a woman walking to the compost bin,
her greeting encompassing God and spring.
The book is structured around a series of poems about a family swim (The Neptune Pool) and another series about Francis Ledwidge's home place, Janeville. These lyrics engage the domestic and historical poles of French's imagination, while there are also several terrific meditative poems, such as East, the title poem and The Fathers Raising the Nets for the Last Game of the Season: A Triptych.
And he is unencumbered by any pieties when he approaches the Rising: 1916 is a state-of-the-nation poem which lets no one off the hook as it imagines the centenary as an automated phone call, with readers offered 16 different options, among them:
If you would like to watch a selection of Star Wars characters
deliver the line “a sustained engagement with our cultural heritage”
in your first language into the teeth of a Force 10 gale
on Skellig Michael, please press 5 now.
In Paddy Bushe’s On a Turning Wing (Dedalus, €11.50), poetry remains a political, rebel act. Bushe recently drew attention to the way local and national bodies were sidelined to enable filming on the Skelligs, and he sees his poems as part of an ongoing commitment to the arts as both an intrinsic good and a necessity for how the individual and the community know themselves.
The first half of the book pays tribute to how specific arts and artists figure as part of our imaginative life, as when, in Woman and Winter Wind, "Prelude, she whispered, this grassy wind / Breaking through that wild gap is a prelude."
Cumulatively, these poems lead up to a long sequence, A Suite on the Suppression of the Performing Arts in Tech Amergin, which laments county council funding cuts that have limited access to the arts in south Kerry.
The second half of the book reflects on other aspects of Bushe’s practice, with poems about family life, further satires on national politics, and continuing engagement with Himalayan culture, where his sight of “soldiers [who] may be Maoists / Or have been trained to shoot at Maoists” is part of an imaginative terrain which sees freedom and self-determination under threat, everywhere, and in need of champions.
John McAuliffe's fourth book, The Way In (Gallery), was, with Clasp, by Doireann Ní Ghríofa – author of the poem below – joint winner of the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award this year. He teaches at the University of Manchester
