In The Gossamer Wall, poet Micheal O'Siadhail pays homage to the victims of the Holocaust. With the survivors of the camps now in extreme old age, this is the time, he feels, to recall how one of history's pivotal atrocities came to pass, writes Patsy McGarry.
Poet Micheal O'Siadhail maintains a God-like absence - or presence - throughout his new creation, The Gossamer Wall. Neither he nor his "voice" is anywhere visible in the work. This immanence is deliberate, and underscored by the absence of even one picture of the poet anywhere in the book or on its cover. It is an act of humility and homage before those who died, those who survived, and those who told about the Holocaust. The book is dedicated to these witnesses.
The Gossamer Wall is really one long narrative poem, which addresses meticulously and with great sensitivity that most evil episode in human history when civilised man coldly planned and carried out the extermination of six million men, women and children for the crime of being different.
The book is an exceptional achievement, evidence of the poet's wounded fascination before such human evil and testifying to a painstaking labour of something akin to outraged love for all those who suffered. It was a labour of four years, but behind that more immediate application it is clear the subject has haunted Micheal O'Siadhail for much of his adult life.
Born in 1947, he reflects how his youth, his life, the whole cultural climate since, has been marked by the Holocaust. It has led to a loss of faith in meaning, a loss of faith in humanism, a loss of faith. It has promoted the absurd, and fostered despair - in art, in philosophy, in life.
For him, it was "the pivotal event of the last century, and one of the pivotal events of the last millennium". It represented "the fall of the pride of modernity", he says, a modernity born during the 30 Years' War with its dream of perfect boundaries, a dream brought to its extreme in the Holocaust. Then, the accumulated prejudices of 2,000 years were unleashed by the most advanced state in the world - culturally, economically, militarily - at the end of another 30-year cycle, which began in 1914. It was terrible, but it was not beautiful.
O'Siadhail is as fascinated as everyone else - as he puts it in the poem, Glimpses - by how "after a tough day selecting who'd live or die,/For light relief Mengele had the camp cellist/Anita Lasker play him Schumann's Träumerei." Such behaviour poses the question: how could people of such refined sensibility perpetrate such planned atrocity?
O'Siadhail believes the cause was Romanticism gone awry; the Romanticism that celebrated truth and beauty, beauty and truth, but forgot about the good. It was aesthetics gone wild, abandoning its cousin, ethics, to irrelevance.
His more immediate inspiration for the book was threefold. An elderly friend of his has a concentration camp number tattooed on her arm. She showed it to him, and he reflected that she and other direct witnesses were much fewer now, before a generation that would not know. What she and her fellow Jews suffered should not be forgotten, ever, he feels.
Such memory is a necessary vigilance before all creeds and ideologies that reduce the great richness and complexity of humanity to the brutality of a slogan or a primitive idea, usually with horrific consequences.
A second catalyst was a visit to Norway some years ago, where he was renewing acquaintance with people and places from a stay 30 years before. He was threatened by two neo-Nazi skinheads, who mistook his sallow features for those of a darker nationality.
And he had read Etty Hillesum's diary. She was "a young bohemian waif" who lived in Amsterdam and kept a diary for two years, during which she rediscovered her Jewish origins.
These influences forced him to confront questions that had nagged at him for years. He finds it paradoxical now that he was to find dealing with such grim material "powerfully enriching". He does not find it paradoxical that an Irishman should feel the need to address the Holocaust in this way. He feels that being Irish was part of what drew him to the subject. Irish people, he believes, are generally drawn to the underdog, and predisposed towards the outsider. Besides, he is also, culturally, a European, and the Holocaust was very much a European event fed by centuries of prejudice born of a Graeco-Roman Christianity which blamed the Jewish people for the killing of God.
He was not drawn as much to that Irish catastrophe, the Famine, though there are oblique references to the suffering of the hungry Irish in the poem, 'Signatures'. This work might also answer the question of why he wrote about the Holocaust and not the Famine:
Surely all tragedies are both singular and one;
Those arcs of island over our human zone.
An uncouth and ruthless Georgian's litany of woe.
Ten million scorch-earth kulaks.
Purges and riddances.
The Gulag archipelago.
Hatches battened on a reek of fevered steerage
Skibbereen to Groose Isle
Ghosts of famine cross on their ragged voyage.
All were "hidden signatures of pain in a planet's hearth./Quakes and eruptions linked in the underearth". In the same poem, O'Siadhail remarks:
And yet there's no Richter scale of tragedy.
How to measure suffering? A calculus of pain?
Beyond each agony a name, a voice, a face.
One does not measure or compare the quality of tragedy - it is irrelevant. All tragedy is about the unseen face of one sufferer. However great the scale, it all comes down to "a name, a voice, a face", O'Siadhail believes.
He agrees the subject is a very public one for a poet to address, but for him, for the reasons elucidated above, it was also about confronting those personal, nagging questions. Besides, he had addressed the public theme before in A Fragile City (1995), when he wrote about trust and its betrayal by those with power. He believes now that this book was prophetic, considering all that has emerged since.
And yet and yet - despite the grim darkness of the subject-matter, in the midst of such human evil there were also glimpses of "the glory of the human spirit", he remarks. There was heroism, friendship, compassion, such as that found among the Huguenots of the little French town of Le Chambon, who saved hundreds of Jews. O'Siadhail devotes a section of his new book and 10 poems to them.
But then there is also Northeim, a town in Germany, and another section of nine poems that amount to a study in how ordinary people can be sucked into evil.
Nor does he judge them. Rather, there is an implicit and disturbing question: in their situation, would you have done differently? Who can judge? In 'Battalion 10', eight poems explore how ordinary men become murderers and the ease with which these "Truckers, stevedores from Hamburg's docklands,/waiters, factory hands, clerks and small-time/salesmen; an average trawl of average citizens" come to go about their bloody business.
The 'Figures' section, 14 sonnets about people in the camps, could be said to be the heart of this book. It is a dark heart, sensitive but not sentimental, and horrific in what is suggested by the author's restraint, as in 'Qui Vive':
As months draw skin tighter over cheekbone,
Steinlauf washes to remember he's still a man.
When to queue to arrive as the soup is thickest,
To sleep on a pillow of belongings, not to leave
Bowl or shoe unattended. Survival of the quickest.
The collection opens with 'Landscapes', 12 poems which set the millennial context for the coming cataclysm, and ends with 'Prisoners of Hope', 14 poems opening out to the future, which meditate on such issues as "That any poem after Auschwitz is obscene". In this section particularly, O'Siadhail employs a zig-zag rhyme, with words at the end of one sentence reverberating off another in the middle of a previous or subsequent sentence.
This is at once the poet's attempt to illustrate the chaos into which meaning was thrown by the Holocaust and an indication that, with time, a healing has begun, with hope leading the way to a new order. The dissonance into which history was thrown by the event is giving way to "the restless subversive ragtime of what thrives". You might say the entire book is a plea for memory - so that "soft habits of psyche" will not let us slip back to such horrors again, so we do not forget history, so that we are not condemned to repeat it.
The Gossamer Wall is published by Bloodaxe in Ireland and the UK, and is also being published in the US.
