A Broken Line: Denis Devlin and Irish Poetic Modernism. By Alex Davis. University College Dublin Press. 212 pp. hb £32.95/pb £14.95.
The Art of Brian Coffey. By Donal Moriarty. University College Dublin Press. 143 pp. hb £29.95/pb £13.95.
In what was to become a notorious piece of literary journalism, Samuel Beckett, under the pseudonym Andrew Bellis, wrote an article entitled "Recent Irish Poetry" for The Bookman in 1934. In one fell swoop, Beckett set out his stall, lambasting "the technique of our leading twilighters", the well-established achievements of the Irish literary revivalists, and identifying Thomas McGreevy's poetry as "probably the most important contribution to post-War Irish poetry". Beckett went on to state that in his view "Mr Denis Devlin and Mr Brian Coffey are without question the most interesting of the youngest generation of Irish poets' and that their work constituted already "the nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland". Beckett probably got it artistically right but his singular belief in the triumvirate forged a critical knot which Irish literary and cultural criticism has taken ages to unravel.
For behind McGreevy, Coffey and Devlin and, of course Beckett himself, Joyce looms, supposedly fathering the stereotypical notion of the "difficult" Cosmopolitan Modernist Irish writer. Criticism of 20th-century Irish writing needs the large historical frame of reference rather than the intent and actual living arc of a life lived and writing achieved.
So, lacking an historical narrative within which Devlin and Coffey can be read, they have been somewhat airbrushed out of the picture, alongside other writers who started to publish in the 1930s, such as the wonder-child, Charles Donnelly, and the fascinating Belfast poet, translator and Europa Press founder and editor, George Reavey. Without the endeavours of poet-critic Michael Smith and his New Writers Press, Anthony Cronin, John Deane and Dedalus Press, Lorna Reynolds, Jim Mays and a handful of other poets, academics and critics, it is unlikely we would now have what is in effect a dynamic re-imagining of the work of what was, in critical terms, a lost generation.
What the "Thirties" poets have in common - a story yet to be told - should not obscure the overriding distinctiveness of their individual achievements and the fact that, as writers, they lived very singular lives with quite different artistic ambitions in mind. As scholarly introductions to both the lives and analyses of the work of Denis Devlin (1908-1959) and Brian Coffey (19051995), the curious reader need go no further than the two fine studies written by Alex Davis and Donal Moriarty and published in most impressive style by University College Dublin Press.
There is an energy and flourish in the writing of both Davis and Moriarty which carries critical conviction in what they are saying; an openness and freshness of approach which is in itself refreshing. Try this for size. "The great irony," writes Moriarty in the introduction to The Art of Brian Coffey, "is that while Irish critics have traditionally acknowledged writers who, like Synge, were imaginative enough to absorb the grammatical constructions and rhythms of Irish into English, they still find it difficult, in an age which celebrates hybridity, to appreciate writers who continue to expand the possibilities of English by opening it up to the influence of other foreign languages. Rather than turn French into English, Coffey turns English into French." Now this raises the stakes somewhat and turns the reader away from the customary (claustrophobic) business of seeing poetry from Ireland as conventionally obsessed with "Irishness" into issues of sound, rhythm and other fundamentals.
Similarly, Alex Davis reminds us from the very start of his impeccable study that Devlin's poetry "takes its cue more from the verbal pyrotechnics of Hart Crane and the Surrealist eroticism of Paul Eluard than the poetry of the Irish literary revival". A point which Devlin's American friends, the poets Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, saw and heard back in 1963 when they published Devlin's Selected Poems, a few years after his death in Dublin at the early age of 51. "From an American perspective, Devlin seems un-Irish (not anti-) and certainly not English; he is rather a European in the sense that Valery and, in the next generation in France, Saint-John Perse are European in outlook."
Davis's chapters on Devlin's Inter- cessions (1937) and Lough Derg (1946) are particularly good and Moriarty has clearly got to the quick of Coffey's Third Person (1938) and, in my estimation, Coffey's greatest poem, "Death of Hektor" (1982) in the two chapters of his study dedicated to Coffey's art .
In a sense, both these books represent new and important beginnings. A poem such as "Death of Hektor" (just waiting for a dramatic treatment for radio or stage) should by now have found its place alongside MacNeice's "Autumn Journal", Kavanagh's "Great Hunger", Kinsella's "Nightwalker", Murphy's "Battle Of Aughrim " and other important poems by Irish poets from the last mid-century to the present .
We are, however, at an early stage in understanding the tradition. The prose-writing of these two poets is uncollected; a rigorous selected poems of each is also required. There is a clear need for a wider historical study which sets their individual stories against the backdrop of this country's emergence into statehood and the unfolding self awareness during the second World War. The subsequent lives of these courageous men, whose integrity has critical resonance as much as undoubted personal value, also awaits the biographer.
In the interim, Alex Davis and Donal Moriarty have written groundbreaking and exciting studies in which the general reader and student alike can recognise the true range of Irish poetry and the quite different backgrounds and artistic ambition of poets who happen to come from this country.
Gerald Dawe's most recent book of poems is The Morning Train: His selected essays, Stray Dogs and Dark Horses, has just been published by Abbey Press. He teaches at Trinity College, Dublin