`We are a cautious, conscientious bunch on the whole, well-intentioned, middle of the road . . . family men in anoraks and belted raincoats." Thurles-born poet Dennis O'Driscoll (46) is describing his own kind. Surely Irish poets are more outspoken and colourful than this? But O'Driscoll is identifying himself according to his day job as a civil servant.
Inside his own particular anorak beats a poet's heart enraged by the arbitrary nature of life's tragedies. He rather enjoys the juxtaposition: "In the civil service you are assigned a grade. You know your status. Whereas with poetry, you never retire and you never really know your grade - it will be assigned posthumously."
Our conversation takes place in his office on South Great George's Street in Dublin, where he is "Lord of the Files" in international customs: "I'm an assistant principal. Since the early 1980s, I have chosen not to go for promotion. I've kept a balance. Work is sufficiently challenging to be interesting. My poetry is tolerated as long as it doesn't interfere with my work. Colleagues don't want the tone of the tea break lowered by talk of poetry. It is seen as an obsession on a par with golf."
O'Driscoll was only 16 when he finished school and the civil service was in fact his only career option at such a tender age. He believes the work has helped more than hindered his Muse - his favourite of his own works is his long poem, `The Bottom Line' (1994), about office life: "In `The Bottom Line' I got more unpoetic things into poetry than ever before, including the language of business" ("I scroll through e-mail;/ there are press releases to issue, markets/ to nail . . .). "It was unprecedented - to give poetry something to digest that it hadn't been fed before.
"When I was writing it I was specialising in company reorganisation and amalgamation and had lots of dealings with financial controllers and corporate lawyers. We spoke a creative language, with new words being invented and abandoned all the time. In the folds of that language were hurts and vulnerabilities, just as in the office there are dramas of ambition, disappointment, romance and infidelity."
His ideal in poetry is to arrive at "a detached, impersonal perception. Revelation is ultimately objectification. I detest the word `I' and it galls me that the only two capitalised words in the language are `I' and `God' ." Nevertheless, in his most recent collection, Weather Permitting, O'Driscoll includes an evocative long poem entitled `Family Album' which negotiates the subjective territory of his own past: " `Family Album' goes against my grain, I admit. It began as a series of prose pieces. Then my wife Julie" - the poet, Julie O'Callaghan - "warmed to them and said I should write about myself for a change. I wrote them because they were a challenge." ("The empty Atrixo jar is what survives/ of our mother's hands: hands that plumped pillows,/ milked drinking water from the pump, spread suds/ and beeswax polish through her children's lives.")
He is more comfortable with the distance of irony: "The confession needs a catalyst to allow it to transcend itself." He has been very influenced by the Eastern European poets, such as Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert: "I felt total empathy and fellowship the minute I read them." The Polish poet, Wislawa Szymborska, was "a passion of mine long before she won the Nobel prize". The fine Czech poet and immunologist, Miroslav Holub, became a personal friend.
O'Driscoll's dark sarcasm is reminiscent of Beckett, who was an early discovery: "When I was 15 I saw Waiting for Godot performed at the Muintir na Tire drama festival. I was stunned by its depth, originality, and the naked sense of poor forked human beings standing, indeed, at a fork in the road." Because the play was poorly attended, O'Driscoll assumed that Beckett was not well-known. He wrote to Beckett to offer encouragement: "The following October he won the Nobel prize." Beckett graciously replied to O'Driscoll's letter with a signed limited edition of All that Fall.
O'Driscoll's recurrent theme of the absurd injustices of physical pain and death has grown out of the intensity of witnessing the premature deaths of his parents in their fifties: "They were ill, suffering, lingering in humiliating bondage to illness". ("And where does the suffering go? . . . Ejected with a colostomy bag's waste? Does it . . . notch the heart like a furrowed face?" ) He continues: "I think in poetry, we need, like Philip Larkin, to include the darkest notes." His work also reflects his concern that we are poisoning the planet.
But there are also bursts of descriptive lyricism, often when he is describing rural scenes ("silk poppies - red slept-in party dresses"): "The lyricism escapes like a mink from a farm and creates a space for itself. It's a moment of enchantment in what is generally a downbeat poetry about the struggle to live an ordinary life. Just as humour will transcend the bleakness, lyricism will provide a counterpoint to a downbeat music."
O'Driscoll is conscious of coming from a certain generation of Irish poets that includes Thomas McCarthy and Medbh McGuckian. He reads their work "with relish", but is evasive on the subject of where he fits in to the Irish poetry scene: "I'm a dogged isolationist, secretive and furtive about my poetry. When I went to UCD I studied law and chose not to study English as an extra subject. I did not enter for the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award nor have I been to Annaghmakerrig or attended a creative writing workshop. My style is unorthodox and I don't want to be discouraged from that."
Although Terry Prone broadcast some of his earliest poems on The Young Idea radio show, O'Driscoll's stern "inner critic" prevented him from sending work out for publication until 1977: "My first poems were published in Poetry Australia by Les Murray." O'Driscoll's first collection of poetry, Kist, appeared in 1982, followed by Hidden Extras (1987), Long Story Short (1993), Quality Time (1997) and Weather Permitting (1999). Last year he was the recipient of a lucrative Lannan Award from the US, and a collection of his essays - provisionally entitled Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams - will be published by Gallery Press within the year: "The essays are both autobiographical and critical. I'm selecting them to form the sort of book I'd like to read myself."
A highly respected critic, O'Driscoll's first poetry reviews were published in Hibernia when he was 23. "When I came to Dublin I discovered I could meet other poets, like Thomas Kinsella, a former civil service man and a biting Dublin wit. I liked the camaraderie of the social side of poetry: the launches; the gatherings. In fact I met my wife at a Seamus Heaney reading." He interviewed countless poets for Poetry Ireland Review (PIR) . He is widely acknowledged and appreciated as being scrupulously au fait with what is happening in the world of poetry, in Ireland and beyond: "I read endlessly, to discover the unrecognised genius."
After getting to know Irish poets on a personal basis, he decided "to confine myself to reviewing the dead or the distant. There is only a short period in a small literary community that you can review poetry with the detachment it requires. As a reviewer, your one loyalty should be to the art of poetry itself." He believes strongly that Irish poetry suffers because so many publications employ Irish poets to review Irish poetry: "If poets are doing the judging and friendships and enmities then enter - how do you decide who is talented?"
He admires the Northern poets, but feels that their status is partly due to "critical spokespersons who mediate their work with articulate advocacy, like Edna Longley, Claire Wills, Michael Allen and Tim Kendall. There is no equivalent for poetry from the South, which is, as a result, largely unheard outside Ireland. We have fine critics such as Terence Brown and Declan Kiberd, but they don't write about poetry."
He now reviews and writes essays mostly for international publications such as the TLS, the Harvard Review and the London Magazine, preferring as his subject non-Irish poets: "I got tired writing about Irish poetry for overseas periodicals. I want to know what's happening elsewhere." The idea of defining poetry in terms of nationality is passe, in any case: "Good poets have more in common with one another, irrespective of their nationality."