Poetry: 'We meet in an evil time," murmured the gaunt Cork poet, Gregory O'Donoghue, unconsciously or consciously echoing MacNeice.
We were on our way to the funeral of Seán Dunne, dead at 39. The church was packed with family, friends and colleagues, but mainly with his own UCC generation, mourning the first of their lot to go. A monk from Melleray spoke, I spoke, and a tidal wave of emotion lifted the coffin all the way to Ballyvourney next day.
Peter Fallon has edited a Collected, which enables us to understand Dunne's achievement. Against the Storm (1985) was one of the last volumes from the Dolmen Press. It is a gloomy book for a young man, moving between the madhouse and the monastery, with a longing for home in between. "I ask for success in simple things:/ husbandship and father care, the deep/ patience of the monk with ancient texts" (Morning at Mount Melleray). There is a memorial poem for that laureate of pain, Sean Ó Ríordáin, whom Dunne admired. But there are also chimes from Spenser in a marriage poem for Dan Mulhall, a UCC contemporary and future ambassador: "From here to Delhi let their echoes ring".
In order to survive, a poet needs skills, and a nexus or nest of obsessions. One of Dunne's favourite images, in his second volume, is the stricken blackbird whose nest has been plundered, an adaptation of a medieval Irish poem. "When it comes to hurt in homes/ there's little for you to teach." he admonishes the wee bird. But he belies his own rebuke across the page, in the title poem, The Sheltered Nest. "When least expected I found love again,/ startling as a bracelet gleaming in grass".
He was also haunted by refugees, those voyaging away, as in Emigrant Sheds, Cobh, in his first volume, but our new asylum seekers as well, like Refugees at Cobh in his second. He was also, like some of our greatest writers, Joyce and Beckett, a philo-Semite, writing of The Jewish Museum in Portobello, as he had earlier of The Ghetto Women. "In Fine's shop in Terenure I buy/ rye bread, chunks of kosher cheese./ Streetlights are a bright menorah/ lit with singing for our feast."
Seán Dunne was something of an aesthete; indeed the cover of the Collected depicts a willow pattern cup and saucer, fragile but beautiful. My Zen friend, Gary Snyder, with whom I shared a Berkeley workshop, defined his kind of poet as a "seeker", for whom poetry is the fruit of a spiritual quest. Poems in Dunne's posthumous volume, Time and the Island (1996), such as The Art of Tea and Shiatsu Sequence suggest his spiritual journey, invoking figures such as Thomas Merton, Simone Weil and that curious Japanese Irishman, Lafcadio Hearn.
The title poem, which ends the Collected, The Healing Island, poignantly predicts a loving future. "Before leaving I climb the mountain./ High above sheep and bladed winds,/ I add my stone to the peak's cairn/ and another for you: a summit reached."
But Seán was also a journalist, who gave a brief literary glow to the then Cork Examiner. He could be savage about our glib trade: "the world's a colour spread for yuppies/ licking at fortune's bum like puppies". This from his Audenesque Letter from Ireland, which catches, as no one else has, not even the Northern poets, the anguish of the year of the hunger strikers: "black taxis, black jackets, black bruise and contusion,/ black crepe on a letter box, the Royal Black Institution".
Another surprise is his versions of Akhmatova. Suitably, I read them in the sick bay of a hospital, comparing them to the translations of D M Thomas, who has Russian. The whole question of translating from cribs has been aired in Cork recently, with their series of Eastern European poets. I find Séan's sombre temperament suits this great gloomy Russian, and his sense of ritual renders her prison poem Requiem more sonorously. He also catches her quite contemporary sharpness, in Could Beatrice Write . . . "Could Beatrice write with Dante's power/ or Laura glorify love's pain?/ I paved a path for women poets./ Dear God, how can I shut them up again?"
Seán Dunne's Munster landscape had been the preserve of poets in Irish, the bards of Corkery's Hidden Ireland. Fascinatingly, he seems to have shed Corkery's agenda: "I have no time for the view that Ireland's/ the sum of the scenes at a Munster Final". Instead, Spenser is a continuing influence, that poet whom sculptor Seamus Murphy called "a malignant dwarf", and who referred to the province as "Monster", advocating the eradication of the natives: an Elizabethan Eichmann. Still, the best poem about Cork is his Epithalimon, to which Dunne pays homage again in Doneraile Court and his late Suir Song: "sweet Suir flow softly till my song's end".
Now Séan's song is ended, as is, more recently, that of Michael Davitt and Gregory O'Donoghue. Gerry Murphy, the e e cummings of Cork, suspects that someone has made a clay model called Cork Poet and is sticking pins in it. Yet he himself has a Selected due this year, and the prolific Greg Delanty a surprisingly early Collected. Tom McCarthy's Borgesian novel, Merchant Prince, suggests a new sophistication, while Theo Dorgan has also added prose to his armory. Our English professor at UCD once described my generation as "a nest of singing birds", (although perhaps "quare hawks" would have been a better description of Cronin, Hutchinson, Kinsella and myself.) This became true of Cork in the 1970s and 1980s, and it is perhaps fitting that Seán's Collected opens with his last poem, which is a Prayer for the earth, which I should have read at his funeral Mass: "King of Saturday, attend the birds:/ oiled wings flapping; their clogged throats".
Poet John Montague taught at University College, Cork, for nearly two decades, and his latest book of poems, Drunken Sailor, contains many poems set in Cork
The Gallery Press will celebrate the life and work of Seán Dunne in the Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, on Saturday, February 11th, at 7pm as part of the Munster Literature Centre's Eigse an Ghrá
Collected By Seán Dunne. Edited by Peter Fallon The Gallery Press, 201pp. €13.90pk/€22.50hk