In Muldoon’s previous book of poems, Madoc: A Mystery, this fantastic genius was equally in evidence but it seemed intent upon short-circuiting itself, producing a chain-reaction of blinding dazzles, a semaphore of flashes that not only put readers on their mettle but put the wind up them as well. Here, however, his gift shines out in a richer, steadier light. The Annals of Chile is by no means a simple read, but it is his best book so far. There is emotional and musical fullness, an opulence and maturity which still leave room for a huge playfulness.
‘Yarrow,’ the very long sequences of linked verses which makes up most of the book’s 180 pages, is one big echoing playroom of allusion, a fantasia in which the death of the poet’s mother and the growth of the poet’s mind are superbly orchestrated and richly celebrated. Postmodern in its speed and structure (it channel-surfs, as it were, upon personal memory and childhood reading and cultural history) but old-fashioned in its obsessive focus upon a beloved home ground (‘The bridge. The barn. Again and again ...’), ‘Yarrow’ works so beautifully because it is fed by deep personal experiences; and it is no real problem if these are rendered by hints and glimpses and intimate touches because their function is to give power, as T.S. Eliot said such experiences should, ‘from well below the surface’.
This work gives the impression of coming clean and being clandestine at one and the same time. It is Joycean in its combination of the everyday and the erudite, but it is also entirely sui generis, a late twentieth century work that vindicates Muldoon’s reputation as one of the era’s true originals.
And it does more. The Annals of Chile shows that when it comes to the workings of poetry, Muldoon’s virtuosity represents more than the ‘articulation of sweet sounds together’ because by now it also expresses the workings of an ever-maturing and increasingly rhapsodic spirit. The largesse of the writing here justifies the blurb on another recent book of his, The Prince of the Quotidian, an occasional poem-diary published by Gallery Press. If several of the poems in it can be thought of as muldoodles, others could be ranked as mulboons (‘The Sonogram’, for example, is included). There’s a lot of the old cleverality and some very cocky snook-cocking in this volume, but the blurb is still right when it speaks of the author as a major poet.
Sunday Independent, 25 September 1994: review of Paul Muldoon, The Annals of Chile (Faber, 1994)
Norman MacCaig
My first encounter with Norman MacCaig’s poetry converted me to it. In a BBC pamphlet that accompanied Listening and Writing, a Schools Radio series produced in the early 1960s, I came across ‘Summer Farm,’. ‘Straws like tame lightnings lie about the grass/ And hang zigzag on hedges.’ Brilliant. A unique continuum of wiliness and sensuousness. The minimal and the dotty (‘A hen stares at nothing with one eye,/ Then picks it up’) transposed into a metaphysical key. This was the world of the fairy tale, the farmyard as it was known in the children’s story about Henny Penny: if an acorn had dropped from an oak tree hereabouts, it could have meant that the whole sky was about to fall. In fact, everything that Gaston Bachelard says about childhood images in his book The Poetics of Reverie is deeply germane to the lyric power of ‘Summer Farm’ and scores of other MacCaig poems: ‘They are associated with the universe of a season, a season which does not deceive and which can well be called the total season … They are not only spectacles through sight, they are soul values … lasting benefits.’
*
He was a great fisherman, a master of the cast, of the line that is a lure. And the angler’s art – the art of coming in at an angle – is there in his poetry too. He could always get a rise out of the subject. He made it jump beyond itself. There is a metaphorical gleefulness in his work, yet in the end what this volatile gift celebrates is the world’s stability and verity. The MacCaig creativity is Pasternakian, the Pasternak of My Sister Life, very different from the tragic elegiac strain that distinguishes the work of his friend Sorley Maclean or that of their grave contemporary, the poet Czeslaw Miłosz; and yet the following lines by Miłosz could stand as an apt commentary upon the MacCaig project: ‘I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this:/ To glorify things just because they are.’
*
One night in Garech de Brun’s house in Co. Wicklow, after an evening at the Abbey Theatre to launch The Way I Say It, a record of Norman reading his poems, he was working the table as gleefully and deliberately as he would have worked a salmon pool. And next thing, he landed a perfectly baited line in front of me, like a little test, just to see how I’d jump. ‘I can’t stand,’ he said – the first flex of the rod – ‘I can’t stand gloomy, ambitious poetry.’ Meaning, from another angle, ‘This is just a wee jag because of the dark and earnest moods of your bog poems.’ (These were being published here and there at the time.) Meaning, from yet another angle, ‘Robert Lowell’s poetry is overrated and you should beware of being influenced by him.’ (Not that I was, then.) I don’t know what imp inspired me, but I remember that I managed to leap free and flick back with, ‘So I suppose Robert Herrick is the one for you, Norman.’ Cheeky, but called for. I date our real friendship from that moment.
*
Norman had the poet’s gift for ‘flying crooked’, down the paths of irony and surprise. His intelligence was both strict and playful, his whole character equally averse to self-pity and self-aggrandisement. Anything too solemn or too obvious (especially concerning himself) discomfited him, so even praise could be risky. I knew, for example, that I was testing his patience when he rolled a big eye in my direction as I introduced him at an Arts Festival in Kilkenny in 1975. To give the audience some notion of the quality of his sensibility, I was talking about Early Irish nature poetry. This was justified partly by the fact that Norman’s mother spoke Scottish Gaelic as her native language, partly by certain attributes inherent in his own writing. The clarity of image, the sensation of blinking awake in a pristine world, the unpathetic nature of nature in his work, all these things are also to be found in the earliest Irish poetry. The weather in it, as in MacCaig’s, is never clammy: the fish jumps, the bird calls, the berry brightens. And yet there is (of course) a difference, and Norman wanted the audience to be aware of that difference as well; he did not want to be presented as some kind of Celto-Caledonian nostalgia kit. For while it is true that many of his ancestors were Gaels, it is also true that his imagination had been sprung into modernity. His poems are discovered in flight, migratory, wheeling and calling. Everything is in a state of restless becoming: once his attention lights on a subject, it immediately grows lambent. As Dr Johnson said of Goldsmith, ‘He put a shine on everything he touched.’
*
One day at a party in Edinburgh, in a room full of smoke and music and flirtation, Norman took me into a corner and began to whistle a totally bewitching air. It was a fragment of pibroch, a few orphaned phrases as piercing as curlew-call, but it was also a melody of the soul’s loneliness, a tune that was like a piece of secret knowledge. It has grown stronger and clearer in my memory, and nowadays I link it with the clarity of conscience and the moral strength that impelled and sustained MacCaig in the course of his protest as a conscientious objector during the Second World War. I link it also with his labyrinthine ironies and courtesies, the way in which he maintained a debonair style and yet kept faith with a history of loss. The filament of sound that unspooled from his lips that day was an Ariadne’s thread leading in to the heart of the Scottish Gaelic maze: in there, at the outback of modernity and English, there dwells the foetal shape of defeat and dispersal, language loss and trauma. One side of this is ‘Aunt Julia’, ‘silenced in the absolute black/ of a sandy grave/ in Luskentyre.’ The other is a matter of tone, that habit of joking and jagging which protects the survivor’s silence. As in his poem ‘Go away, Ariel’, where he says ‘I’d rather be visited by Caliban … I’m teaching him to smoke. It soothes him/ when he blubbers about Miranda and/ goes on about his mother.’ But now I can just hear Norman rebuking me for all this, telling me to tone it down
. ‘Post-colonial cant! Blarney! Blather! Come off it!’ And yet, and yet …
*
I first met Norman in February 1973, when my wife and I were travelling to a poetry festival in St Andrew’s. On our way through Edinburgh we had arranged to have coffee with him in a hotel – The North British, I think – and he then took us round for a dram and a bite of lunch in The Abbotsford, one of the great literary pubs of the age. There we had our grilled haddocks and were introduced to Gavin Muir, son of the poet Edwin Muir. I could hardly believe it was all happening. I also remember being instructed that the Glenmorangie whisky we were drinking was not produced (as I had long assumed) to rhyme with the Italian piange but with the English word – if it exists – orangey. Being in his company was always a bracing experience: no false note was permitted and ‘Boo’, mitigated by a giggle, was a term of praise.
*
Integritas. Consonantia. Claritas. As a master of the light touch, Norman might feel uneasy about having these heavyweight terms applied to himself and his work, but as a classicist, he might just allow them. One of his self-portraits, after all, presents him as an ‘Equilibrist’, with a burden of joy in his right hand and a burden of sorrow in his left; which is another way of saying that his poetry is an element where what Shelley called the ‘weight of hours’ becomes momentarily buoyant, and ‘something/ tosses the world in its hand,/ judging its weight,/ wondering if it’s worth keeping’ (‘A Matter of Scale’).
Preface to Norman MacCaig, L’Equilibrista: Poesie Scelte 1955–1990, trans. (into Italian) Marco Fazzini (Stamperia dell’ Arancio, 1995); reprinted, Irish Times, 1996
Joseph Brodsky 1940–1996
Those who knew Joseph Brodsky were well aware that his heart disease was serious and that it would probably be the death of him, but because he always existed in his friends’ minds not just as a person but as some kind of principle of indestructibility, it was difficult for them to admit that he was in danger. The intensity and boldness of his genius plus the sheer exhilaration of being in his company kept you from thinking about the threat to his health; he had such valour and style, and lived at such a deliberate distance from self-pity and personal complaint, you inclined to forget that he was as mortal as the next one. So his death is all the more shocking and distressing. Having to speak of him in the past tense feels like an affront to grammar itself.
There was a wonderfully undoubting quality about Joseph, an intellectual readiness that was almost feral. Conversation attained immediate vertical take-off and no deceleration was possible. Which is to say that he exemplified in life the very thing that he most cherished in poetry – the capacity of language to go farther and faster than expected and thereby provide an escape from the limitations and the preoccupations of the self. Verbally, he had a lower boredom threshold than anyone I have ever known, forever punning, rhyming, veering off and honing in, unexpectedly raising the stakes or switching the tracks. Words were a kind of high octane for him and he loved to be propelled by them wherever they took him. He also loved to put a spin on the words of others, whether by inspired misquotation or extravagant retort. Once, for example, when he was in Dublin and complaining about one of our rare heatwaves, I suggested jokingly that he should take off for Iceland and he replied in a flash, with typical elevation and roguery, ‘But I could not tolerate the absence of meaning.’
His own absence will be harder to tolerate. From the moment I met him in 1972, when he was passing through London on the second leg of his journey from dissidence in Russia to exile in the United States, he was a verifying presence. His mixture of brilliance and sweetness, of the highest standards and the most refreshing common sense, never failed to be both fortifying and endearing. Every encounter with him constituted a renewal of belief in the possibilities of poetry. There was something magnificent in his bewilderment at the self-delusion of second raters and his anger at the sheer ignorance of the technical demands of poetry evident in the work of many poets with big reputations; and there was something bracing about what he called ‘doing the laundry list’ with him, which meant going over the names of contemporaries, young and old, each sticking up for the ones he regarded most. It was like meeting a secret sharer.
But this was a personal bonus, and in the end it is less important than what might be called his impersonal importance. This had to do with Joseph Brodsky’s total conviction about poetry as a force for good – not so much ‘for the good of society’ as for the health of the individual mind and soul. He was resolutely against any idea that put the social cart before the personal horse, anything that clad original response in a common uniform. ‘Herd’ for Joseph would have been the opposite of ‘heard’, but that did not lessen his passion to reinstate poetry as an integral part of the common culture of the United States.
Nor did it mean that he wished to use the sports stadia for poetry readings. If anyone happened to bring up the huge audiences that attended such events in the Soviet Union, there would be an immediate comeback: ‘Think of the garbage they have to listen to.’ In other words, Joseph decried the yoking together of politics and poetry. (‘The only thing they have in common are the letters p and o’) not because he had no belief in the transformative power of poetry per se but because the political requirement changed the criteria of excellence and was likely to lead to a debasement of the language and hence to a lowering of ‘the plane of regard’ (a favourite phrase) from which human beings viewed themselves and established their values. And his credentials for such a custodianship of the poet’s role were, of course, impeccable, since his arrest and trial by the Soviet authorities in the sixties and his subsequent banishment to a work camp in Archangel had specifically to do with his embrace of poetic vocation – a socially parasitical vocation, according to the prosecution. This had turned his case into something of an international cause célèbre and ensured him an immediate fame when he arrived in the West; but instead of embracing victim status and swimming with the currents of radical chic, Brodsky got down to business right away as a university teacher in the University of Michigan.
Before long, however, his celebrity was based more upon what he was doing in his new homeland than what he had done in the old one. To start with, he was an electrifying speaker of his own poems in Russian and his many appearances at universities all over the country in the 1970s brought a new vitality and seriousness to the business of poetry readings. Far from cajoling the audience with a pose of man-in-the-street low-keyness, Brodsky pitched his performance at a bardic level. His voice was strong, he knew the poems off by heart and his cadences had the majesty and poignancy of a cantor’s, so his performance never failed to induce a great sense of occasion in all who attended. He therefore gradually began to be regarded as the figure of the representative poet, sounding prophetic even though he might demur at the notion of the prophetic role, and impressing the academics by the depth of his knowledge of poetic tradition from Classical times up through Renaissance and modern European languages, including English.
Still, if Joseph was uneasy about the prophetic, he had no such qualms about the didactic. Nobody enjoyed laying down the law more than he, with the result that his fame as a teacher began to spread and certain aspects of his practice came to be imitated. In particular, his insistence that students should learn and recite several poems by heart had considerable influence in Creative Writing schools all over the United States, and his advocacy of traditional form, his concentration upon matters of metre and rhyme, and his high rating of non-modernist poets such as Robert Frost and Thomas Hardy also had the general effect of reawakening an older poetic memory. The climax of all this was to come with his ‘Immodest Proposal’, made in 1991 when he was acting as Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress. Why not print poetry in millions of copies, he asked, since a poem ‘offers you a sample of complete … human intelligence at work’ and also tells its readers ‘be like me’. Moreover, because poetry employs memory, ‘it is of use for the future, not to mention the present’. It
can also do something for ignorance and is ‘the only insurance available against the vulgarity of the human heart. Therefore it should be available to everyone in this country and at a low cost.’
This mixture of barefaced challenge and passionate belief was typical of him. He was always putting the slug-horn to his lips and blowing a note to call out the opposition – even the opposition within himself. There was a passion in everything he did, from the urgency of his need to go into overdrive when rhyming to the incorrigible cheek of his duel with death itself, every time he nicked the filter off a cigarette and bared his teeth to start on it. He burned not with the hard, gemlike flame that Walter Pater proposed as an ideal but rather with a kind of flame-thrower’s whoosh and reach, supple and unpredictable, at once a flourish and a menace. When he used the word ‘tyrant’, for example, I was always glad that he wasn’t talking about me.
He was all for single combat. He took on stupidity as eagerly as tyranny (in his understanding, after all, the former was only another aspect of the latter) and he was as bold in conversation as he was in print. But the print is what we have of him now and he will survive behind its black lines, in the pace of its poetic metre or its prose arguments, like Rilke’s panther pacing behind black bars with a constancy and inexorability set to outpace all limit and conclusion. And he will survive too in the memories of his friends, but for them there will be an extra sweetness and poignancy in the pictures they carry – which in my own case will include that first sight of him as a young man in a red woollen shirt, scanning his audience and his fellow readers with an eye that was at once as anxious as a hedge creature’s and as keen as a hawk’s.
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