The ochre-coloured farmhouse at Gort Athaig
doesn't need much enhancing; but there's a story too.
'Menagerie'
It's not just that Bernard O'Donoghue doesn't like to insist on the poetic significance of his subject-matter – he's out-and-out self-deprecating, somehow avidly deflationary. The opening to 'Menagerie' seems to say – who am I, the poet, to try and confer significance on a world so manifestly capable of doing it for itself? And yet the poem goes on, because 'there's a story' to that painterly farmhouse – a narrative rooted in place which pre-exists the poet's ratiocinations and may outlast him. To touch upon that story – which I won't spoil here – is all the poet trusts himself to do. Stories are important; as he writes at the end of 'History', summarising what has gone before –
...never forget
that you once read something by someone
who said they had known when they were young
someone who said their father told them
they had been to Abraham Lincoln's funeral.
Reading these lines, with their uncharacteristic claim as to the value of the poem itself, I recall O'Donoghue's style of reading his poems out loud. Many poets introduce their poems with a little preamble explaining possible obscurities, but O'Donoghue's stories tend to actually deploy the same content. The effect, when we do then hear the poem, can be, again, deflationary, rather like Percy in Blackadder regaling us belatedly with his story about how he was almost eaten by a hammerhead shark – 'Well, ma'am, I fell into the water; and was almost eaten by a shark. And the funny thing is, its head was exactly the same shape as a hammer!' Percy doesn't know how to tell a story; O'Donoghue, rather, refuses to read – or to write – his poems in a grand manner. He never lets us forget that they operate on the same plane as the true and tall tales he often takes for subject-matter. When he mentions, in 'Magic Lantern', 'a comet, like an old-style, opened-out / girl's hairgrip', it's characteristic of him that the movement is from the cosmic to the homely, and not the other way round. I can't imagine any other writer coming up with that comparison – except possibly Hopkins, in his journal prose.
Eschewing both out-there lyricism and the vague contentless melodrama common to much contemporary poetry, O'Donoghue relies on more subtle textural effects. In doing so, he appears to obey Elizabeth Bishop's advice that one shouldn't take 'the catastrophic way out' when writing a poem – where this might mean the sudden ascription of significance, a barn-door swinging open on the kind of starry epiphany, or revelation of personal damage, which is meant to convince us that the plain-style stuff that has led up to it really is that strange, unplaceable thing, the contemporary poem. O'Donoghue is plain-style all the way, though with skilful ruffles:
At home there's no space left on the walls
to hang the new pictures I'd like to introduce.
I move things round, hopelessly: the icon
of the virgin is now over the stairs,
her matt, pastel gaze reproving us,
which before caught the light from the fire.
'Exhibitions'
That last line captures the sound of extinguished significance so gently – it's to do with the play of 'before' and 'fire', and 'caught' and 'light' – that it's easy to miss. Another poem in this collection, 'Vocation', ends with the protagonist
...sat alone in the back
benches of the unheated chapel, hour
after hour, staring for inspiration
at the golden, unresponsive tabernacle.
O'Donoghue has always written sensitively about the religious beliefs of ordinary people, and those poems of his typically picked out by reviewers or anthologised often fit this description. But what I would draw attention to here is the difficulty, once again, of writing poems which so totally refuse the tendency towards any kind of unearned uplift, or conclusive darkness. This isn't an original problem, but it seems we do need to get to grips with it if we are to encounter what is quietly unique about this poet's style. O'Donoghue has a way of making you feel the inadequacy, the sad approximateness, of adjectives – 'golden', 'unresponsive', 'unheated'. He is the kind of poet the blurb-phrase 'hard-won simplicity' was invented for, although one doesn't want to use it, partly because it is a cliché and partly because it seems to turn the writer in question into a kind of saint. But then, if one had to describe a contemporary poet this way – the force is strong, in some critics – then O'Donoghue's your man. He has a kind of quiet sacerdotal authority about him, which can risk telling, not showing. In this, he resembles more closely 'the solitary wise man' of his translation of 'The Wanderer' than the hero of 'The Canon', much as its opening question seems to apply to him: 'An ascetic: but was he before his time / or after it?'
That this authority derives from the poet's strong sense of literary history is clear from that translation of 'The Wanderer', which forms the centrepiece of Farmers Cross and allows O'Donoghue to enlarge his usual tone of moderate authority toward more comprehensive assertions, possible, again, because not truly, or only, his:
When you start holding forth, be sure you know
exactly what your drift is and where it will end.
Any person with a spark of sense
must know by now how desperate it will be
when the whole of our dear world
stands silent and empty.
O'Donoghue isn't afraid to go over old ground – 'Yes, we know these tales of unrequited love', he remarks in 'Amicitia', but 'we also know / what truth they have'. Except we don't – or we only periodically know, before we forget again. That is why these stories, these poems, are so important; and why, perhaps, O'Donoghue has become of the most dedicated elegists of our time. In this collection, 'The Year's Midnight', an elegy for Andrew Glyn, is particularly beautiful.
This is not to say that O'Donoghue doesn't do politics. He appears to share Michael Longley's conviction that the poet must approach such happenings through the pastoral – since, for this kind of poet, the pastoral is what is immediately available to him, the conduit of sensuous delight which connects him to the world, and to do otherwise might risk bad faith. In 'Flocks and Companies', the poet hears the birds outside, and realises, slowly, that 'they, like all of us, / lived in societies, and that the wren / who trilled within my hearing yesterday / was one of many'. Since the solitary bird is a long-standing image for the poet, O'Donoghue seems to articulate here a more grounded sense of his own vocation. Birds, and poets, and humankind more generally, are joined in common endeavour.
A quiet assonance outlines that apparently simple phrase, 'trilled within my hearing', so we catch, perhaps, the phrasing of the Book of Job: 'Surely thou hast spoken in mine hearing, and I have heard the voice of thy words, saying, I am clean without transgression, I am innocent; neither is there iniquity in me.' O'Donoghue's poem suggests that individuals can't absolve themselves of a collective guilt so simply. Only at the end of the poem can he make sense of a starling's 'foreboding sequence':
But I saw what he was sent for, what he was warning,
when the first ordnance descended on Fallujah.
A parallel could be drawn, again, with Michael Longley, but his transitions of this kind are subtler, exquisitely-managed – O'Donoghue is almost brutal. (He deploys a similar special-effect more gently in a poem from his previous collection, 'Vanishing-Points', where the prostrate body of 'your daughter' in the dentist's surgery fades into that 'of the thrown-away body / of the young Taliban soldier'.) By ending his poem so suddenly – it's an unrhymed sonnet, and one starts looking for the rhymes, to try and justify the last two lines – he leaves himself open to obvious criticisms. That this poem can be read in terms of a tokenistic liberal gesture seems to be important to it. It's got to brave those accusations and win through, without using any of the soft-focus tricks available when it comes to writing a well-wrought political poem. The abrupt linkage between the personal and the political is meant to be felt, as we reach the twist, along the heart. So once again, O'Donoghue doesn't show, he tells – and it might not be to everyone's taste.
If there's anything I miss in Farmers Cross, it's those moments of righteous anger which have previously cropped up here and there to texture O'Donoghue's wise poise. Take his early poem 'O'Regan the Amateur Anatomist', which breaks off its tale about the titular sadist – 'he halved a robin with that knife' – to announce that he accidentally beheaded himself in a collision with a lorry: 'I wonder what he thought he was up to then?' Or 'The Mule Duignan', the last poem in O'Donoghue's Selected Poems, which features a passage of astonishing, MacNeicean self-laceration:
The cow was standing up, eating hay.
And then for the first and only time I saw
my parents embracing. I hate that country:
its poverties and embarrassments
too humbling to retell. I'll never ever
go back to offer it forgiveness.
Much of O'Donoghue's power relies, as already discussed, on his sensitivity as to which stories he should tell, or retell, and which not. One wouldn't want him to totally jettison his stoical wisdom and join the rest of us in the familiar mire. Nevertheless, I think, reading his poetry, of an old Tamil saying – that when the saint does finally lose his temper, his rage will be so potent as to shake the whole jungle.
Bernard O'Donoghue, Farmers Cross, Faber and Faber, 2011. £9.99. 978-0-571-26860-3
© Vidyan Ravinthiran, October 2011
The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford
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