Poetry, whether written in Irish or English, is not just a language: it’s a personal language, intimately bound up with the speaking voice and personal atmosphere of a poet. A poetic voice is not something that can be transferred or taught. But it can be encouraged, enabled, empowered by fine example and the reading of literary magazines and poetry collections. A public library is one of the best places for the aspiring poet to find recent work, in both books and magazines. Cork has been particularly blessed with the publication of two crucial journals, Poetry Ireland, edited by David Marcus in the 1940s and Innti, edited by Micheal Davitt in the 1970s. David Marcus eventually went on to publish and edit Irish Writing, eventually New Irish Writing for The Irish Press, and now, The Sunday Tribune. Currently, Southword from the Munster Literature Centre and The Cork Literary Review from Tig Filí in MacCurtain Street publish new poetry. (All of the above journals may be read in our Central Reference Library.) Although Frank O’Connor began as a poet and maintained an intermittent career as poet-translator, it was prose fiction he chose as his professional medium. The Irish language poet Seán Ó Ríordáin, therefore, dominated the poetic landscape of Cork for almost half a century, from the publication of his Eirebeall Spideoige in the Forties to Tar Éis Mo Bháis in 1978. Born in Baile Bhúirne in 1916, he lived at Inniscarra and worked for nearly thirty years as a Clerical Officer in City Hall.
Ó Ríordáin’s death on 21 February 1977, along with the death of the composer Seán Ó Ríada, left an indelible impression upon the young poets at UCC. Both deaths led to a compelling decade or more of elegies, from Sean Lucy's Unfinished Sequence to Gregory O’Donoghue’s lament for his uncle in Kicking, to Theo Dorgan’s masterful Rosa Mundi in 1995. Dorgan’s Rosa Mundi had been preceded by his Ordinary House of Love (1991,1993), a lyrical, sensuous collection with all the love-lyricism of a Robert Graves. The distinguished Ulster poet, John Montague, one of Dorgan’s teachers at UCC, wrote part of his A Slow Dance under the shadow of Ó Ríada’s death. Montague and Lucy were the resident gurus of poetry in Cork in the 1970s and 1980s, but young poets like Dorgan and O’Donoghue did break out from under their elegiac umbrellas.
Two powerful Cork poetic voices continued to produce fine work in the shadow of Ó Ríordáin’s life and death: Seán Ó Tuama and Patrick Galvin. Adopting what another distinguished Cork poet, Robert Welch, calls ‘a complete and total approach to the thing’ Ó Tuama has written brilliantly of life and death, family, history and travel. His friend Ó Riada is superbly commemorated, also, in ‘Ar an dTraein go Dún Éideann’:
Ar an dtraein go Dún Éideann
bhris an tonn orm faoi dheareadh,
ar an dtraein go Dún Éideann
bhain do cheol mé dem bhonna.
Ó Tuama’s Rogha Dánta /Death in the Land of Youth, with translations by Peter Denman and Ó Tuama, was published by Cork University Press in 1997. In recent years Cork University Press has become a dynamic and stylish publisher of key Cork authors. With great thoroughness and authority it has begun to establish a canon of the best work of local writers, thus fulfilling one of the key functions of a publishing house associated with a University. More recently, CUP published an extensive selection of Patrick Galvin's poems. The book, Patrick Galvin: New and Selected Poems, is edited and introduced by two Cork poets, Greg Delanty and Robert Welch.
Galvin’s career began in Cork, in David Marcus’s Poetry Ireland and Irish Writing. But his poems were always published by outsiders, The Linden Press and Martin, Brian and O’Keefe in London, Raven Arts Press in Dublin and Belfast’s Lyric Theatre. In his revolutionary tone and socialist viewpoints, Galvin has created a unique poetic world. In ‘The Madwoman of Cork’, Miss Cecily Finch’, ‘Lochan’, and even with the reticent narrator of ‘Statement on the Burning of Cork’, Galvin has created a unique fiction within poetry, a narrative that’s not just his own life but the symbolic life of entire excluded communities. What he has done, and the persona he has created, is a magnificent addition to the Irish poetic imagination.
The world that Galvin’s poetry reveals is a kind of Spanish Cork, a Granada on the Lee, with its music and legends, its tyrants in uniform -- and its birds of carrion and of the sea. He is our lyric poet of the walled city: his Barrack Street and Greenmount could be the Jewish quarters of Warsaw or the Greek districts of Alexandria or the Catholic warrens of old Derry. What he writes is unlike anything written by any other poet in Ireland:
And if I die now
Don’t touch me.
I want to sail in a long boat
From here to Roche’s Point
And there I will anoint
The sea
With oil of alabaster.
Galvin has lived most of his life outside Cork, in London, and Belfast, but he returned to Cork in the Eighties and set up the Munster Literature Centre with his wife, Mary Johnson. That he dedicated more than a decade of his life to this centre is consistent with a mid-century belief in the revolutionary combination of theory and praxis. His Selected Poems and his Raggy Boy Trilogy are essential reading for anyone interested in Cork life and literature. From Galvin one can thread a fine line of poets, Robert O’Donoghue, Anthony Blinco, Alfred Allen, the late Seán Ó Críadáin, Seán Lucy and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.
Ní Chuilleanáin was born in Cork in 1941 into a distinguished academic and literary family. She won the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 1972 for her Acts and Monuments, a superb debut. Later collections include Site of Ambush, The Second Voyage and The Magdalene Sermon. Hers is a very brilliant talent where the world is lit by a pencilled-in sunlight. She has always written revelatory light descriptions of things - -those luminous moment of revelation in corners, in kitchens, in stair-wells :
The precious dry rose-geranium smell
Comes down with spirals of sunlit dust
From the high sill: nodding stems
Travelling out from the root
Embrace a fistful of dusk among the leaves.
It is a talent quite close to the descriptive power of the Cork novelist, Mary Leland; and all happening within the same complex social milieu. Other poets of a similar milieu, and with finely tuned poetic ears, are Roz Cowman with The Goose Herd, Aine Miller with her Goldfish in a Baby Bath, Rosemary Canavan with a robust and powerful collection, The Island, and Martina Evans who has written brilliantly in poetry as well as prose.
William Wall, a fine poet born in Whitegate, Co. Cork, in 1955, is now better known as a novelist and short-story writer, but his poetry is still supremely crafted and deeply felt. His Kavanagh Award winning Mathematics and Other Poems (1997) is well worth studying. Gerry Murphy, the most popular Cork poet of the modern era, published his first collection, A Small Fat Boy Walking Backwards, in 1985. He published Rio de la Plata and all that in 1993, and followed this with Extracts from the Lost Log-Book of Christopher Columbus and The Empty Quarter. His Selected Poems is published in 2006. Murphy is a terrific talent, at once playful and serious, with a keen sense of irony and a craftily-disguised sense of social justice. His ‘Oedipus in Harlem’ is pithy, pitiless and profound, but a poem like ‘After Goethe’ also captures essential elements of his method and style:
All nine of them -
the Muses of course -
used to visit me.
I ignored them
For the warmth of your arms.
In his youth Gerry Murphy was a competitive swimmer. In the pool or in the River Lee, Murphy often encountered another swimmer-poet, Greg Delanty. Delanty was born in 1958, and has become the poet of the 1980s diaspora. In American Wake (1995) he made the defining poetic statement for our last lost generation. But it was The Hellbox (1998) and The Ship of Birth (2003) that made his international name. His Collected Poems was published by Carcanet in 2006. Delanty is without doubt the most natural and gifted Cork poet since Seán Ó Ríordáin. A Professor in Vermont, he has been exiled from his native Cork city, but like many of the Ryanair generation he is too mobile to be simply an exile. For such a poet matters of identity, home, exile, become fractured and complicated. There is no complete home except poetry. He writes, in 'Home From Home',
Perhaps now I understand the meaning of home
for I'm in a place, but it is not in me
and could you zip me open you'd see
between the break in fuming clouds,
an island shaped like a Viking's bearded head.
Two poets who have a distinctive modern idiom are Maurice Riordan and Patrick Cotter. Cotter’s background in the study of German poetry has given work such as The Misogynist’s Blue Nightmare a metallic, urban feel, a sense of Film Noire reality. Cotter’s feel for Continental life was put to great use recently in his General Editorship of the European Translation Series. His own translations of the Estonian poet, Andres Ehin, have been widely praised. Lisgoold-born Maurice Riordan’s brilliant first collection, A Word for the Loki, was a Poetry Book Society Choice in 1995 and this was followed by Floods in 2000. He is a fastidious, intellectual poet, but with a great sense of humanity and memory:
My mother comes to the doorstep
and issues her dinner-call: three rising notes,
something between a yodel and a mimicked cockcrow.
I rise from the sand-heap. And I listen.
Another contributor to that European Translation Series of 2005 was the poet Liz O’Donoghue, who translated the work of the Lithuanian poet, Sigitas Parulskis. Her own collection, Waitress at the Banquet, was published in Cork in 1995. Four other Cork poets that the reader of poetry or the would-be poet should test themselves against are Eugene O’Connell, Aidan Murphy, Bernard O’Donoghue and Leanne O’Sullivan. O’Connell hails from the same Cork farming territory as O’Donoghue and he shares many of the senior poet’s gifts, especially a great delicacy of line and humanity of spirit. Murphy who has lived for many years in London, moved to Dublin in recent years where he continues to publish with New Island Books. He is a skilled, reticent and urbane poet. Bernard O’Donoghue, born in Cullen, has published six collections, including Gunpowder and Outliving. He is a winner of the Whitbread Award for Poetry. The very youngest of Cork’s most successful poets is Leanne O’Sullivan, born on the Beara Peninsula in 1983. Her Waiting for my Clothes, published by Bloodaxe Books, was received with wide acclaim in 2004. Although still very young, she is a practised and celebrated poet, having won the Seacat Poetry Prize, the Davoren Hanna Award and the RTE Rattlebag Poetry Slam. Her clear and steady and intensely personal tone will become a dominant force of the new Munster poetry.
The key Cork Irish Language poets of the twentieth Century, Seán Ó Ríordáin and Seán Ó Tuama, have already been mentioned. But in the 1970s in Cork there was an explosion of energy around Irish poetry, led by the late, charismatic Micheal Davitt. Davitt founded Innti, the iconic new journal, while still a student at UCC in 1970, and went on to publish poetry and commentary with an unstoppable energy. A good deal of that modernist, contemporary energy is available to readers of Freacnairc Mhearcair / The Oomph of Mercury, his Selected Poems, published by Cork University Press in 2000. A member of Aosdána and a winner of the Butler Prize, Davitt died suddenly on 19 June 2005. Liam Ó Muirthile is a superb poet of Davitt’s generation, born in Cork in 1950. His Tine Chnámh (1984) and Dialann Bóthair (1992) are challenging intellectual works. Colm Breathnach, the Oireachtas prizewinner of 1991 and ’94, was born in Cork in 1961. He has worked as a translator for years, but it is his own collections, Cantaic an Bhalbháin, Croí agus Carraig and An Fear Marbh that have ensured his firm reputation. The most distinctive and energetic poet of that entire 1960s-born generation is Louis de Paor, who now works as Director of the Irish Studies Programme at NUI, Galway. De Paor’s most recent collection, Ag Greadadh Bás sa Reilig/Clapping in the Cemetery, is drawn from four previous, distinctive and revolutionary, collections, Próca Solais is Luatha (1988), 30 Dán (1992), Seo. Siúd. Agus Uile (1996) and Corcach agus Dánta Eile (1999). His work is energetic and provocative, linguistically masterful and intellectually sharp and witty. He shares much of the instinctive brilliance of a poet like Greg Delanty, but he has transformed this brilliance into a unique new voice in Irish poetry.
There are other poets, of course. The constant and new-found reader will find many other poets of this neighbourhood and this county among the bookshelves of Cork City Libraries. And all the other categories of poet are there as well: the humorous ones like Ogden Nash and Pam Ayres, the Nobel Laureates like Seamus Heaney and Milosz, poets like Eavan Boland and Adrienne Rich; and the older classics, for sure, from Shakespeare to Robert Frost.
— TMcC |