Chris Arthur

Life
1940- [Christopher John Arthurs]; b. Belfast; grew up in Co. Antrim; worked as a nature warden at Lough Neagh; went to university in Scotland; worked as TV researcher and schoolteacher; lectured at Edinburgh Univ. and St Andrews, Scotland; moved to Wales, 1989; lectures at Lampeter University; admired author of contemplative essays and and winner of awards incl. Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award from Southern Humanities Review in 2004; poet and essayist; issued Irish Nocturnes (1999), Irish Willow (2002) and Irish Haiku (2005), and Irish Elegies (2009), and Words of the Grey Wind: Family and Epiphany in Ulster (2009), all essay collections; contribs. to The American Scholar, Descant, Irish Pages, The Literary Review, The North American Review, The American Scholar, Northwest Review, The Threepenny Review, Contemporary Review, Southern Humanities Review [SHR], South-west Review, The Centennial Review, Orion, Hotel Amerika, New Hibernian Review, ABEI Journal [Brazil], and An Sionnach

There is a Chris Arthur website [acccessible at 16.06.2023].

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Commentary
J. W. Foster, Foreword to Words of the Grey Wind (2009): ‘[...] The movement of Arthur’s mind is one of exfoliation. His modus operandi, which after a few essays the reader begins with pleasure to anticipate, is a measured departure from a particular object, incident, word or memory, often commonplace but sometimes highly personal and sometimes intrinsically poetic- ferrule, table, mistletoe, swan’s wing, one afternoon’s occurrence - into its ramifying implications, symbolisms and meanings. An extended metaphor is often the required ignition. The pursuit of the subject is a “long foray”, to borrow an oxymoron from Seamus Heaney, and exemplifies not only the parsings, propositions and interrogations of analytic thought, but also its reservations, denials and reassertions, until, oddly, the essay’s stages of argument seem to exist simultaneously, even though points along the way have been decisively made and conclusions reached. The alertly cognitive becomes something akin to reverie without loss of alertness or cognition. He may have used the term ’nocturne’ for one of his titles, but “fugue” seems closer to the development of an Arthur essay. The net result is metaphysical: Arthur’s acute inquiry is accompanied all the while by an awareness that nothing, be it argument or the stuff of the world, comes to final rest. [/.../] Ireland, of course, has produced its quota of essayists, from Oliver Goldsmith through (among others) Thomas Davis, Robert Lynd, Thomas Kettle, Stephen Gwynn and Filson Young to Hubert Butler. But if Lynd can be regarded as the Irish exponent par excellence of the English essay, it’s clear that Arthur belongs to some other tradition, if he is not sui generis. His thought-processes are too unconfined, his subjects at once too spacious and narrowly focused, his procedure too conceptually chaste, and his intention too severely tasking, for the English essay. His writing has some of the curiosity of Ciaran Carson’s prose books, with their lodes of charming arcana, but does not have Carson’s almost metaphysical wit. One thinks instead of Octavio Paz or Gaston Bachelard, at times of a soberer and longer-winded Borges. But this is trawling the academic net, as Seamus Heaney once remarked of such critical activity. If an Irish affinity must be sought, then the poetry of Michael Longley, with its finely-spun lyrical procedures, moral presence and its almost Eastern sensibility, comes to mind. In any case, Arthur’s essays reveal a rarefied and rare, if not unique intelligence, and this selection from Blackstaff Press is a cause for congratulation and celebration.’ [End; given on the Chris Arthur website - online; accessed 02.06.2010.]

Quotations
Nocturnes (1999): ‘These nocturnes are rooted in the same parts of Ireland as I am. They took shape where I was born and grew up. Inevitably, they derive much of their tone and colour from the places, people and events that constitute my background. To the extent that writing has a voice, they speak with the same accent whose inflection and intonation mark every word I utter. I hope this provides sufficient commonality to justify gathering them together as a book. But though the Irish dimension does indeed provide a linking thread, under-running all the different themes with the same familial bloodline, the nocturnes are the outcome of many intermarriages, brief encounters and unexpected alliances, which often take them far away from their ancestral roots. Kinship does not rule out distance, difference, or diversity, as I hope the pages that follow will illustrate. The ground covered in them, if it does not sound too grandiose, belongs to the human tribe, rather than to some little County Antrim clan, even if the universal issues are addressed in an Ulster accent; even if the points of departure are often minutely local.’ ([p.1.])

Reference
The author’s website at www.chrisarthur.org contains poems and prose extracts as well as biographical information, details on his writing method and photographs of assorted materials.