Bernard O’Donoghue

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See Cork Literary Review (2009), which includes an article by the editor Eugene O’Connell on the topography of O’Donoghue’s poems - remarking that Cork was an ‘open laboratory’ for O’Donoghue as a medievalist ‘seep[ing] seamlessly into a poetry that filters a 21st-century sensibility through a medieval mindset’. Also, in this issue a reprint of the poem Hermes and a review review of O’Donoghue’s Selected Poems  by Maurice Harmon.

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Commentary
Denis O’Driscoll, in Poetry Ireland, Iss. 21 ([Nov. 1986?]) - Editorial: ‘I have not had enough room to get a number of recently published poetry collections (not even my own!) reviewed for this issue and will be handing over some books as well as poems to my successor, John Ennis (to whom I wish fortitude and inspiration). One debut which I ought to at least mention is that of Bernard O’Donoghue, who has done so much as editor and reviewer to spread the word(s) of Irish poetry in England. / His poems in Poaching Rights (Gallery Press), at once intimate and objective, bring proper names and place names, traditions and superstitions, saints and drunks into striking and sometimes satirical focus. Mastery of tone is O’Donoghue’s key attribute and there is also cogent imagery (‘A sweet summer’s evening / That could hardly raise the pigment to grow dusk’), a wry sense of humour, and rural evocations which are affectionate but not sentimental. Among the evocative poems, “Munster Final” is my favourite but the strongest poem in the collection is ’Out of These Fields’, a beautifully-judged and compassionate piece which draws O’Donoghue’s qualities together in one strange but deftly-sculpted memorial tablet.’ (Available at Poetry Ireland - online; accessed 26.06.2023.)

[Note - re date of above: Poaching Ireland, being O’Donoghue’s second collection, appeared in 1982 - suggesting that this is the date of his ’debut’ referred to here. Poetry Ireland Review’s Archive is sadly devoid of dates for individual issues - or only in low-pixel front-page images where the date is indecipherable - but Richard Hayes contributed a ’Re-View’ of Poetry Ireland Review, Issues 1-21, in Autumn 1992 (pp.53-66), which argues for a date a decade later [available in JSTOR online]. Yet O’Driscoll’s tenure of the PIR editorship occupied 1986-87 according to the excellent biographical entry by Patrick Maume in Dictionary of Irish Biography [online], and during that time it appears from searches in the COPAC library database that that he edited issues 20 and 21. While a reference to his predecessor John Ennis suggests that O’Driscoll might be newly arrived in post, the number of the issue (21) argues for the second year of occupancy and therefore 1987. Pending access to physical copies this is the conjectural date assigned above. The month of November is taken from the blurred front page image. No other images are available on internet.

Terence Killen, review of Gunpowder, in Irish Reporter (4th Quarter 1995, p.29) identifies poems, “Second Class Relics”; “A Good Constitution”; “The Great Famine”; “Fighting Over the Water” - and speaks of modesty and self-imposed limitations.

Pat Boran, review of Outliving, in The Irish Times (17 May 2003), Weekend Review, p.12: ‘[...] his usually very short and precise poems are often centred on minor incidents in the lives of neighbours and half-acquaintances. Returned to and retold, these reveal new meanings through the benefit of hindsight. / Yet O’Donoghue is anything but a nostalgic Irishman abroad, yearning for the auld sod. In poems that have at least one foot in the past there is, too, the kind of dangerous, vertiginous draw that Oisin must have felt revisiting his own Tír na nÓg. [...] A master of creating depth of meaning through the juxtaposition of anecdote, myths and fable (hardly surprising in one whose scholarly life is concerned with medieval literature), O’Donoghue is also Outliving in yet a third sense. Through the characters his poems remember and perhaps sometimes even create, he can step out of his own existence and, in the lives and experiences of others, find and explore the only common ground that means anything.’ (See full text, infra.)

Maurice Harmon, review of The World of Bryan MacMahon ed. George Fitzmaurice, in The Irish Times, 30 July 2005): ‘[...] Bernard O’Donoghue’s superb essay interprets several stories, such as the brilliantly intricate “The Lion-Tamer”, the seanchaí tale “The Glittering Man”, and the wonderful “Ballinteerna in the Morning”. He illuminates the work and demonstrates how good MacMahon is, disguising sophistication as simplicity. He wisely points out that the stories retain a sense of the secrecy of the parish which the outsider cannot fathom.’ (Seext review in RICORSO Library > Criticism > Reviews - via index, or as attached.)

Seamus Heaney, ‘Christmas in Camelot’, review of Bernard O’Donoghue, trans. and intro., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , in The Irish Times (23 Jan. 2006 ): ‘[...] Scholar, gentleman and poet, O’Donoghue was the ideal choice for a job requiring knowledge of the text, knowledge of the courtly Christian culture that produced it (among other things, it is a handbook of courtesy) and knowledge of the extraordinarily rich and rare Middle English in which it is written. At Oxford University he has been teaching the poem in the original for decades, and from his own work it has long been evident that he has what it takes to deliver a verse translation. He possesses what Auden regarded as the two necessary poetic qualifications - the capacity to be “bewildered and happy” and “most of all, the knowledge of life”. / The poem itself is by turns bewildering, happy and knowledgeable. It comes out of the great tradition of Arthurian romance, combining the “natural magic” of Celtic nature poetry with the highly developed conventions of knightly chivalry. It is the work of an artist completely in control of his material, playing with it as resourcefully as a Shakespeare or a seanachaí. Anonymous he may have been, but he was still capable of producing a masterpiece that has about it the uncanniness of an aisling and (as O’Donoghue observes) the irony and common sense of a Don Quixote.’ (See full-text copy in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or direct.)

Bookgeeks interview: ‘[...] The book I most wish I had written: it’s a difficult question because for various reasons – laziness, lack of seriousness and application, and so on – there aren’t many books I could imagine myself having the energy and dedication to write. I mean to write Dante you’d have to be Dante – and you wouldn’t want that, much less aspire to it. I’d quite like to have written Italo Svevo’s The Confessions of Zeno. That is deeply sympathetic and somehow within the compass of a normal person. Lots of individual poems it would be great to have written: Yeats’s “Broken Dreams”, Heaney’s Clonmacnoise poem, lots of Donne’s Elegies. But that’s just saying what my favourite poems are. (See full-text copy in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or direct.)

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Quotations
‘Everybody Loves Pat Boone’, a poem, in Times Literary Supplement (30 Nov. 2001): ‘The painful glamour of male childhood was / The elder sisters’ friends. … Friend of a friend, whose silver tongue / Made that confident and adult judgement: / “Everybody loves Pat Boone”.’

“Visiting the Birthplace of Aodhágan Ó Rathaille”: ‘We got directions from a man in socks / asleep in front of “Coronation Street” / who followed us to the door with a kind / of generous wistfulness, and then worked our way / up along the mountain road past Lisheen Cross / to reach the place itself, easily known / by its limestone monument. We set to, / taking photographs from different angles, / getting as much fuchsia in as possible / and were just setting off (we had / a boat to catch) when the sound of a car / distracted us. It was audible long before / it rolled around the bend towards us / without benefit of silencer. I knew / the driver from somewhere and he knew me / as a friend. “Come here”, he said with urgency, / “I have something to show you.” We climbed / through holly and early blackberries / into a small garden, in front of broken windows / and followed him through the jagged glass / into a restored room: new orange plaster, / radiators and power-points. “The lads going home from school throw stones at it. / Because it’s empty they think it’s nobody’s. / Once they lit a fire on the new boards below. / What kind of neighbours is it we have at all?” // I wasn’t sure what to suggest, or any way / that we might help. He’d told the Guards / but they weren’t interested. He’d sell it / if he could, but who would buy it now, / this half-wrecked bit of renovation? / It was coming on to rain, and time for us / to go, so he backed out of the way, / into the field-gap by the monument. / And as we drove back down towards Béal na Díge / I wondered who would want to fix a house / in that wet place of all earthly places.’ (Times Literary Supplement, 26 July 2002, p.4.)

“The Old Graveyard”; ‘It still commands the best view from the village, / across the unkempt pitch-and-putt course / to the river. The stone wall, perfectly jointed / at the corners, was built - or so they say / by Dan Hugh, the mason-poet, from the ruins / of the Benedictine church that dated from / the seventh century. To read inscriptions / the Americans spray shaving-foam, trying / to bring to light the names of ancestors. / In autumn when they’ve gone back to resume / their duties, in New England or Chicago, / the cosmetic blear still discolours the stone.’ (Times Literary Supplement, 20 May 2005, p.9.)

‘The Quest for Beatrice’, review of Peter Dronke, Dante’s Second Love: the Originality and the contexts of the Convivio (Leeds UP 1997), 76pp., and his Sources of Inspiration: Studies in literary transformations 400-1500 (Rome: Edizione di storia e letteratura 1997), 409pp. in Times Literary Supplement (21. Nov. 1997), [q.p.]; ranks the author with the great pan-European philologists-critics such as Curtius, Leo Spitzer, and Auerbach; notes that Sources of Inspiration proposes that many passages in Patrick’s Confessio echo distinctive rhetorical, syntactic and rhythmic patters in Augustine’s Confessions: notes as “a group of specific sentences and phrases, of the kind that scholars have always argued about”, but by having “imprinted themselves in Patrick’s memory, or in his subconscious mind”; comments that this might sound unduly impressionistic but that the method is richly earned by the rigorous concentration on lyrical form and language that always supports it [in this critic].

‘The Necessary Man’, long review of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Warwick Gould, John Kelly, and Deirdre Toomey (OUP 1997), in Times Literary Supplement (5 Dec. 1997), [q.pp.]: ‘Yeats was determinedly following artistic, political and personal courses that now appear wayward, and must have seemed unpredictable at the time’; ‘slightly grubby literary disputes in Ireland’; Yeats wrote to John O’Leary of ‘that aristocratic, esoteric literature’ needed when ‘we have a literature for the people but nothing yet for the few’; quotes editors’ remark that the primitive state of Yeats’s housekeeping in London meant that Lady Gregory ‘took care to bring her own sandwiches, while the letters speak of hampers of food including Bovril and champagne supplied by her to sustain the poet.’

“Concordiam in Populo”: ‘And Duncan’s horses ... ‘tis said they ate each other’ [epigraph]. ‘After the heart attack, prodigious events / Took place: neighbours who hadn’t talked / For twenty years, because of trees cut down, / Horses gone lame, or cattle straying, / Cooperated in organizing lifts / To make arrangements for the funeral. // Husbands who’d not addressed a civil word / To wives for even longer referred to them / By christian name in everybody’s hearing: / Lizzie or Julanne or Nora May. / The morning of the burial it rained and rained, / And we all huddled close by the graveside, / Trusting one another, small differences / Set aside, just as Kate had told us once / How she crept into bed when the thunder seemed / To throw giant wooden boxes at the house, / Beside the husband that she hadn’t spoken to / Since the first month after their sorry wedding.’ (Times Literary Supplement, 16 Aug. 2002, p.28.)

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References
Patrick Crotty, ed., Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 1995), selects “A Nun Takes the Veil” [304]; “The Weakness” [305]

Notes
Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry (London: Faber & Faber 1995) is dedicated to Bernard O’Donoghue.

Special thanks: O’Donoghue is offered particular thanks for revision of the Middle English entries in Drabble, ed, Oxford Companion to English Literature (1989).

Translation Cork: Cork poets incl. Bernard O’Donoghue, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Theo Dorgan, Greg Delanty, Robert Welch, participated in Cork 2005 European translation series directed by Pat Cotter of the Munster Literature Centre.

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