Philip Nikolayev - Letters from Aldenderry

Letters from Aldenderry

 by

Philip Nikolayev

Philip Nikolayev shows himself to be at once a master of the ‘natural’ conversation poem as well as of the most witty and ingenious ghazals, sonnets, quatrain poems, and other fixed forms… This is a truly exciting collection of lyrics, as surprising and varied as it is original.’

– Marjorie Perloff.

Review: Ann Fallon.

Letters from Aldenderry is Philip Nikolayev's fourth book of poetry and is, as you would expect from a poet with his publishing history, technically brilliant and confident. It is also   emotionally complex and personal while exhibiting his engagement with a vast cultural background in references to people and places of the US, Russia, Europe, and India.  Containing ninty-nine poems it takes us from the flight of two 'eagles' down immediately into the world of the poet, opens us up to poems which flow easily like the best  conversations, and engages us in questions of being, of art and of human frailty, until we finally exit the book from a vantage point above the seated poet, watching as he  'types a word or two and falls asleep'.   

The book opens with the poem Eagles, a curtailed sonnet which offers a glimpse of something which appears at first to be a 'rare sight, lovely against the chalkboard sky' but which in line nine, becomes a disappointment and a distraction from an essay which he was reading.

Eagles

Two eagles circled over Cambridge today,
a rare sight, lovely
against the chalkboard sky.
Drawn to stare, I soon noticed
that they went around in near perfect circles
at even speed.
In fact they looked exactly identical.
Their widespread wings didn’t so much as flutter.
I heard a thin electrical whiz
and wondered if they carried
tiny surveillance cameras on board
that could scan
“Shakespeare and the Pathos of Rambling” that I was reading.

The final line is the longest and could very easily have been divided to complete the Petrarchan form which is indicated. That particular form, however, was significant for expressions of idealised or perfect love, and there is no room for perfection in Nikolayev's down to earth take on the world. The ideal of the two eagles is associated with a childhood promise, and appears in a 'chalkboard sky'. His growing awareness then recognises that they are not quite perfect and the trope comes when he hears the 'thin electrical whiz'. The disappointment of this changes to humour when he wonders if their 'cameras' might be capable of scanning the essay, and there is the suggestion that they, and their owners might benefit more from such surveillance. Given that the essay in question is from James Wood's The Irresponsible Self  and that the philosophy of that book is dealt with later by Nikolayev in the poem Revolution, it is difficult not to concur with his laconic assessment here.  

The conversational tone of Eagles is typical of the poems in the collection drawing us in and yet presenting in a very understated way the philosophical issues which life seems to offer. In The Art of Forgetting, the same easy confidential tone is used and draws attention to his own forgetfulness before examining the question of where attention should be paid. The poem therefore exemplifies his intimate awareness of the limitations of the human condition and he explores this theme by particularising it, by drawing us into the conversation and by allowing the universal predicament to be discovered in our own time.

The Art of Forgetting

Last night I cooked my socks in the microwave 
by mistake. What to do when you’re so absent
minded? As well, I have frequently
refrigerated my poems in the freezer
to the point of having to thaw them later,
and poetry’s what’s emerges in defrosting.
I have also lost to nature generations
of galoshes, coats, scarves, umbrellas,
even once an Egyptian skullcap,
whose individual names I forget.
The name of the czar escapes my mind
on whom was meant to be my dissertation,
or was it thesis. Water,
all kinds of water under the all-purpose bridge.
If I’ve forgotten so much via absentmindedness mostly,
then how much have we forgotten as a species?
One day we learn, another forget
everything, including this fact.
It’s possible given enough time and effort
to forget anything,
which’s why we like to reminisce sometimes
on those even who’ve decided they don’t like us.
We’ll fight for our memories, the truth as it appeared once.
But to remember something we need to forget
something, a different truth. My grandmother
believed that if you dab any convenient spot on your body
with iodine daily
it will help you keep your memory in old age.
Head of the Marxism-Leninism chair
at the Ivanovo Energy Institute,
where she taught philosophy and scientific atheism,
she was the kindest soul, loved and spoiled me to distraction,
and her blueberry cakes were of course the best
in this world. Baptized as a child,
on her retirement to a small apartment in the Crimea
she read the Bible, perestroika raging all around.
Everyone wrote, thought and talked of
Stalin, Stalin, Stalin, Beria, Stalin.
She read the Bible, both the Testaments.
Thus dialectical materialism was forgotten
and an ancient faith recovered.
I too would like to forget a few things,
keep trying, but tend to forget instead
all the wrong ones, like submitting payments
by the due date, the need to tie my shoestrings.
Mnemosyne, and her daughters the Muses,
and her grandsons the museums …
Literature too is a museum,
as well as Lenin’s mausoleum,
which is essentially a tomb.
As you must of course know I’ve forgotten
the remote control on the bathroom sink
where my reflection in the crooked mirror
distracted me with its scowl.
This is earth life, but like hailing from outer space.
When my daughter was born,
I spent the night with her and my wife at the hospital
and went home the next day to clean the apartment.
I vacuumed the floor very thoroughly,
my thoughts soaring far and wide. Little did I notice
that the vacuum was running in blow out mode
so the condition of the floor changed
hardly at all. This still makes my wife laugh
and may indeed be worth remembering
against all death. While stress, duress and strain,
the painful neck crane
and other stuff rotten
are best forgotten.

Reading through these poems it becomes obvious that Nikolayev is  a poet's poet, taking delight in manipulating and changing established forms and even adding new ones. Letters from Aldenderry continues his subversion of form and language by showing his craftsmanship and then resolutely breaking the rules in the service of the particular poem under construction.  In Ideas, for example, he runs the words together in a scriptaura continua, forcing the reader to work to recognise the English words and their development from the Latin mother tongue, just as the idea 'ofaprivatelanguage' is questioned along with 'whoputithere' and 'howdiditemerge'.

This idea of a private language is further confronted in his 'immured sonnets' where he uses the form to address our ability to read another person or to translate thoughts  and languages. It also questions such unconscious ideologies as whether we privilege reading from left to right, or from right to left. Hymn, a beautiful love poem to his wife, the poet Katia Kapovich, is a good example of the form. As in most of the immured sonnets in the collection the personal thoughts occur in bold type and are surrounded by the plain type of the more impersonal thoughts.

Coming across the form for the first time it is not immediately clear how to read it. During the course of the book the rules change, so that the reader is constantly being brought into challenging word plays and through these into more personal discoveries. John Kinsella describes his poetics as being 'in "cahoots" with a self-created idiomatic Russian-American English that, like Nabokov's adds to the possibilities of the word, of the line, of the overall form of expression in the text.'

His attitude towards innovation and subversion emerge from an examination of how he displays the rules of his craft before confidently breaking them in the service of the piece he is constructing. He opens the book with a curtailed sonnet, itself once a subversion of the sonnet and now accepted on its own terms. This links his innovation to past innovators, and just as Joyce referenced  the past while 'making it new' for his generation, Nikolayev continues to reference the past while creating something new.  In Revolution, he hints at the   tightrope which must be walked between the populist call for

     poetry that goes de   
     de de de de de duh

and the literary critics who demand

     dramatiqually Duhfamilriazung  
     Ourself zo 
     that oui oui oui oui oui 
     oui can no longer recognise Ourself 
     cuz oui wanna escape from Ourself

Having established his poetic credentials he subverts the rules and breaks the forms. Peppered as his poems are with mention of philosophies and philosophers from Plato to his grandmother's knowledge of dialectical materialism, Nikolayev's 'broken forms' adds to the suggestion that he is rejecting Plato's 'ideal forms', and reflecting a more accurate portrait of the relentlessly fallible and broken human condition. His innovations and 'broken forms' become a philosophical reaction against the idea of perfection and are used in the service of art and ideas, rather than a reaction to established literary manifestos.

The central poem in the collection is instantly recognisable as a ghazal but the rules are broken in line with the ideas expressed. Normally a ghazal is a poem of rhyming couplets dealing with unattained love, melancholy or metaphysical questions and containing a reference to the poet in the final couplet.  Here the reference to the poet/narrator occurs in the first couplet, so the poem is turned on its head. The strict rhyming scheme is broken in the fifth couplet just as the voice proclaims that it will not follow the rules. Looking in this kind of detail at how Nikolayev is breaking the poetic rules helps to provide an entry point for his personal aesthetic, which seems to tell us that the thoughts behind the poetic form will always take precedence. 

My name is Wormswurst, I give back to men their Zen.

I switch their here now with my there then.

Their stories of the past forgotten

Lay many generations protein,

But when our new spores come to life,

We sing them from within a hive.

We show a multitude of claws

And form a multitude of laws.

We see a world in groping mittens.

Will not obey! This music leads me,

This music leads me, leads me where?

Oh how it leads me! I don’t care!

The opening acknowledgement of his body as 'Wormswurst' or wormmeat gives the narrator an atemporal, aspatial point of view and alludes to Hamlet. This Shakespearean allusion continues in the final poem Earth, with its seven rhyming couplets. But the portrait drawn there of the 'diminished lot' could also be staged as a Beckettian drama.  Earth is however a unique expression, sui temporis, from an important modern poet at ease with his own predicament and aware of his own craft and vocation and of the insignificance of life for all that. Like Beckett he decries our efforts to express something significant, and like Beckett does so in a way which elevates human expression to a beautiful art form. 

Earth

But what to make of the diminished lot,

of what man could have got and yet has not?

But let him simply while away the day,

and soon this will not matter anyway.

Walking in vain across a cloudy sky,

he scans the grasslands with an acid eye,

like a slightly more modern Robert Frost.

But what of what man had yet somehow lost?

Staring at nature helps him to forget,

to come to terms, to cancel out the debt.

All night he whistled with a mockingbird

and now on his old keyboard types a word

or two into the world and falls asleep.

The land has willows, something needs to weep.

Nikolayev has translated Beckett's French poems into English and has run the SAMUEL BECKETT facebook page since 2009, gathering a unique collection of photographs, artistic portraits of Beckett and resources and bringing together almost twenty thousand Beckett fans worldwide. It is typical of his interest in art, culture and ideas and the high standards that he insists upon, that the page has become such an important resource for Beckett fans and scholars. 

We are told consistently that to become better writers we must read more and there is no other book of poetry which could be better recommended for this purpose than Letters from Aldenderry. On top of this the personal engagement and intelligent companionship which it offers will make you feel that you are in Paris, or Moscow or Boston conversing with one of the most exciting writers of the century.  

Philip Nikolayev. Photograph: Katia Kapovich

Having relocated from Russia to the US in 1990 Nikolayev has first hand experience of the promise of new worlds and of that which is never entirely left behind. In a century of  mass population movements, he becomes an important voice within this movement, transferring cultural insights both enriching and gaining from his new culture.  Since his move to the US he has has written primarily in English and his poetry bears the hallmark of his hybrid identity.  This is his fourth collection and it is one which both poets and the reading public will love. 

It can be purchased from Amazon and directly from the Salt Publishing at:
http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop/proddetail.php?prod=1844712796




He also runs the Russian Poetry in Translation fb page, providing access to the poetry of Russia to the English speaking world, ( https://www.facebook.com/RussianPoetryInTranslation?fref=ts) 

and the SAMUEL BECKETT fb page:
(https://www.facebook.com/pages/SAMUEL-BECKETT/51428148130?id=51428148130&sk=info)

Larissa Schmailo has also published a review of Letters from Aldenderry for Jacket Magazine, focussing on Nikolayev's playfulness with the English language: http://jacketmagazine.com/34/shmailo-nikolayev.shtml

Afric McGlinchey The lucky star of hidden things

The lucky star of hidden things

by

Afric McGlinchey

Salmon Press, 2012.

Afric McGlinchy's The lucky star of hidden things was published recently by Salmon Press. It is a strong confident collection, and the work of a mature artist  She says that she 'writes for [herself] and has an ongoing love affair with words' and this is manifestly the case in The Lucky Star of Hidden Things. Her poems are often erotically charged and sensual, sometimes with an unexpected comic touch, or a sophisticated awareness of her changing family, and changing roles.  Individual poems have been carefully placed to intimate the journey from Africa to Ireland and from the past to the present. From the opening poem 'Birthstone' to the section entitled 'On the Road' to the final section 'Leaning into Your World' the collection documents both a biographical and and artistic journey. With this in mind I particularly loved the open reference to Molly Bloom in her final poem 'Yes', which seems to promise an earthiness and an exciting creative output in the future. 

Yes 

(after James Joyce)

… yes and then

I touched my finger to his lips

to stroke away the cider, 

and put it to mine

and our tongues went plunging

- such a lush sweetness -

the grass so springy-soft on the cliff

and the waves crashing below

and I had to catch my breath

and the night's perfume drowned

that tang of lamb

and I thought of my first kiss

- what was his name? Johnny? - yes,

his tongue so unexpected,

wriggling like an eel,

but this time it felt different,

and even his silence didn't matter,

when he stared, stared at my breasts, 

and I let my hair slip loose

like that Cape Town girl, 

and you have moonlight in your eyes, he said

so I took him in my hand

and he whispered, would I

ma petite phalene, he said

and I thought I may as well,

as well him as another,

and the sea was swirling below us in a froth

the sky gorgeous with stars

and I suggested with my eyes

that he ask again

and I knew he would 

and I wondered if I'd say yes

and then I urged him down 

and he found his way

through all my layers

and I might, I thought, yes

I think I will

say yes.

The heat, language, scents and customs of Africa inform each poem in the opening section 'In my dreams I travel home to Africa'. Night Scents in particular combines her experience of Africa with her experience of a broken relationship, acknowledging her own animal instincts and senses as well as her very human anxiety. 

Night Scents

I lie in bed,

turn my nose

to the pillow

your memory,

as visible to my nostrils

as the night lamp.

Curtain ushers in butter -

soaked toast, wide-awake lily,

air before storm;

I sense my way

by pheromone,

as hallucinations spill:

saddle sweat, smack of salt, almond;

twang of diesel, turning milk;

from the boiler, burning fur

and I am back there -

steam-cracking tobacco 

stalks me, steals my sleep.

In the garden

eucalyptus,

citrus, spice:

like notes on a piano,

twilight,
closing the flower. 

But it is not just the earthy sensuality which enthrals and seduces her readers. In the first section of her book, McGlinchey's ability to examine the scars of her personal history allows a tension to slowly mount, so that when we encounter the exhilaration of 'Free running', her first poem set in Ireland, we too revel in the freedom which she describes.  Having immersed her reader in the hot climate and the passionate and doomed relationship which finally interrupted  her time in Africa, we can easily identify with the need to 

        … dive, 
        rotate mid-air, 

        a feline, 
        land, leap 
        across bonnets

        side-spin the lamp post
        vault park railings
        jack-rabbit-sprint


The central line of this poem reads 'but I'm metamorphic -' and catches beautifully the change of pace and of perspective which she exhibits in the second section of the book. Her ability to orchestrate the emotional reaction to the collection seems very sure footed. None of the poems jarred or seemed out of place and it is difficult to believe that this is a debut collection.   

Jennifer Matthews described McGlinchey's work as 'elemental', 'utterly sensual' and 'raw with emotional honesty'. The poem Girl without a horse for example depicts an almost mythical desire in a young girl's life. In only fifteen short lines she sketches a scene which indicates the importance and passion of the girl's decision. 

Girl without a horse

(for Micaela)

She searches country roads

until she finds one -

beyond the long-roped goat.

He is unbridled wildness,

the shag of his white coat

brazened with muck.

Her hand opens

with an apple core

invitation.

He shivers, snorts,

bends to the scent.

then,

blood-warmed attention

as she steals to the feast

of his back.

The powerful image of the girl feast[ing] on the experience of being on the horse's back makes it easy, on an initial reading, to miss the 'apple core / invitation' and the echoes of forbidden fruit and so re-reading  the work becomes both essential and a pleasure.  

This collection shows McGlinchey to be a strong, vibrant and exciting new voice in the Irish literary landscape and I look forward to reading more of her work in the future.

A Hennessy Poetry Award winner, Afric McGlinchey grew up in Ireland and Africa. She was also a Pushcart nominee, and highly commended in the Magma, Joy of Sex, and Dromineer poetry competitions in 2012. She is a freelance book editor and reviewer, and tutors poetry online at www.africmcglinchey.com Her début poetry collection, The lucky star of hidden things, was published in 2012 by Salmon.  Afric lives in West Cork, Ireland.

Michael Longley Collected Poems

Michael Longley

Collected Poems

Jonathan Cape, 2006.

Reviewed by Ann Fallon.

Michael Longley has been described by Seamus Heaney as ‘a keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders’. He is a central figure in the contemporary Irish poetic landscape and has created a body of work which ensures his importance in the continued evolution of that landscape.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a recipient of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and the Wilfred Owen Award.  He has won the Whitbread Prize, the T S Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry and the Librex Montale Prize.  We took a look at his Collected Poems, first published in 2006, and the most comprehensive introduction to his work.

Longley is not the only Northern Irish poet who deals with the borderlands delineating war and peace; past and future; community and individuality; abstract concepts and material realities, but he does so in a singular way. Underlying his approach to the territory between these concepts is a notion of what he calls ‘the fundamental interconnectedness of all things’. Most of his work was published against the background of the North’s ‘troubles’ and in such a context of social conflict and violence, the Whitmanesque idea of the connectedness of all things has the effect of refuting political jingoism and propaganda which generally aims to demonise an enemy. He recognises this interconnectedness as an underlying, non-linear and highly sensitive flux. It draws his attention from his immediate family and friends, to his neighbours and wider community until his townland includes ‘Carrigskweewaun and Central Park’. It takes him from fleeting moments in the present, to the ancient past and tentatively indicates a possible direction for the future.  He expresses this sense of interconnectedness in classical analogies, in terms of biology and ecology and also in terms of mystery.  

Longley casts an eye on particular details within his social context, rather than on the inherited concepts which generally inform the historical, literary and political landscape in Ireland. By using lists and catalogues and by paying close attention to what is unique and individual in his environment, he communicates with the more instinctive elements of human nature and gives us what has been called ‘privileged access to lower levels of raw information’. Such raw information forces us to pay attention to the world itself, rather than to our preconceptions of that world and exemplifies what William Empson calls poetry’s ability to ‘impos[e] its own assumptions’ and to remain ‘independent of the mental habits of the reader’. Identifying, listing and dwelling on these connections is an act of imagination and of love, while for Longley hate and destruction seem to abide in a ‘no-man’s land’ of abstract concepts and inflated rhetoric. 

He begins his Collected Poems with a celebration of his marriage, the book is infused with over one hundred and thirty dedications and references to particular friends and it ends with two poems which welcome and invite his grandsons into his life. The importance of family, friends and community and of the physical incarnation as well as the mystery of love flows throughout the book and is openly expressed in, but not confined to his love poems.

Having ‘read Homer at school and [been] taught by W. B. Stanford, a great Homeric scholar at Trinity’ it was natural that the relevance of the classics to present day situations would be obvious to him. However, he writes that

re-acquaintance with the Odyssey in my late forties allowed me to give expression to sorrows… Moments in the Odyssey chimed with emotions that I would have found almost impossible to deal with otherwise: heartbreak, paranoia, bitterness, hatred, fear. Homer gave me a new emotional and psychological vocabulary.

Longley’s classical references allow his readers to integrate or re-integrate particular stories into our experience and this gives us an alternative way of visualising the future. Recent evidence suggests that ‘projecting the future may not be the [only] … function of memory, but it certainly is one of its primary functions’. What we are able and what we consciously choose to remember therefore determines what we can imagine for the future. Longley integrates the stories of the past with events from his own private life and leaves the possibility that they are also relevant to a wider community.            

           

Through understatement, a key feature of his politically sensitive poems, and through his use of classical reference Longley’s work provides a neutral ground in which mediation can take place, if it is sought. It is only the name of the poem ‘Ceasefire’ for example which links it to the conflict of Northern Ireland. In it he moves from establishing the common humanity and dignity of opposing parties.

            Ceasefire

Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears

Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old

King gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and

Wept with him until their sadness filled the building.

Taking Hector’s corpse into his own hands Achilles

Made sure it was washed and, for the old king’s sake,

Laid out in uniform, ready for Priam to carry

Wrapped like a present home to Troy at daybreak.

When they had eaten together, it pleased them both

To stare at each other’s beauty as lovers might,

Achilles built like a god, Priam good-looking still

And full of conversation, who earlier had sighed:

I get down on my knees and do what must be done

And kiss Achilles hand, the killer of my son.




Although Achilles has killed Priam’s son, Longley allows that the sadness of both men ‘filled the building’. Their mutual recognition, ‘Achilles built like a god, Priam good-looking still / And full of conversation’ is the opposite of the kind of jingoism and propaganda which demonises the enemy. This recognition then allows both parties to ‘do what must be done’ to move beyond war and injustice. Priam’s unbearable suffering is somehow borne and the result for him is the return of Hector’s body for his funeral rites. The community benefits also - and Longley’s readers are now included in this community - with the recognition of how much fellow humans have suffered and yet how they can move beyond that. The territory of the past, pre-Christian and Mediterranean is recognised in this poem as part of the continuum and literary history  which ‘provides both touchstones of excellence … and also stepping stones’ to the present. It requires the active participation of the reader to draw connections but Longley allows for the creative imagination of his readers which can ‘discover patterns of human experience in literature remote in time and location which can have a cogent relevance for the here and now’. ‘Ceasefire’ shows how the stories of the past make room for a ‘new and psychological vocabulary’.

The distance which the classics provide also allows Longley to discuss hatred and violence in a measured way.  Where ‘to write carelessly and self-indulgently in a place like Northern Ireland could have terrible consequences….[Longley tries to remain] mindful of how much some fellow-citizens have suffered’. This important socio-political role for the arts and for imagination is expressed by the philosopher Richard Kearney who writes that

it is the new language of the artistic imagination which, in turn, can summon politicians to envision our society in new ways. If it is indeed the business of imagination to make politics distrust itself – reminding it that its principles are not literal facts but constructs of imagination – it is also its business to encourage politics to remake itself by remaking its images of the good life.

But Longley does not take his references purely from the ancient past. There are also obvious connections between Anglo-Irish poets such as Yeats and MacNeice. His interest in Yeats dates back to his school days ‘when he had requested as a third-form prize for English the Collected Yeats’. Terence Browne notes that ‘Longley’s according poetry a kind of sacral numen in a secular world may also have its source in this early reading of Yeats’.

Longley’s innate awareness of the role of the imagination in shaping a new political reality also seems to echo, but in a more democratic and less feudal way, Yeats’s views on the responsibility of the artist. He also shares with Yeats an ability to incorporate specific Irish place names into their poems and weigh ‘a place name in his hand, like a magical talisman, in a distinctly Yeatsian fashion’. Yeats’s desire to provide a unified vision and heritage for both Catholic and Protestant in Ireland lead him to focus on the pre-Christian heroes of Irish mythology. Longley’s frequent references to Homer, the Odyssey and the classics are similarly pre-Christian and therefore potentially unifying.

                       

The shape of the Collected Poems, as well as the dedications throughout and individual poems themselves, shows that Longley is very sensitive to the idea of  creating community. His generous dedications and inclusions of family, friends, his sensitive remembrance of the victims of violence, as well as his use of Gaelic place names and of the distinctly English concepts of ‘king and queen’ show exactly how it is possible to imaginatively create and integrate a community.

The first poem in the Collected Poems is ‘Epithalamion’, the celebration of his marriage, and from this personal experience the Collected Poems imaginatively reaches further out out until he can conceive of ‘a townland / That encloses Carrigskeewaun and Central Park.’

He recognises interconnectedness as a moving, changing flux of life and expresses it in terms of biology, and his sensitivity to nature helps to highlight the impact of non-linear connections and complexities of small events on the wider world. This automatically reflects back on the importance of small gestures in the human community and allows for the possibility that a single person can make a difference.  His unanswered question in ‘Autumn Lady’s Tresses’, is about the actual connections between different elements. Between

‘the solitary swan on Dooaghtry Lake’

to the

‘dolphins whose waves within waves propel

You and me along the strand’

to the

‘Cowrie shells for decorating your sandy hair?’

The connections, he implies, are there but it takes imagination to trace them, just as it takes imagination to trace the common humanity between warring factions.

Longley’s poetry displays an awareness of the importance of the list or catalogue, especially where there has been a breakdown of natural relationships. From ‘Persephone’ in his first collection which envisages the winter preparations of the mole, swallows, bat, squirrel, weasel and ferret, the stoat and fox to the listed delights which he will share with his grandson in Carrigskeewaun in ‘The Leveret’, the penultimate poem of the Collected Poems, Longley instinctively reaches for the list to try to capture the full importance of the present moment. Psychologists tell us that ‘Normal people’ suffer from inattentional blindness which means that they ‘don’t consciously see any object unless they are paying direct, focused attention to that object’. Michael Longley’s lists force us to stand back from general conceptualising and to see more of the details of the actual world. 

In his poem ‘Badger’ for example he makes us instantly aware of the physicality of the animal as he pushes ‘the wedge of his body / Between cromlech and stone circle’. He is differentiated from other animals, and is ‘not like the fox’ or the hare. He doesn’t just represent nature, he is a particular expression within it.  This difference, underlying the entire poem, between a concept and a concrete reality occurs throughout Longley’s poetry. He does not ignore the concepts through which we see the world but he manages to put the importance of individuals ahead of these concepts.

The mention of the ‘cromlech and stone circle’ seems to be a reminder of how far mankind has travelled, but the cultural ratcheting which springs from our desire to control the environment and which has brought us from stone circles to disused mineshafts to skyscrapers, is just another obstacle to be negotiated by the badger. He pushes his body into the earth and between man made structures.  Without our desire for control of the environment he lives in ‘the depths of the hill’ and continues with the important work of ‘manag[ing] the earth with his paws’. The badger’s management of the earth provides a new take on the  traditional argument of colonists over the centuries who have justified their claim to land because of  their superior management of it. For the badger, nothing is wasted, ‘mineshafts’ are once again used, and in the natural order of things his own body will add to the organic matter of the earth when he returns underground to die. The violent intervention in section three where he is pulled out by the snout is described but not commented on. As an observer of life and death Longley draws our attention and leaves us to draw our own conclusions.

The poem also contains a list of flowers and plants which the badger eats, again paying attention to the particulars of the environment and attention to particulars is a shield against generalisations, and ultimately against dogma.  In the poem ‘The Ice-cream Man’ the list itself becomes a healing device which soothes his daughter’s shock at the murder of the local ice-cream man.

I named for you all the wild flowers of the Burren

I had seen in one day: thyme, valerian, loosestrife,

Meadowsweet, tway blade, crowfoot, ling, angelica,

Herb Robert, marjoram, cow parsley, sundew, vetch,

Mountain ravens, wood sage, ragged robin, stitchwort,

Yarrow, lady’s bedstraw, bindweed, bog pimpernel.

Naming the particular flowers uncoils a lifeline, back from the murder, to the time when she would rhyme off ice-cream flavours, a time of normality for the child. The list of twenty-one flowers is unexpected and becomes an insistent demand that attention be paid to these small things which can still be counted and counted upon. By the end of the poem the list itself has become both a wreath to commemorate the dead and an aid to allow the living to continue. There is also a slight biblical echo of a responsibility which has been given to man and subsequently forgotten, to name and also to care for the creatures of the earth.

In ‘Master of Ceremonies’ Longley shows the ongoing effects of a breakdown in connection between family members, between warring nations and even on a physical level, between parts of the body. Longley’s grandfather ‘Had thrown out his only son, my sad retarded uncle’, and later demoted him in hindsight from son to nephew. This family rupture is seen against the background of the international breakdown of World War I, where the uncle

            Went over the top slowly behind the stretcher parties,

            And, as park attendant where all hell had broken loose,

            Collected littered limbs until his sack was heavy.

The horror of the disconnected limbs and the warring nations is shocking but is something which can be conceptualised and placed aside. Less easy to forget is the personal story of the grandfather who continues to regard Lionel as a ‘nephew’ long after Lionel’s head ‘got blown off in No Man’s Land’. As a poet living amidst civil violence for decades, Longley rejects the possibility that death will be read in the light of ‘one dominant inheritance – the blood sacrifice and the hope of eventual freedom rooted in struggle’. ‘Master of Ceremonies’ shows his family’s personal connection with war and the dehumanising effects of a breakdown in community. It also allows him to connect to other victims, in the acknowledgement of the loss to humanity which war and family breakdown represents.

His love poems seem to offer welcome moments of personal regeneration and provide an oasis from the conflicts of his life in Northern Ireland. In ‘An Amish Rug’ there is a sense of longing for simplicity, a different way of life where

…a one-room schoolhouse were all we knew

And our clothes were black, our underclothes black,

Marriage a horse and buggy going to church

And the children silhouettes in a snowy field.

Of course this idyll can only remain a dream but Longley wants to share this dream of a simple life with his wife. Longley questions the mythology of passion in ‘The Linen Industry’ asking

What’s passion but a battering of stubborn stalks,

then a gentle combing out of fibers like hair

And a weaving of these into christening robes,

Into garments for a marriage or funeral?

But in deflating the early moments of pleasure he brings in the story of a shared lifetime, and ultimately of the whole stretch of human existence. He projects a fragile happiness and allows for the continued awareness of the wonder of his lover. He becomes ‘shy of [her] breasts in the presence of death’ as if he were Adam seeing Eve for the first time in a lapsed world. The harvested flax and the white linen petticoats become a symbol of the life ahead and the work it will involve while the bow on her bodice becomes ‘a butterfly attending the embroidered flowers’ showing the rewards and the moments of inspiration which he hopes their work will bring.

Longley’s metaphor of the bow becoming a butterfly, is a symbol for the imagination, for poetry and for the protean nature of language. It quietly hints that creation is ongoing, fragile and partly dependent on the imagination of individuals. It also allows that this delicate act of imagination can change the emotional climate of the planet. It acknowledges the shared vocabulary which a lifetime with his partner yields and which he calls elsewhere ‘a sodality of the imagination’. It  celebrates the subterranean roots which play such a large part in the interconnectedness of things. In his poem ‘Laertes’ it is this shared vocabulary which enables the despondent father to recognize his son. Instead of blurting everything out Odysseus calls on shared memories

of a childhood spent traipsing after his father

And asking for everything he saw.

Laertes’s recognition of his lost son is then swift and unquestioned, overcoming and decommissioning fifteen years of absence. The absence has not resulted in an inability to communicate and this explains why the need for a list or catalogue of facts is obsolete. Their solidarity has not been broken and they can rely on natural connections without the need for facts and figures.      

Longley’s Collected Poems melt, rather than shatter, what is frozen inside our skulls. They work more like the ‘contrapuntal runnel’ which he wishes his words to be in ‘The Leveret’ and reflects the possibility that there are enough harsh voices and that to be heard it is sometimes necessary to whisper. He whispers about a no man’s land of abstractions and ideologies in which human life and the environment can become worthless. His family’s experiences in both world wars introduce this idea showing an unmanaged area full of the ‘littered limbs’ and the severed head of his uncle Lionel in ‘Master of Ceremonies’. The idea broadens in the poem 'Pine Marten' to contain the

stuffed pine marten in the hotel corridor

 who is

making it across No Man’s Land where  

A patrol of gamekeepers keeps missing him

In the poem ‘Harmonica’,

           ‘A tommy drops his harmonica in No Man’s Land’

and the movement of our souls which ‘are air’ gathers enough force to play

          ‘an orchestra of harmonicas’ in this waste land.

This movement of souls is articulated through art which tries to draw our attention back to the incarnated world and to the mystery behind it.  In ‘The Wren’ he acknowledges that 

          We sleepwalk around a townland whooper swans 
          from the tundra remember, and the Saharan 
          Wheatear.

Michael Longley’s Collected Poems records ‘all but nine of the poems in [his] eight volumes’ dating from 1969 to 2004, as well as two new poems as an epilogue. It deals not only with his experiences and interests during those thirty-five years from No Continuing City to Snow Water, but also with experiences and events of his earlier life, notably his father’s life and death, as well as his hopes for the future, one of which is noted in the final poem ‘The Wren’, that he be imprinted on the instinctual memories of his grandsons, that he ‘burble under [their] siesta / Like a contrapuntal runnel’. 

The voice which emerges from these poems is singular, considered, understated and respectful of life. Each of the three hundred plus pages of the Collected Poems presents a continuous counterpoint against the babble of popular rhetoric which is prone to using abstract principles in its justification of intolerance. His singular voice whispers through each of the poems reaffirming the importance of imagination in building community, the necessity of drawing attention back to the small details of creation when relations have broken down and the dignity with which it is possible to face the future. It defines humanity as beings capable of community and states that this is both a reassurance and a responsibility.

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Terence Browne ‘Michael Longley and the Irish Poetic Tradition’ The Poetry of Michael Longley 

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Dawe, Gerald Against Piety: Essays in Irish Poetry (Belfast: Lagan Press, 1995)

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McDonald, Peter ‘Au Revoir Oeuvre: An Interview with Michael Longley’

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