At the Edge of Ireland (32 page)

Leanne handed us a copy of a small paperback with a very black cover and a photo of a girl half-naked in a hospital gown with her back to the camera sitting on a heavy wooden chair with a strange ghoulish mask propped up against one of its legs. The title of the book was
Waiting for My Clothes
. Anne and I read the summary and reviews on the back cover together.

Leanne O'Sullivan was born in 1983 in Cork and is currently studying English at the University College Cork. Her poems have been published or given many national awards when no one knew her age…
Waiting for My Clothes
traces a deeply personal journey, from the traumas of eating disorders and low self-esteem to the saving powers of love and positive awareness.
[Leanne summarized the essence of her poems:]
“I was writing down the reasons I should live for and then became addicted to looking at things to find beauty in them.”

Billy Collins, the celebrated American poet laureate, was full of adulation: “Of course she's far too young to be so good! She dares to write about exactly what it is to be young. A teenage Virgil, she guides us down some of the more hellish corridors of adolescence with a voice that is strong and true.”

And Selina Guinness, who celebrated Leanne in her 2004
The New Irish Poets
book, wrote: “This voice seeks its own history in the most difficult terrains of the psyche; anorexia, sexuality, the loss of innocence; but resurfaces to discover afresh a world new and strange in images of startling perspicacity.”

One reviewer suggested that Leanne “writes with a visceral frankness about what it is like to be young in Celtic Tiger Ireland. The unabashed eroticism of her new work reestablishes a continuity with an earlier phase in Irish literature stretching way back to the pre-Christian sages.”

Another reviewer sought to place Leanne in a modern-day societal context: “The social revolution which has occurred in Ireland in the last two decades has made the youngest generation feel as if their immediate predecessors were raised on a different planet…Irish poets are today easily influenced by poets from elsewhere, in a way that is even more invigorating in this globalized world than it was in the '60s and '70s.”

Anne handed the book back.

“No, no—it's yours,” said Leanne. “Please, keep it. I'll sign it, if you like.”

“Thank you so much,” said Anne. Then she became very quiet as she scanned the first two poems in the book. Finally she smiled:

“Leanne—this is going to be a rich experience reading this book. You seem to love to…to ‘zoom.' A line like—‘I see myself in the well of her pupil'—that's a wonderful image!”

Leanne giggled. “Is that what that is—a ‘zoom'?”

Anne laughed. “Well, that's what David calls it when he suddenly goes from a typical wide-angle view of things when he's writing to a tiny image or microcosm, just like a camera zoom lens.”

“Great word.” Leanne chuckled. “I'll use that!”

“So, what's the current project? Another book of poetry?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah! So many things. Beara is still a very important element in our family lives. This is my father's family home here. I'm always discovering new things. For example, just up a track there behind the house is a secret place—an unsigned secret sad place. It's a place of unsanctified ground where they used to bury babies who died at childbirth or before they were baptized. According to the Catholic church, they went to limbo, where they'd never ever see the face of God. Little tiny innocent babies buried, unrecorded in any book—only in the hearts of their families—with only small rocks for gravestones in a cold cruel field called a
Ceallunach
. It's such a horrible idea—although, thank the Lord, they've stopped it now. The new pope has declared that there's no such thing as limbo anymore! But Beara is full of secret places like that. The Hag used to be a secret too. You know, that rock just outside Eyeries? It's become a bit of a pilgrim site now and the folktales are getting all jumbled up. But I love anything with links to the ancient pagan power sources—fertility, harvests, mortality, and of course, immortality—the tales that once made the poetic oral traditions of Ireland so renowned in the Celtic world. Poets were regarded as seers, magicians, healers, second-sighters—sometimes the equal of bishops and even kings. We've got some of that in our own family—the ability of second sight. We don't talk about it much, though. You've got to be careful. The old superstitions and fears are still floating about. Some have been Christianized a bit and some of the old power's gone out of them—the things you read about in
The Book of Cailleach
and
Gearoid O'Crualaoich.
But I'm working on a set of new poems now about The Hag of Beara, and I find, even as I write, there are unfamiliar and powerful energies flowing through me.

“Yeah, I know it sounds a little odd, although—like I said, I do tend to be a sucker for superstitions and these ancient stories. But certainly I find the feminine in me is strengthened—made prouder—the more I seek out the power and the links between the tough women of Beara and the mighty female goddess inside The Hag. The church has tried to play all this down—but the older Beara women know how to weave a Celtic knot pattern of these stories. Especially about Bui—another name for The Hag, but also for The Cow—symbol of everlasting life.”

Our conversation grew increasingly fascinating. Both Anne and I could sense a different mood in the house, in the room, where we sat overlooking Kenmare Bay. And then Leanne began, without any fanfare, to read some of her new and soon-to-be-published Hag poems in a quiet voice full of restrained energy and fire. We just sat silently. Leanne had told us that her mother had problems listening to these poems—they made her blither (weep). One of them seemed to be having that same impact on Anne. But we still sat there and sensed The Hag almost as a tangible presence around us.

It's only an old and not very big chunk of rock on an empty hillside,
my skeptical, pragmatic self declared.

No, no. It's the ultimate soul of Irish folklore—the indomitable feminine, the very essence of fertility, the underlying strength of the land and of the soil,
my ancient Celtic self insisted.
And this young woman, this walking-talking pre-Raphaelite portrait of beauty and insight, will be the one to reconnect all these ancient forces with modern-day mores and perceptions.

We left Leanne, wishing her that traditional Irish good night—
oíche mhaith duit
—to which she laughingly gave the traditional response
gurab amhlaidh duit
. Anne thanked her again, and I noticed she was clutching her book very tightly against her chest like a totem.

 

J
OHN
K
INGERLEE LIVED IN
a cottage of interlocking rooms and spaces. It was located at the side of the road to Kenmare—almost in the road—but buffered by a tall thick hedge that blocked the fine vista across Kenmare Bay. The place was artistically chaotic—books everywhere, scattered canvases, newspapers, things piled up in corners. And John was a different kind of individual altogether from any other artist I met on the peninsula—zanily irascible, opinionated, bloody-minded, rude, even a little crude, but gloriously honest and open.

Our meeting began with an initial request. “Hi—take your shoes off, please,” and I found myself looking at a small wiry individual, someone who seemed like he could throw a pretty mean punch and you'd never see it coming. His face was long and wolfish. Within seconds of our exchange of hellos I sensed a distinct aura of pent-up fury in the man—or at least a hefty dose of frustration—that might explode like a land mine if an unsuspecting stranger happened to step in the wrong place. His eyes were like little dark hard pebbles that darkened even more when he flung out one particular remark at me—fast as a throwing knife—after I thought we were having a pretty amenable let's-get-to-know-one-another kind of chitchat.

“Quite frankly, David—I don't think I agree with a single thing you've said so far…”

“Oh—sorry about that,” was about the only inane response I could come with at that particular moment.

“…although I certainly do envy you your certainty…”

I couldn't suppress a chuckle. Most people, friends included, tend to accuse me of constant devil's advocacy. Always testing out new ideas and trying to see things from different points of view. This accusation of certainty and implied dogmatism was altogether new to me. I have difficulty making up my mind finally about anything. Playing with options is invariably far more intriguing—and fun.

“I'm gonna take that as a kind of backhanded compliment and…”

“You can take it any way you bloody—”

“Yes, yes—I'm sure. So that's what I'll do as you tell me the story of your life. In a nutshell. So to speak.”

“In a nutshell?”

“Or anything else that's small, compact…and with edges!”

“With edges?!”

“Yeah—edges.”

Kingerlee looked at me again with those oh-so-dark, almost feral eyes. He was either about to explode—or laugh. Thankfully, he laughed. “In a nutshell. Okay. Here we go. Born Birmingham, England. Spent time in London. Dad a manager of some kind of poker club. Started painting at three (me, not my dad). My Auntie Anna looked after me—her boyfriend was Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Went to a very Catholic boarding school. Did odd writing and poetry projects and learned to paint in the furnished bedsit where I lived. The place drove me nuts, so I painted like mad and began to find patrons and buyers. Christy Moore, the famous Irish folksinger, bought a lot of my stuff in those days and that helped. Got deeply into Jung. In the 1960s lived in Ibiza and Cornwall and then dumped all that eventually and lived in Morocco, Fez, and Tangiers—and became Sufi. Changed my life completely, inside out and upside down. Now I live here part of the year since 1982. My main patron is a fine guy—Larry Powell—who buys most of my work. He helped me publish a very fancy retrospective book—big coffee-table format—on my art.”

“And how would you describe your art?” I'd seen an odd mix of his pieces since my arrival. Some were scattered across a table between piles of art books. Some were framed on the walls. Others were in various stages of completion—strange collages of images, haunted multilayered portraits thick with still-moist paint…These did not appear to be happy works. Apparently I was right.

“My portraits are layered alienations…I particularly watch the faces of politicians and so-called world leaders. Maybe that's where some of my portraits get their sense of cynical presence from. One of my favorite works is a canvas that got partly chewed up by a cow. She gave it real texture and a sort of unique 3-D tactile energy! I don't know why these portraits are popular—maybe it's that they're kind of iconic. But also very human. Some have taken over a couple of years to complete—a slow accumulation, layer upon layer of paint, but each one quick and spontaneous. And most are not people I know—except the self-portraits. Even Christy Moore said he recognized me from those portraits. But then I'm into the ‘squares' paintings—kind of restrained classical grids and little tiny abstracts. There's a whole mix of stuff—some are very extrovert and flamboyant.”

Farm near Eyeries

I'd done some homework on Kingerlee before my visit. Anne is a whiz with the Internet, and the Internet is a whiz with instant information. So all I have to do is say something along the lines of “Darling, I wonder if you could just tap out a nice fat ream of stuff on…” and she'll smile her bewitching kind of smile and the stuff would pour out in nanoseconds. Kingerlee has obviously garnered a host of admirers around him and his works. One critic compared him (favorably) with Mark Rothko; another claimed his thick, stratified landscapes, with sometimes up to a hundred overlayers of paint, as “a richness beyond compare.” Art critic John Benington gushed that “he re-creates spaces that we could enter mentally and visually in a way that seems to have no parallel in contemporary art…His work literally frizzles with energy as if seen through the eyes of a child…creating a unique cosmic world.”

One writer suggested that Ezra Pound, Paul Klee, Jean Dubuffet, and Jean-Michel Basquiat were key influences on his work and that “anyone privileged enough to watch him paint is struck by an analogy with gardening—He tends the grounds of his pictures with the same devotion as a gardener.” Apparently his key implements are palette knives (often one in each hand) and large decorator painting brushes.

Unfortunately I was not “privileged enough” to see the man in action, but there were other things I was curious about—most notably what I tend to label as “The Vivaldi” approach to creativity, where similar themes and arrangements recur again and again in a string of different works.