The Columbia History of British Poetry (165 page)

BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry

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Page 638

and expansion to which Muldoon subjects the poetic parish. He reinvents his native Moy in County Armagh as a fabulous locale where "anything wild or wonderful" might happen. Interviewed by John Haffenden, Muldoon said of "the Moy": "I'm very interested in the way in which a small place, a parish, can come to stand for the world."

Although all first-person lyrics should be understood as dramatic structures, Muldoon goes further and introduces a phantasmagoria of emblematic figures: "Sam Parsons," the signs of the Zodiac, "an Oglala/Sioux." Individual poems also contribute to a hall of mirrors, a multifaceted dialectic, in which one parable or story catches light from another. This has led Muldoon to an idiosyncratic kind of narrative poetry, and to greater formal experiment. "Immram," in
Why Brownlee Left
(1980), is a blackly comic farrago that crosses Raymond Chandler with the Irish medieval "voyage-tale'' and the Byron of
Don Juan. Quoof
(1983) and
Meeting the British
(1987) are variations on a deconstructed sonnet sequencevarying line lengths, outrageous rhyme, tangential linking motifs, the sonnet sometimes functioning as a stanza, sometimes standing free. The Muldoonian mutabilitywell-made poetry that pretends not to beis bound up with the question of language. Like the later MacNeice, he exposes the disturbing assumptions and implications hidden in everyday phrases or clichés. Thus "neither one thing or the other" questions the desire for fixed identity.

Muldoon's critique of language in general, and of Ulster's political clichés in particular, undermines cultural determinismtogether with Heaney's presumption that "right names" exist. Muldoon suspects etymology, like other fixed histories, and embraces "incorrigibly plural" verbal associations. A sequence of rhymes in the poem "Sushi" (from
Meeting the British
) runs: "arrogance," "arcane," "oregano," "orgone," "organs," "Arigna," "Arragon." When Muldoon deals more directly with violence he, too, uses scenarios from other warsWorld War I again, Korea, the genocide of American Indians. "Truce" recreates Christmas 1914 to suggest the necessity and difficulty of peacemaking: "It begins with one or two soldiers / And one or two following . . ." "Gathering Mushrooms" questions armed struggle in a different wayby representing its ideology as its real prison: "Come back to us . . . / Beyond this concrete wall is a wall of concrete / and barbed wire." Muldoon's poetry picks the locks of word prisons.

It seems a comment on Irish patriarchies that Medbh McGuckian's aesthetic should stand so far back from the structures of her male con-

Page 639

temporaries. Beside McGuckian (b. 1950) even Muldoon looks logo-centric. While her poems appear to make statements and observe syntactical norms, their logic is one of relations between images. "The Orchid House," from
The Flower Master
(1982), begins:


A flower's fragrance is a woman's virtue; So I tell them underground in pairs; Or in their fleshy white sleeves, how Desirable their shapes, how one Was lost for sixty years, with all Its arching spikes, its honeyed tessellations . . .

These exfoliating images, however, are neither impressionistic nor primarily sensuous. Flowers (and clothes) recur in McGuckian's poetry as counters in an interior drama about sexuality, gender, marriage, motherhood, and poetry. Here, orchids' complex reproductive system enables her to play around with androgynous and autoerotic zones: "virtue" faces the testicular implications of "underground in pairs," the "lost" orchid possesses "spikes'' and "tessellations."

McGuckian's distinctive concern with houses, gardens, and deeply conflicting images of women may involve a dialogue with Catholicism, which places mother or virgin on the only available pedestals. This aligns authority with procreation and thus further complicates women's creativity. McGuckian, like her male peers, is obsessed with poetry itself. Some of her poems encode responses to theirs or turn the tables on a male muse. "The Sitting," in
Venus and the Rain
(1984), is one of the many poems about paintings or painting in which McGuckian explores the politics of representation. The positions of artist-subject and sitter-object appear equally uncomfortable: "she questions my brisk / Brushwork, the note of positive red / In the kissed mouth I have given her." "Harem Trousers," in
On Ballycastle Beach
(1988), develops this theme in relation to an androgynous garment: "A poem dreams of being written / Without the pronoun 'I.'" Ultimately, McGuckian writes a kind of metapoetry, like Wallace Stevens, whose images belong more to words than to the phenomenal world. Yet her slippery language outmaneuvers the egotistical sublime.

It is as if Muldoon, McGuckian and Carson have reconceived the English (or Northern Irish) lyric not only by making it so linguistically self-conscious, but by pushing particular structural aspects to extremes. Muldoon emphasizes narrative and verbal accumulation;

Page 640

McGuckian image and symbol, while Ciaran Carson (b. 1948) emphasizes narration. Over ten years after a rather conventional first collection,
The New Estate
(1976), Carson produced two much more radical volumes:
The Irish for No
(1987) and
Belfast Confetti
(1989). The latter title alludes to a wry local euphemism for nuts and bolts dropped on Catholics in the Belfast shipyards, which becomes a metaphor for war poetry's "fount of broken type." Carson's formal radicalism consists in his long lineanother deviation from the stanzaic shapes laid down by Heaney, Longley, and Mahon. This line functions less smoothly than that of the American poet C. K. Williams (an influence on Carson), being interrupted by sudden breaks, twists and turns. Carson's syntax imitates the digressions of story telling and conversation. The unpredicatable relation between line and syntax reproduces a fractured communal narrative:


Maybe you can figure it, why The Crown and Shamrock and The Rose and Crown Are at opposite ends of the town. Politics? The odds change. The borders move. Or they're asked to. A nod's as good as a wink . . .

This self-consciousness has referential origins and referential point. Carson has said that his poems are not "about" but "of" "the Troubles." If one poetic role model is the Irish traditional storyteller (
seanachie
), another is a crazy with a notebook: ''Squiggles, dashes, question-marks, dense as the Rosetta stone." Language seems unable to pin down a city mutating under the stresses of urban renewal and cultural change as well as civil war. Symptomatically, the members of "The Exiles' Club" in Wollongong "just about keep up with the news of bombings and demolition" and try to hold on to old maps and obsolete names in their heads.

In one aspect, Carson's poetry is about culture shockit genuinely engages with the disjunctions between tradition and modernity, country and city. His audacious poem "Hamlet" rewrites both the parish and Shakespeare as an evening in a Belfast neighborhood pub, which takes in (but never resolves) such topics as a soldier being killed in 1922, a Guinness stain on a ten-pound note, the Armada, lost streets, fictions, truth, and language. We are told the etymology of the (Catholic) Falls Roadfrom "hedge," "
frontier
," "
boundary
." But "Hamlet" dissolves Kavanagh's parish into the talkthe poemthat keeps it going: "time / Is conversation: it is the hedge that flits incessantly into the present . . ."

Page 641

Part of the generational dialectic in Northern Irish poetry (although older poets have moved on, too) is a fresh encounter between traditional forms and modernism. Why this should happen with reference to Northern Ireland might seem mysterious, until we remember that the dialectic between Yeats and Joyce continues in Ireland, and that it has both a political and a theological element. Perhaps the metaphysical differences set in motion by the Irish religious antinomy are among the most significant determinants of poetic vitality.

Four recent collections keep all the arguments in play: Muldoon's
Madoc
(1990), Heaney's
Seeing Things
(1991), McGuckian's
Marconi's Cottage
(1991), and Longley's
Gorse Fires
(1991). Heaney's book is visionary, transcendental, and traditionalist; McGuckian continues her teasing strategies; Longley condenses dark images from the Holocaust and the
Odyssey
; and Muldoon throws in a neo-Joycean literary-critical-political satire.
Madoc
, subtitled "A Mystery," imagines that Coleridge and Southey, the poet-pantisocrats, really did found their utopian community on the banks of the Susquehanna. Through Muldoon's veil of puns and allusions we can see that it all ends in colonialism, violence, literary rows, and tears. Since the pantisocrats are heading for the village of "Ulster," it may be presumed that Muldoon also has his eye on politics and poetics nearer home. His irony extends poetic intertextuality over centuries as well as continents. But, despite the irony,
Madoc
itself belongs to a new frontier for the English lyric in the British Isles.

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