WHY LYRIC? . . .

Right around a year ago, I had the pleasure of introducing two Boston-based Irish poets to an audience of colleagues and students at UMass Boston in the Global Writing Series sponsored by our MFA Program in Creative Writing. I have known the work of these two poets—and have known both of them as friends—for quite a few years. But I am thinking of them now, in National Poetry Month, relative to an essay I read recently by esteemed literary critic Jonathan Culler: “Why Lyric?” Published in PMLA last year, this essay makes the case for restoring the reading of lyric poems . . . as lyric poems: that is, not as “narratives” that are telling a story, which seems to have become the pro forma way of reading lyrics, but as rich and subtle linguistic and formal constructs (and as “a moment's monument,” perhaps, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti describes a sonnet). As Culler observes: “If narrative is about what happens next, lyric is about what happens now—in the reader’s engagement with each line—and teachers and scholars should celebrate its singularity, its difference from narrative.”

So let the celebration of lyric begin with “Corpuscles,” a poem by Mary O’Donoghue from her second book, Among These Winters (Dedalus Press, 2007), that really does both require and reward “the reader’s engagement with each line.” A writer of award-winning fiction as well as poetry, Mary was born in County Clare in the west of Ireland. The author of an earlier volume of poems, Tulle, which was published in 2000, she teaches in the English Department of Babson College.

CORPUSCLES

The train journey is ten hours,
eight states, long. After I finish
my book, finish eavesdropping

on conversations (the sweet-spoken
southern lady who once used her hand-bag
to clobber a man with a hand-gun;

the woman who talks about her driveway,
her diet, how her husband brought four
lobsters home on her birthday,

and she ate one each day with butter;
I want to change seats and cuddle up
to her gusto), I think about your blood

test, how you’ll have the outcome by now.
How they chose the big lively vein
that twists vine-like down your arm,

then they plunged and drew like a sump.
That evening, drops of you pipetted,
a palette enough for a Georgia O’Keefe,

a grid of round red sweets. I have
never seen you bleed, not in the crime
scene way of “bleeding profusely,”

though one nose-bleed was satisfying,
patterning the pillow with flattened
poppies. Even the large gash on your thigh

had turned to nice chitin by the time
I saw it, and itched to prise off a rusty
flake for the pink of skin caught off guard.

And I make awkward boxer-fisted
prayers for your corpuscles, shallow-shaped
bowls, tiny rubber diaphragms.

We talk long-distance late that night. Your voice
is chirrupy, Guinnessy, curious about Virginia.
My heart unfists in one swift graceful systole.

No less than “Corpuscles,” but in a much different way, the title poem of Aidan Rooney’s Tightrope (Gallery Books, 2007) also demands readerly attentiveness to each line to learn both the “how” and the “why” of the domestic tension that can hide behind closed doors. A native of County Monaghan, Aidan has been out in the Boston area for around twenty years, teaching French and English at Thayer Academy in Braintree. His first book of poems, Day Release, was published in 2000. Tightrope was officially launched in Dublin on Holy Thursday of 2008.

TIGHTROPE

Both how, when I pulled the front door
this morning to let the sun in,
some night class of spinner had strung
from one jamb to the other
the flimsiest funicular
that, now a waft of light and air
enters to liven the dusty house,
passes lightning bands of silver
along its barely visible floss
as if to make sure all is clear,
and why, is just beyond us, unless
some huge jump needed to be taken.