CANAL BANK WALK

“O commemorate me where there is water,” poet Patrick Kavanagh wrote in a poem titled “Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin,” continuing: “Canal water, preferably, so stilly / Greeny at the heart of summer.” Well, as the photograph affirms, he got his wish in the form of a statue of himself sitting on a bench situated at the side of Grand Canal. I wonder if I earned my own canal-side commemoration after all my walking along its banks today, perhaps my unintentional affirmation of another of Kavanagh’s well-known poems, “Canal Bank Walk”: “Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal / Pouring redemption for me, that I do / The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal, / Grow with nature again as before I grew.” That long, long walk—from Kilmainham back to Ballsbridge (I don’t even know how many miles)—was what linked the two major events of my day.

The first event was a cuppa java with Mary O’Donoghue, an old poet-friend from Boston who has just had her first novel, Before the House Burns, published by Dublin’s Lilliput Press. It’s a beautiful-looking book which I will sit down with when I get back to Boston. She launched it in Galway a week or so ago. I had hoped that she might be launching in Dublin too while I’m here, but no such luck. Back home in County Clare for the summer, Mary just happened to be in Dublin for the day, coming in by train from Galway. We had a nice catch-up at Bewley’s on Grafton Street. And then we walked a few blocks over to catch up with another Boston-based poet-friend, County Monaghan-born Aidan Rooney. Aidan knew he would be seeing Mary, but he did not expect to see me “out of context”! It was great to spend a few minutes with the two of them . . .

Then I set off to do some wandering around Dublin. I had no specific plan beyond simply absorbing the sights and the sounds (and the smells, too) of the city. But I guess I did more than wander—I just kept on going, following streets rather than a map . . . and eventually I realized that I was headed toward the infamous Kilmainham Gaol. Dating back to the late 18th century, this prison housed not only the full range of criminals—from debtors and petty thieves to ruthless murderers—but also many of the major figures of Ireland’s struggle for political autonomy—from Robert Emmett and Charles Stewart Parnell at either end of the 19th century to the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916 (Pádraig Pearse, Éamon de Valera, Countess Markiewicz), fifteen of whom were executed by firing squad in the stone-breaking yard within the prison walls. The prison was decommissioned in 1924 then stood in disrepair until the mid-1980s, when it was restored and opened as a museum of—and a monument to—the Irish nationalist cause. Obviously, the conditions under which the prisoners lived were horrendous. I found my visit to Kilmainham to be very moving and very thought-provoking about what certain individuals will do—and also what they will endure—for love of their country.

Leaving Kilmainham, I followed my nose for water and found the Grand Canal, which I knew would lead me back within a block of my hotel. At least an hour later . . . I got back just in time to freshen up and head into Merrion Square—specifically to O’Connell House, the Dublin home to the University of Notre Dame’s Keough-Naughton Center for Irish Studies. (In the 19th century, the building was the home of legendary nationalist Daniel O’Connell—the Liberator.) I had gotten wind that Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney would be giving a private reading there this evening, for participants in the Notre Dame Irish Seminar. I am grateful for the warm welcome I received from Center director Kevin Whelan and from ND Irish-language professor Breen Ó Conchubhair when I arrived on their doorstep: I’ve known both of them for years . . . but hadn’t seen either of them for years, so the friendly greeting from each of them was no small part of the evening’s pleasure.

But the larger part of the evening’s pleasure was, of course, Heaney’s reading. I have heard him read perhaps 8 or 10 times, dating back to 1981. This reading was particularly enriching—and enlightening—as he pre-viewed a number of new poems from his collection Human Chain, due out in September. He also read a number of poems that recognized the presence in the audience of his longtime friend and long-ago (early 1950s) classmate at St. Columb’s College in Derry, Professor Seamus Deane. For my money the preeminent scholar of Irish literature, Deane is also a fine poet and the author of the staggeringly powerful novel Reading in the Dark (which I have taught on a couple of occasions). After the reading there was the usual milling about, in the midst of which I managed to have a nice conversation with each of the Seamuses. Like Kevin and Breen, they were very welcoming of my being there.

On my way back to the Burlington Hotel, I walked along the Grand Canal again. Passing Kavanagh’s statue, I wondered if even that notoriously cantankerous man-about-town might have enjoyed some of the company I kept during this long and winding day.

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.