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Transcript 29 Bordered by the Sea

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POETRY REVIEWS:Softly Creaking Englishes

Pat Boran: New and Selected Poems

Dedalus Press

Dedalus Press, 2007.

Reviewed by J. Mark Smith

The word from Glasgow — where a brother of mine has lived the last fifteen years — is that the Irish abroad, grown prosperous, have become more like everybody else in the English-speaking world. More like Canadians, say, or (for that matter) the Dutch. That is to say duller, though comfort and consumer-cosmopolitanism may not be wholly a bad development for the Irish-English speech, or at least for Irish poets — who now wield a world-view and lingo less inward-looking and intense, its surface hardly troubled by thought of fealties to or apostasies from the Christian sects (“dark religions,” Pat Boran calls them). American Billy Collins’ parody of a couple of years ago, “Irish Poetry,” makes gentle, even wistful fun of the shimmering diction of a certain kind of twentieth century Irish verse:

That morning under a pale hood of sky

I heard the unambiguous scrape of spackling

Against the side of our wickered, penitential house.

Boran, the editor of Dedalus Press and author of several books of poetry since his first in 1990, has been a builder of word-structures mostly free of spackling and wicker, though not without residues of the penitential.

The greater number of these poems, including some memorable ones, were written in the (economically) drab days before Ireland staged its great capitalist revival. Very early in the book’s introduction, Dennis O’Driscoll mentions the EU-funded bypasses that made Ireland’s highways more efficient, its villages — such as Boran’s home-town of Portlaoise — backwaters. Boran’s early poems suggest those changes brought only anomie and alienation. So the upbeat United Nations of food-and-culture catalogue that closes a recent poem, “Bread” (2004), is really not typical of this collection:

Barrel loaf, butter loaf, dinkel bread, bagel,

brotchen, ciabatta, focaccia, brioche…

And so on for another 18 lines, until, a little overwhelmed by the divers things that can be done with milled grain of wheat, the reader finally arrives at “Irish sliced pan.”

Boran’s register through most of the book is plain style (though I don’t know if “Irish sliced pan” would be considered fancy baked goods or plain): not in the tasting all that different from Collins’ aggressively unshowy lexical preferences. And if to Collins’ possibly imaginary “mirl” and “clabber” Boran prefers verbs such as “creak” and “wind,” his governing of phrasing and quantity makes lasting nourishment of verbal staples:

The basket creaked with meat. (“Widow, Shopping in Portlaoise”)

Sometimes I hear in Boran’s lines the leadings of what must be, locally and unpredictably, a still vital common speech:

But then the years passed

in cruel sevens… (“Living with Artists”)

Elsewhere —

His penis hanging between his legs

like a vandalized telephone… (“Literature”)

— this poet’s swift figures marry private perception to (damaged) public sphere.

A question that I find this book puts to me, across an ocean of English, is the following: what in the end worth saying can be spoken in, or seized from, the tongue that is plainly both mine and that of the imperium? Consider two curious poems in the collection (“Latin I” and “Latin II”) that, understood most simply, give voice to a teenager’s frustration with an obligatory Latin class. “What good is it?” the speaker in one demands of his mother. The untethered concluding line of its companion poem — “the language could prove good only for history”— is weirdly timeless. There may be no good reason to lament the fate of any language — whose words “slip in and out of meaning / like smugglers and stowaways / passing each other on the docks” (“Passport”) — but especially not of Latin, whose metamorphosed forms (“bellicose,” “extrapolation,” “legion obstacles,” “consolation,” “expressions,” “necessary,” “patiently,” “detergent,” and so on) make themselves indispensable in these poems and throughout Boran’s collection. But spare a thought for the expressive fate of the speaker of any language become a lingua franca. To master it is to be, like a drummer in a country and western band, “master / of the standard dowel.” (“Master”)

“Grief,” a lament in which the speaking voice paces through the absolute privacy of intense grief, concludes with this directive:

… stand

by the keening hand-dryer

all night long if that is what it takes,

in that bruising light

in which the junkie

cannot hope to find the vein.

The poem staggers with the wretchedness of solitude. But company, and communication, are hardly what it seeks. I am told that in Glasgow these days the bars equip their toilets with a blue-frequency light meant to frustrate junkies’ efforts to find the vein, but that the light on a mobile phone cuts like a laser through this interference. The white light of mass life, of popular speech and its conveyances, though aider and abettor extraordinaire, cannot palliate personal agony. The broad bands of modern telecommunication, the text messaging of popular culture, the modern languages in their most current forms, more and more seem to offer only the sentiment of consolation. So, tempted by privacy and grief, by linguistic and cultural nostalgia, but appalled by those “rooms / or bright ideas you wander through / but do not recognize the meaning of,” the poet becomes a historian or archivist of all that is necessary and lost.

The thought borne by “Alternative Histories” is that we become alive too late to what we need most from the past:

When I was twelve the only man

who knew who built the fence around that field

was discovered face down in the barley,

his last words lost on crows.

Boran’s poem I take to be a token of hope that the man found face down in that field did after all leave a communication for us, who do not yet know that we are “historians.”

My favorite in this collection is (from As The Hand, The Glove [2001]) “The Engine,” which makes much of a beautiful gestural rhyme — the winding motion of a key in an old clockwork toy train, which resembles the motion with which the speaker later carves his name in wood or stubs out cigarettes. “Same motion,” perhaps, but its way of occupying the present moment is altogether different from the young smoker’s display of anxiety, or the child’s discovery that he leaves traces of himself in things:

With a four-sided aluminium key

and one hand clamped around the wheels

to hold them still, I hold my breath

and wind the engine of the small grey train.

I am five or six years old and I wind

for the soft creaking of the spring,

for the pull of these four small wheels

like the heart-throb of some living thing.

Later when I carve my name in wood

or later again stub out cigarettes

it will be with this same motion, but for now

I wind to be here, beside myself,

and with the last possible, last permissible turn

to release the perfect single ping

then watch as the engine heads out with the news,

a thing beyond me, a thing singing.

This winding is a gesture of completion and release, given in a tactile image made from an arrangement of long and short vowel sounds (the long i of “wind” and “beside” against the short i of “ping” and “thing and “single”). The engine with its “last possible, last permissible turn” is (as Allen Grossman has put it) an Orphic machine. The “perfect single ping” is that perfected singularity: the poem’s identity, if never the poet’s — since it is “a thing beyond me.” It is an engine of similarity and difference, armed with a four-sided key, four small wheels, four tetra-packs of four-beat lines. A venerable machine, a singing thing, that has headed out with all kinds of news over the centuries. A bugler or trumpeter “winds” his horn; but more than musicality this “winding” points to a certain inescapable technicity in poetry too.

Any reader assents to the springwork turning of the poem. And the stillness to which its windings return is the stillness that takes back each reader’s private recollections. Through the ghostly compartments of “Grief” (from which you see reflections of “your shadow / wind around you, / dissolve into you then / reappear…”), no sound travels. But surely there are interwindings of world and self, of self and conveyance, more supportive of individuated life? For some time now those have not been the transports that we — the winders of engines, say, the speakers of softly creaking English — have sought.

J. Mark Smith is a Canadian poet and writer of creative non-fiction. His first collection of poems, Notes for a Rescue Narrative, was published by Oolichan in 2007, and is reviewed in this issue of Transcript.

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