POETRY: EUGENE O'CONNELLreviews The Kiss: New and Selected Poems and Translationsby Ulick O'Connor, Salmon Poetry, 88pp, €12 and Along The Liffey: Poems and Short StoriesBy Sheila O'Hagan Salmon Poetry, 82pp. €12
ULICK O'CONNOR, a notable chronicler of 20th-century Irish writing and writers – he has written biographies of Gogarty, Behan and the much celebrated Diaries– is himself an immediately recognisable public figure.
A rather mannered portrait of him, circa 1958, by Patrick O'Connor, on the cover of The Kiss, mirrors the late Romantic "poetic" style of earlier poems such as Awakening: "That morning when I brushed your lips/ To win you back from sleep's eclipse".
The shorter free verse form of later books All Things Counter(1986) and One is Animate(1990) seems more attuned to his personality – lines from the poem Louis MacNeicecapture intimations of that poet's early death: "I saw him in his last year / at some Joyce affair outside the tower / looking granite faced, away from the sea".
His translations of Verlaine and Machado are poignant, liberating him somehow from the "poetic stance" that tended to blight the earlier work – poems such as From Prison– and articulating his stance on human rights: "God, O God, out there is life,/ Simple and apart,/ How peaceful that murmur comes/ From the village heart".
The final, 18-poem sequence, versions of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Malfrom Poems of the Damned, are a tour de force of interpretation – the petulance, the exuberance, the passion of the mid-18th century French poet (whose poems remained banned until 1949) mirror O'Connor's own personality – his sense of outrage at injustice, his singular defence of the rights of the individual.
Along the Liffey, Sheila O'Hagan's first book in 14 years, has a curious "coming of age" feel to it, poems and stories that reached a tipping point in the author's head; that needed to be told.The stories, five in all, are strategically placed throughout the book to offer a counterpoint, a different register to the loftier diction and more formal concern of the poems.
Dodo and I, a streetwise tale of a brow-beaten wife on a rare night out, is deliberately placed at the end of a high minded sequence of poems that explore the passage of time and death – it should be noted that the celebrated September 4thpoem is re-titled here as Elegy to Ted(McNulty).
The Traveller, a gothic tale of how a woman cajoles a "travelling man" to impregnate her – she is in a childless marriage – is a startling shift in register from the sequence of poems (referencing classical myth and legend to illustrate the simmering resentments that lurk beneath our so-called civilised veneer) that went before.
The choice of a “travelling man”, a member of a submerged social group is quitely subversive but reflects her social conscience: she has campaigned for the homeless and prison rights groups in London and Dublin.
O’Hagan seems to have deliberately orchestrated poetry and prose, the formal and the informal, high and low registers of language to manipulate our reaction to the controversial but urgent themes she raises.
It's quietly subversive too in its evocation of the deeper reaches of the female psyche – "sins of the flesh" are not exclusive to one gender. Along the Liffeyis unflinching but sympathetic – as one would expect from a writer of O'Hagan's standing – in its portrayal of the human condition.
Eugene O'Connell's most recent collection of poems, Diviner, was published by Three Spires Press. He is editor of the Cork Literary Review
