Perhaps since Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, poets have been using prose to understand how poems and poetry work. Something about the procedures of prose, its civilities and solidity, render it a serviceable means to tease out the more excitable properties of poetry and the ends they might serve.
Some poets use prose as a rhetorical crowbar with which to prise open their locked boxes of poems; others take a flightier approach, grafting creative fizz and sparkle on to the lumpier business of sentences and paragraphs. For both, prose may offer an earnest way of trying to think about (and possibly answer) questions posed by poems.
“We were all young once… and full of religious zeal to save Irish poetry from its own limitations,” writes Thomas McCarthy in an essay on Harry Clifton. Exactly what those limitations might be is left uncatalogued, McCarthy being a critic of uncommon generosity. Even the book is magnanimous, featuring 73 essays from almost 50 years, from 1978 to 2022. It’s a life’s work, and a good-natured and welcoming life at that: you’d go a long time before you’d find as positive a take on Irish poetry, or as warm a response.
Though the volume’s title may promise a wider lens, one will look in vain for a questioning of Ireland’s contemporary scandals (clerical and institutional sex abuse, the Magdalene laundries, Tuam babies, etc – and what a dark shadow is cast by that “etc”): it is poetry, poets and notable novelists that are the subjects here.
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For McCarthy, nothing if not an idealist, poetry’s beauty is its “redemptive nature”, (as he writes in an essay on Annemarie Ní Churreáin). But the best poetry is also “the most purposeful”, a good part of that purpose being humanistic, as this most humane of essayists attests.
Preferences do sneak through and if, at times, the book seems less to question Ireland than to affirm Cork, perhaps this partisan adherence is to be expected. One whole section is devoted to The Question of Cork and if some of the subjects seem on the arcane side, even for so dedicated a librarian, two companion pieces on Sean Dunne confirm the value of the memorial impulse and its re-collected praise.
The Question of Women’s Poetry may not be quite so neatly answered and may indeed raise more questions than even this book can accommodate. One might be why poetry by women should be herded into a separate chapter while that of men is allowed to roam freely over the Irish poetic plain. The Question of Men’s Poetry is, apparently, one that needs neither asking nor answering.
As with any anthology spanning such a wide time-frame, the significance or, indeed, relevance of some of these essays’ subjects will have dimmed in the intervening years. The Party, as a term, may now need a footnote and, knowing what we now do about cash for ash, would anyone argue (as McCarthy did in 2012), that post Celtic-Tiger economic catastrophe would have been averted had Ulster “been in charge”? But this volume’s longer view of canonical writers such as Elizabeth Bowen and Eavan Boland, and the close-up essays on younger poets not yet obliged to be reconfigured by the tradition, nicely balance scrutiny with enthusiasm.
If occasional notes of hyperbole creep in (”Here is all the art of poetry you will ever need”, he writes of Ciaran Carson, who would probably have been first to puncture that inflationary balloon), there is also a nicely counter-balancing humour (which pits Rudyard Kipling as “the Enoch Powell of poetry”, or recounts Muriel Spark setting fire to one of McCarthy’s own “execrable poems with her long cigarette”). What comes across most strongly is a clear-eyed understanding of how the best writing succeeds in style, substance and effect.
Cheery, enthusiastic and kind, McCarthy remains an indefatigable advocate for Irish poetry. This compendium shows him at his most unstinting best.
“I was free to live my life, but was I free to imagine it? Did the poems I had read, or the poetic tradition I had inherited, encourage me to do that?” So writes Eavan Boland in Reading as Intimidation, one of 29 essays included in Citizen Poet, edited by pre-eminent Boland scholar Jody Allen Randolph. This single volume showcases a lifetime’s thinking and writing about poetic tradition, craft and aesthetics, ranging in time from selections from 1995′s Object Lessons to Boland’s editorials for Poetry Ireland Review shortly before her death in 2020.
A fair proportion of what’s included may be familiar but having such valuable essays collected in a single volume, especially for a younger generation that may not have experienced, first-hand, the electric charge that Object Lessons applied to the Irish poetry world, is a boon.
These essays position themselves at the cross-point of Irish poetry, with its various wounds and political urgencies, and the full span of an English-language poetic tradition, with Boland searching for representation of experience yet to find expression there, namely the lives and life stories of women. In A Journey with Two Maps, a painting Boland recognises as by her mother’s hand is signed by her mother’s art instructor: this discovery prompts a probing, beautiful essay about ownership and authorship, and the blind spots of canonical representations of women’s lives.
The animating force behind many of these essays is an investigation of how Boland read, thought and felt herself into an evolving poetics, and how that process might be said to offer useful models to other Irish poets in her wake.
In an essay (somewhat misleadingly) titled Domestic Violence, Boland explores the domestic poem as a site where unusual vocabulary and imagery might be harnessed to redress the rift between the “ordinary world – the small universe of the cup, the open door, the room” and “the epic world of violence and civil struggle”. “I thought wistfully,” she writes, in a phrase that is – typically for this volume - both pretty and rigorously exact, “of a poem in which the interior and exterior worlds had a new freedom, a symbiotic negotiation, like shadow and light.”
These are also probing and perceptive essays about craft, paying careful attention to both mechanics and aesthetics, especially in relation to the lyric poem. Daughter, an experimental book project offered here in draft, assembles fragmentary poems, letters and diary entries to illustrate Boland’s increasingly synthetic imagination.
Boland’s poetic project became, over time, one of expansion, community and diversity. “I began to see that poems are not just an individual fluorescence,” she writes: “they are also a vast root system growing down into ideas and understandings”. Her many poems about Irish history loop personal interpretation into historical record with her lyric “I” ceding to a more inclusive “we” as the public responsibilities of the Citizen Poet become increasingly foregrounded in her poems, a process insightfully examined throughout this laudable book.
The Frontier of Writing: A Study of Seamus Heaney’s Prose is a collection of 10 essays by Irish and US academics on a topic which, as Richard Rankin Russell writes in his essay, “has not always been given the acclaim it deserves, particularly in contrast with his much better-known poetry”. That this essay is about the Wordsworthian influences on Heaney’s prose about Brian Friel’s work indicates a certain matryoshka doll-like quality to the discourse here, not atypical of the academic genre.
As the price suggests, this is not a volume intended for a general audience, though its user-friendly prose shows it’s unlikely to refuse one: it’s scholarly in bent, reference and methodology.
Heaney wrote prose of remarkable elegance and verve. Preoccupations, The Government of the Tongue and The Redress of Poetry all rank as among the best books in our time about the workings, history and art of poetry.
Few can turn a prose sentence so deftly as Heaney, or be so learned, intellectually sharp or stylistically spry. For obvious reasons, most academic response to Heaney’s poems is written in prose - it’s a brave academic who’d write a monograph in verse. These essays about Heaney’s essays, all written in perfectly earnest and painstaking prose, nevertheless don’t match Heaney’s brio with the form. The contrast is striking, with the energy and temperature of the writing rising with every quote from Heaney’s prose.
What these essays do very well is offer sturdy, authoritative studies of subjects ranging from musicality in Heaney’s work, to the ethics of the prose poem, to the application of Freud’s notions of the uncanny to Heaney’s prose. Most striking is their appreciation of how Heaney worked out in prose how other writers (Hughes, Hopkins, Lowell, Kavanagh, Friel) influenced his poems.
If the essays can’t quite restrict themselves to the prose and often flit back to studies of the poetry (there’s a lovely comparison by Gary Wade of the Heaney poem Sunlight with Vermeer’s The Milkmaid), who can blame them? Just as Heaney’s prose was all about poetry, so too must the critics circle it, like moths to lit candles.
Vona Groarke won the 2024 Michel Déon Prize for nonfiction for Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara (New York University Press)
Further reading
The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre (Faber & Faber, 2018) by Don Paterson
Seeming a cross of manifesto and textbook, this book is saved from both by Paterson’s humour and charisma. Poets will cherish its close-up technical advice while non-poets will enjoy its anecdotal bulletins (ie gossip) from the poetry world, often couched in footnotes that both amplify and cut down to size the poetics lessons overhead.
Madness, Rack and Honey (Wave Books, 2012) by Mary Ruefle
Ruefle’s synthetic imagination is delightfully surprising. In My Emily Dickinson she braids the lives (and deaths) of Dickinson, Emily Brontë and Anne Frank to explore the language of loneliness, intimacy, and confinement. Her advice illustrates more than instructs, as in her Short Lecture on Lying which reads, in entirety: ‘In this lecture I only lie three times. This is one of them’.
My Poets (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012) by Maureen McLane
Less an autobiography than an account, in Wordsworth’s terms, of the growth of a poet’s mind, these prose pieces - poised between aphorism, essay and diary entries – combine sparky insight with great fun. “Wordsworth is very dull” she writes, “until you suddenly feel his way of being dull is the elemental vital way to be.”
